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Prisoner of Conscience

Big Issue
15th-21st May, 2000
Reprinted with the kind permission of the Big Issue

By Max Daly

Lloyd was finishing his breakfast when the doorbell rang. It was a man and a woman. They were looking for a Mr John Brock. The 14-year-old said his dad was asleep upstairs and offered them a cup of tea while they waited. A third visitor arrived through the open back door and Lloyd, in a rush to get ready for school, shouted up for his mum. Within five minutes the three CID officers had arrested John Brock and were escorting him out of the house to the police station.

Fast-forward nearly two years and Brock's stepson Lloyd, now 16, son Dylan, 11, and his wife Louise are waiting outside the walls of HM Prison Highpoint, Cambridgeshire, on a Bank Holiday Monday. For the first time 49-year-old Brock - prescribed Prozac within weeks of being locked up to dampen spiralling depression - has chosen to speak about his torment at the hands of Britain's hypocritical and heavy-handed drug laws.

Charity worker Brock and his director Ruth Wyner were jailed for a total of nine years in December for 'allowing' drug dealing at the Wintercomfort homeless drop-in centre in Cambridge. There was no evidence they had stood by while drugs were taken or dealt - indeed, they had expelled scores of dealers.

Those campaigning for the pair's release, including Labour MP Anne Campbell and Tory MP Peter Bottomley, say both are on the receiving end of some very rough justice and that they should never have been arrested, let alone incarcerated.

Dylan has written to Home Secretary Jack Straw and handed in a 20,000-signature petition into Downing Street requesting his dad's release. The boys, who have visited weekly since December, know the procedure: the less full their pockets are, the quicker they can all get through security to see him.

Brock is sitting alone on a red 'inmates' chair. Lloyd gets some coffee and the family surrounds him, bums on blue 'visitor' chairs. Warders look on from edge of the canteen.

"Everyone says I shouldn't be here," says Brock, whose eyes show the strain of more than 150 days of manic frustration. "A couple of prison officers say that if I'm locked up, then they should be too, because they're in charge of people who deal on the premises.

"At first I was shocked and angry. But the most overwhemling feeling I have is of apathy. I don't know if it is the medication or the depression causing it. But if I stop taking the drugs I might plummet and end up a gibbering wreck in the corner of the cell like I was when I first arrived here."

Brock has little optimism for his and Wyner's appeal against conviction, taken up last month by Michael Mansfield QC and due to be heard this autumn. "Everyone in here sees Mansfield as god, that he will get me out, but I am very cynical about it all. The judiciary will not change its mind."

But it is also anger and injustice which haunt Brock. "The fact I am in prison has also left me with utter contempt for the system that put me here, especially for the judiciary. I was just an honest man doing an honest job. My family has been taken away from me. I think about my family every second of every day. It is hard for me to cope without them and they are finding it hard with me in here."

Brock's prison routine, he says is too boring to recount. Time plods by. The more he can fill up his time, the less chance he has to dwell on his situation. "When the cell doors shut it all closes in and I get depressed. The only things keeping me sane are painting with watercolours, my radio and my family," says Brock, who breaks into a smile for the first time when Louise says his artwork is brilliant: "I'm not very good really, she's just saying that to cheer me up."

While Brock, 50 this June, languishes behind the razor-wire at Highpoint, life at the Wintercomfort drop-in centre rumbles on. The only changes at the project since Wyner and Brock's arrest are physical.

The project's 'open door' policy, championed by the Rough Sleepers' Unit as the best way to get people off the streets, has been slammed shut. Now there's a metal gate with mounted camera, and an intercom system. The same rules on drugs remain unaltered, while the 'closed door' policy has seen the number of people coming in drop by a third.

Rachel Hawes, 28, is the new acting project manager at Wintercomfort. She took over John Brock's job after working as his assistant manager. Hawes has worked at the project, which offers cheap food, access to doctors and hostels, drug and alcohol advice, showers, a laundry and second-hand clothes to the homeless, for seven years.

Hawes points out of the window at a dilapidated house opposite where the police placed secret cameras to film dealers in the alleyway beside the project. A bit to the left of the look-out post is a door with the words 'JOHN AND RUTH OUT' painted in graffiti.

"John was a brilliant worker. He was easy to talk to and never lost his cool even when he was threatened. He was unflappable. It is very worrying taking over from John, for obvious reasons. The whole team is frightened that we might still be under suspicion. Potentially the same thing could happen to us."

After John's arrest she and other staff and project users were badgered into becoming casual police informers, she says. Hawes was contacted twice in one day by officers to be an unprotected informer. She told the Wintercomfort trustees, who made a complaint. Cambridge police replied with an apology.

Hawes spots a plain-clothes detective at the front desk. She mocks him, asking if he's here to "gather some intelligence". He replies: "Might be." The last time Hawes saw the officer he was acting as a police bodyguard during a walkabout in the project by homeless czar Louise Casey.

"Over the last two years we've built bridges with the police. But despite that, I feel very distrustful of them. They made out we were nodding our heads in approval at drug-dealing. It was an insult."

Grandmother Jacqui Norman, 50, works as a night support worker at a homeless shelter down the road. She used to have Brock's job. Norman, who stopped working at Wintercomfort five years ago, counts herself lucky to be a free woman.

"After the shock of what happened to John I had the feeling of 'There but for the grace of God'. We both worked under the same rules and used the same methods at the centre. By what I have seen nothing has changed. Given the evidence he was convicted on, I would have gone to jail unless I'd changed jobs - and that's frightening."

Norman points out that during her time at Wintercomfort the police were relaxed about the project's problems with drugs. "Police officers were on the steering committee, but they often didn't turn up for meetings. When they did bother to turn up we made them aware of the problems we were having."

She says the police's use of secret cameras and undercover officers gave them an unfair advantage in the hunt to weed out drug dealers. "The police were undertaking surveillance in a way no staff member could have done. Of course they could see things that we couldn't," says Norman. "There was always the telephone ringing, a nuisance at the door, someone wanting to use the washing machine. There was no possibility of three staff having an overview of the whole thing, especially when you had 100 people in there. I used to chuck out people more for drinking than drugs. A bottle of whisky is a lot easier to spot than someone shooting up in the toilet or passing over a tiny package. You can't watch everyone every minute of the day."

Taxi, a project worker at The Bus who looks like a taller version of Brock and has worked with both his predecessor and successor, says: "The situation John and Ruth are in has made me question why I do this. It's not the best job in the world, there are big health and safety risks, people exploding in your face and bad pay. It's like nursing, you don't do it for financial rewards, you do it because you care about people."

Brock gets a signal from the prison officers that the one-and-a-half hours with his family are over. Soon he will be back in the depths of Highpoint, left to mull over his plight. How does he feel about the future?

"The future? I can't see past this afternoon. I just want to get out of here but I can't think about it. Louise has asked me to write down what I want to do when I get out but I just can't do it, I can't see that far."