Free Prisonomics by Vicky Pryce Page A

blocked anyone’s full view into the room even if they had managed to sneak in and trespass into the prison area. And it was also as far away from the church from which one could be seen as possible. Clearly the prison officers had enough experience of the system or had been warned by PR in headquarters, which they seemed to be in contact with constantly about me, that this made sense. It was also why it seemed right for me not to do any external jobs which were ‘out of bounds’ and where anyone could approach me. In the meantime I had to take my exercise either in the back courtyard or after 6 p.m. as it was assumed that in this Arctic weather no journalists would stay past their newspaper deadlines.
20 MARCH
    It was agreed that I would today finally venture out and go to the education building to have my IT induction , which I was really looking forward to as I am useless at it and was determined to learn to touch-type and improve on my Outlook, Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint skills, which to my shame are non-existentexcept for sending basic e-mails. It was suggested that just in case there was still someone hanging around and wanting to photograph me, I should be shielded by staff who would walk with me there on the direct normal route to prevent a clear view for the camera and on the way back we would take the roundabout way back through ‘out of bounds’ terrain which would be well out of shot anyway. Well, there was someone still there. According to the girls who were threatening to go and shake him down, he was hiding in a tree! He managed to take a couple of pictures after all, which made it into all the national newspapers, me dressed warmly in my winter clothes clutching some books and looking studious. I thought I looked OK – not harassed, in my own clothes, doing something useful. My children complained to the Press Complaints Commission and all my friends were horrified at the intrusion. I read what they had written after I was released on tag and was really touched that they felt so strongly about it. I am a lucky mother. But I personally felt at the time that the journalists were just doing their job and that in many ways it was better to get it over and done with; once they had taken the first picture of me in open prison they would surely leave me alone. And so it proved; despite some false alarms they didn’t come back until near the end.
    Even so, so paranoid was everyone that we once chased a group of perfectly innocent, rather bewildered , Dutch tourists away – wonder what they thought of a prison governor coming to ask them what they were doing taking pictures of the house and gardens. Being a Grade II-listed Elizabethan house with a great history, tourists could often be seenstalking the grounds. But the staff seemed to worry about me more than I worried about myself. I made it clear that having been constantly followed around by journalists in the last few months I was unfazed by it although I worried about the inconvenience to everyone else, residents and staff. But they rose to the occasion with good humour. It is not every day they have to handle the press and they also had to take good care of the other prisoners who didn’t want their pictures to appear in the national press while they were in prison. Many of the women had been more traumatised by the lurid coverage of their cases in the press than the sentence itself and by the damning comments of the judge that had humiliated them and in their minds made a return to their community that much more difficult. In some cases their acquaintances had been told that they were simply away – studying, travelling or whatever. I came across this a lot. A lovely Indian lady never told her parents, who had moved back to India, that she had gone to prison and was calling them weekly from the ESP phone box keeping up the pretence that she and her husband – also in prison, like her, for benefit fraud – were just fine and leading a normal