Free Prisonomics by Vicky Pryce Page B

life. Having their pictures taken and then broadcast just wasn’t going to be something they would welcome.
    This was generally respected by the press so, apart from me, all other faces in the published pictures were obscured. Prison officers apparently often don’t tell others what they do for a living though the lady senior officer next to me was very pleased to be identified by her friends and acquaintances by her shoes. It became quite a topic of conversation in the centre office and she and I joked about it again on the day she retireda couple of weeks before I left East Sutton Park. To this day I am convinced no one in ESP held any of this against me and they were much more solicitous towards me than I should have expected.
21 MARCH
    I met with the nurse today at the immaculate if small healthcare unit between the two medieval towers and next to the gym and the huge laundry room. She checked my weight (I’m losing some), took blood for tests and gave me a second hepatitis B injection. Again for someone who hates needles this was completely painless. I ordered my extra blood pressure pills and ‘Viscotears’ for dry eyes as well as headache pills and was told to collect them on the next delivery day, which was next Tuesday when the blood results would also be ready. I was treated like a real human being. I had wondered why many of the residents were popping in and out of healthcare all the time. It probably did a lot for them psychologically especially since I discovered that there was no longer a counsellor available to deal with mental issues and the girls had to be given special licences to go outside and get treatment if they needed it, a cumbersome task and occasionally one that seemed to sink beneath the weight of bureaucracy.
    I had been completing my inductions for three days already and the session that really made me think hard and reflect about the situation I was in was the ‘ pathways ’ induction with the head of education. What we did was discuss in quite a lot of helpful detail what we intended to do to respond to what had happened to us, what were our concerns and how we were going to address them between now and when we came out– and beyond. This would then form part of a plan that would be considered by the first risk-assessment board we would attend in the following few days.
    Two of us did it together and we had been assured that everything we talked about would all be kept confidential. We both seemed to care deeply about the impact our actions may have had on our family and our reputations, which is fairly typical for women. But we were both amazed to find out the trainers’ experience regarding the differences between men offenders and women offenders doing their ‘pathways’ for the future. The administration of East Sutton Park, the only female open prison in the south of England, had been amalgamated with the nearby male open resettlement prison Blantyre in 2007. This allowed staff to make comparisons – albeit anecdotal ones – and patterns had emerged. Women were preoccupied first and foremost with the impact of their imprisonment on their families in general and their children in particular . Their concerns were heightened by a feeling of helplessness because they were away from them and an inability to exercise control over events. Making amends and re-engaging properly with family was priority number one for women. Men in general (and it is a generality but very much from the experience of these prison officers) took it for granted that their children would be looked after by the mother and so were less concerned about the impact on them and much more interested in finding ways to negotiate a reasonable path through prison and then making money once out. When offenders in both prisons were asked what had prevented them from achieving their potential in life the women’s answer was children and family and the men’s was a lack of money. It seemedto me that judging from the