Macshane Prison Diaries

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84954-794-9
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

Two days before Christmas 2013, former MP Denis MacShane entered one of Europe's harshest prisons. Having pleaded guilty to false accounting at the Old Bailey, he had been sentenced to six months in jail. Upon arrival at Belmarsh Prison, his books and personal possessions were confiscated and he was locked in a solitary cell for up to twenty-three hours a day. Denis was the latest MP condemned to serve as an example in the wake of the expenses scandal. Written with scavenged pens and scraps of paper, this diary is a compelling account of his extraordinary experiences in Belmarsh and, later, Brixton. Recording the lives of his fellow prisoners, he discovers a humility and a willingness to admit mistakes that was conspicuously lacking in his former colleagues at the House of Commons. Woven into the narrative are thought-provoking reflections on a range of important topics, from the waning of public confidence in MPs - and the high-profile termination of his own political career - to the failings of the British judicial system. Above all, Prison Diaries reveals what life as a prisoner in Britain is really like, addressing issues such as rising inmate numbers, dehumanising conditions, high incarceration rates, lack of rehabilitation and an endemic political disinterest. This honest and fascinating diary is both a first-hand insight into the current prison system and a report on how it simply does not work.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Macshane, Denis

Leseproben

DECEMBER 2013

MONDAY 23 DECEMBER 2013

So far, the grub is OK. As I come down the stairs from Court Number 9 at the Old Bailey, at about the time I would be making my morning cup of coffee, I don’t know what to expect. I have just been sentenced to six months in prison. I go down the narrow flight of stairs from the dock and I am handed over to a polite woman who handcuffs me to her wrist. Prison life has begun.

The Homebase-looking wooden panelling of the court quickly gives way to the old institutional cream stone and concrete wall of schools, hospitals and police stations from my schooldays in the ’60s. I am marched, no, accompanied, along a narrow corridor. Doors open and shut. The clanging sound of doors is the most common sound in a prison. Heavy doors and noisy keys tell me I have left freedom and entered captivity.

There is no hostility or even interest. I am being processed. It will take time to get used to who is who. With a mixture of Irish and Polish blood, my default personality setting is anti-authority. After experiences of being arrested in political demonstrations in Britain, Europe, even South Africa, I know the correct posture: be polite, head-down, cooperative. Inside, you may be boiling over with injustice or your own idiocy, but there is no point in fussing once in the hands of men and women in uniform.

There is a first time for everything and my natural curiosity and journalistic instincts take over as I try to make a mental note of what is going on. The first stop is a counter where my details – name, address and date of birth – are entered in a register. This is the world of ledgers and big, bound books. Computers have no place.

In my anorak, over a formal suit, there is a thriller in the pocket. A friend who has done time inside warned me to make sure I had books with me. My suitcase, which always amused the press as I trundled backwards and forwards off the number 11 bus to the Old Bailey, is full of books. I am taken back to a small cell where I get out the thriller and start reading.

After a short while, the door opens. ‘Legal visit,’ I am informed. I follow the guard down the long corridor to a cream-painted interview room. I was never really sure of the point of having lawyers at the end of a long process that began with the BNP making a complaint about me in 2009. Martin Rackstraw, my solicitor, comes from Bindmans, the wonderful King’s Cross firm founded by the great Sir Geoffrey Bindman decades ago. It has been the left-liberal reference point for so many people in trouble with the police. I have been using them for forty years and have always liked the different solicitors there.

Martin had found a barrister, Mark Milliken-Smith QC, who had done his best. I suspect he knew, as I did, that my case was never to be about truth or justice or proportionality, but was intensely small p and big P political.

Like a journalist, or perhaps a politician, the judge had the facts wrong in his sentencing statement. My QC is dismayed that a 65-year-old first time criminal who had not profited from the offence, whose case file had already been closed by the CPS and the Metropolitan Police, and where the contested moneys were nugatory, is now to spend Christmas in prison.

I calm him down. The judge who insisted on sentencing me is already a part-timer on the court of appeal and destined for full-time appeal court work. So appealing against his sentence to his own friends, all from the same background and political outlook, is pointless.

Moreover, the legal costs of dealing with the BNP complaint have drained most of my savings. I have four children and my main concern is helping them. Paying out even more money to my learned friends has lost all attraction.

I agree that my pathetic hopes that someone, somewhere would actually read the facts of the case and the double jeopardy of being cleared of a crime, and then, without fresh evidence, sent to jail, were unrealistic. This is English justice at its finest. Get a grip, MacShane. Get your life back. Get over the next few weeks. Get on with a new life post-BNP, post-Parliament, post-CPS, post-Old Bailey. I say goodbye to my lawyers, shake their hands to thank them for their diligent work, and wish them a Merry Christmas with their families. They leave and I am taken back to my little cell.

1150H A kindly lady warder opens the door and gives me two boxes of an all-day breakfast, piping hot from the microwave, and a welcome cup of tea in a Styrofoam beaker. I blow on the cheap sausage, bacon and beans, and eat both boxes. It is the last bacon, indeed the last cooked breakfast, I am to enjoy before being released.

I sit with my feet up on the hard wooden bench against the wall in my cell. My folded up anorak from Decathalon is a cushion. No BlackBerry, no iPad, no more messages, or tweets, or emails, or calls to distract me. It is relaxing, even if I have no idea what the future will hold.

1615H The door opens. ‘You’re off, MacShane.’ I follow obediently down the corridor. I notice my suitcase out of the corner of my eye and long to get to work with the pads of paper inside and a long book review I have planned. There are half a dozen other prisoners. We are told we are going to Belmarsh.

Belmarsh! Hang on a second. Isn’t that Britain’s hardest prison? A maximum security jail for the worst criminals – murderers, gunmen, terrorists? What am I doing going to Belmarsh? The other politicians who have been sentenced have gone to Wandsworth and quickly transferred to rural open prisons.

Suddenly the future looks bleaker. It is made worse by the dark December weather on one of the shortest days of the year. I am led to a curious upright white van, about the size of a small lorry. Inside are six compartments. They are like upright coffins. There is a small ledge as a seat and a tiny slit window with darkened reinforced glass. You can stand up but not move. I am not claustrophobic but this tiny vertical enclosed space is oddly unsettling.

I watch London, my city, go by. I do not know where we are. I cannot even work out which bridge over the Thames we are taking. Once on the other side of the Thames, the streets go by without any sense of where we are heading.

1700H The van slows down and turns off the main road. A giant set of doors opens and we are inside the Belmarsh complex. I later learn that there are in fact four prisons here, the main one for hardened criminals like me. There is also a youth offenders’ prison and a maximum security block for terrorists or the worst murderers on remand, though given the numbers of gates and walls we have gone through, I am not sure how anyone can escape. Finally, there is a private prison called Thameside. The Belmarsh Prison complex opened in 1991, the first new prison to be built in London since 1885.

It has its own magistrates’ court on the site. There is an underground tunnel from Woolwich Crown Court to Belmarsh. According to my friend, John Austin, who for many years was the MP for Belmarsh, senior judges refuse to hear cases at the Crown Court, as there is no decent restaurant to hand.

I have some sympathy with the judges, as I am indeed feeling peckish and could do with a decent bottle of chilled Chablis as I wait around with other prisoners to enter Belmarsh. We are in a dirty room with the biggest steel bar gate I have seen so far. We wait our turn to be called. I hear two men talking in Albanian and three in Romanian. They are rough, brutish men drawn to Britain by employers who do not want to pay fair wages to British workers.

There is a tall friendly man who I see later. He just tells me to keep my head down and I’ll be OK. Prison is no stranger to these men.

‘MacShane,’ barks a voice. I go to a counter. I give my name, date of birth and address. I notice they have written me down as ‘Ian McShane’.

‘Excuse me, Sir, but my name is Denis MacShane, not Ian.’

The officer takes no notice and so, as I enter prison, I have a new identity. I hope the actor, Ian McShane, whose robust performances I have always enjoyed, is not too upset that Her Majesty’s prison service has bestowed his name on me.

First names don’t exist for prisoners. You are known, called for, shouted or barked at, by your surname. So I am McShane. Ian is just for the prison records.

‘Right, over here. Take off your clothes.’ This is a first. When imprisoned in communist Poland I was not subjected to a strip search.

As you take off your top garments, you are given a prison T-shirt and sweatshirt. These are robustly made with strong thick warm cotton, not the gossamer thin garments you buy in Primark or H&M.

‘Right, trousers and underpants and socks off.’

I begin to feel like Mr Godfrey in wanting to go to the loo as the prison officers stare disinterestedly at my genitals.

‘Right, put your trousers on.’

Not my suit trousers which, along with my suit jacket, shirt and tie, hang on hooks as I pull on prison underpants. These would pass the Jeremy Paxman test after the presenter rightly sent a cross email to the Marks & Spencer boss, Sir Stuart Rose, complaining that M&S knickers were so poorly made with such weak elastic that they were forever slipping down Jeremy’s bottom and thighs.

In fact, I feel warm and homely in the prison trackies and pants, and am quite happy to say goodbye to the formal attire of dark suit and striped shirt. During my court hearings I wore a striped blue and...