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From the Inside
Dispatches from a Women's Prison

Jonathan Haworth was a new judge out to make his mark. Sitting on high in red and purple robes, grey wig perched on his head, he wiped his moustache and appeared to lick his lips as he appraised the hapless pair in the dock before him. He told us to stand. This was the moment I had been dreading but had been unable to imagine, it held such a terror for me. Haworth had been heard boasting at a lawyers' party that he was going to send John and me to jail. I could hardly believe it. Now it was really happening. I hauled myself to my feet and gripped the rail in front of me.

'You will go to prison for five years.'

My vision blurred; I felt sick from the inside and worked hard to remain upright. It was worse than I had thought possible. I glanced at my husband but looked away again quickly, struggling to control myself, fearful of total collapse. A detective sergeant who had been involved in the case, and who had not looked at me once throughout the seven-week trial, now fixed me with a fierce eyeball-to-eyeball stare. He had got a result and was savouring the moment, sending waves of hatred my way - hatred that at root seemed to have nothing at all to do with me.

John got four years. The Judge continued to spin words around the courtroom until a crescendo of anger from the crowded public gallery drowned him out.

It was early evening: too late for us to go to our respective jails, which meant that we would spend the night in police cells, something I reckoned would give a measure of satisfaction to the Cambridge cops, though I knew some of them were embarrassed by our prosecution. I would do my best to retain my dignity. The guards came for us and my whole body flinched as they snapped on the heavy silver handcuffs, one half on to my wrist, the other half on to theirs. I was led out of the Guildhall and hustled into the back of a waiting police van. The last thing I saw before the doors slammed shut was Cambridge's newly erected Christmas tree dripping with warm golden lights.

The drive to the police station was all too short. I greedily drank in the view through the van's back window, my last look at these familiar streets. We were bundled into the cells. Those windowless rooms were about 8 feet square and each had a rock solid bench along one wall, with an extra bit of space round the corner for the open toilet. There was no washbasin and the floors were stone cold. A frosted skylight in the ceiling let in a little natural light. I sat on the bench, stunned, and looked at my watch. It was 7 p.m. Alone and isolated, I felt like a nothing, a nobody, just a weak, pink, pathetic creature, loathsome and worthless. My feet were icy. They had taken my shoes away.

December the seventeenth, 1999, the verge of a bright new millennium; but I saw only gloom and despondency ahead. It was hard to fight off the feelings of failure, feelings that I must somehow deserve this, that I was a wicked as the idiot judge seemed to believe. How could anyone even suggest that we had allowed heroin to be sold at the day centre when we had spent so much time and energy trying to combat the problem? The jury had believed it, that was what counted, and the local evening paper had leapt upon the story.

I was the same person as I had always been, I told myself. Waves of misery spun me through the night as the cell light blazed continuously. They would not turn it off. There was no relief to be found anywhere.

The following day Ruth and John were removed to prison, John to Bedford and Ruth to Holloway and later to Highpoint where she spent most of her sentence.

We have got Christmas over and now it is New Year's Eve, the Millennium New Year - a special time of hope, but inevitably I feel low. The radios blare out as ever but annoy me more than usual. On Radio 1 they are doing a countdown to the great event, the new millennium: sixteen hours to go; fifteen hours forty minutes and ten seconds; fifteen hours thirty-five minutes and thirty seconds; it just goes on and on.

It is Sunday and I decide to try to get to the gym; I have figured out that they usually come for us at 9 a.m. on weekends. I put on my tracksuit bottoms and a pair of Rachel's old tennis shoes that I have brought with me and wait downstairs by the gate. Fifteen minutes later (fourteen hours and forty-five minutes to go) I ask a screw and she says: 'No gym' fuck this place. I storm back upstairs. Pearl is not in the room and I do some yoga, trying to cut out the omnipresent radios (fourteen hours and thirty minutes to go). I am about to start some meditation when in comes Pearl. She gets something and is off again. I try once more. Pearl comes back again and goes. I start again. This time a screw comes in to do the daily check on the bars. It is hopeless. I give up.

If only I could block out this millennium stuff, the hype and the excitement. It is not for me, I am in mourning, for the loss of my family, my friends, my life. I go down for some hot water from the urn to make myself a treat: camomile tea.

I get through lunchtime bang-up and when the spur gate is opened up I stroll downstairs, still feeling low, to make another cup of tea. My name is on the whiteboard: I have a visit! I race into the office and hope that I am not too late, try to pull myself together: it will be the family. I am let out and a screw walks me across the compound to wait outside the door of the visits hall. After the usual frisking I am shown through. There they are, my special three. Huge hugs and kisses. We have an hour and a half. It goes fast.

They tell me how they managed over Christmas, that they loved the presents I got for them before I went to jail. I tell them how I am getting on. Are we putting a positive gloss over things for each other? Probably we are; I guess we need to.

When the visitors leave, we convicts have to wait, sitting at the tables in our red chairs. The visitors sat on the blue ones, which now seem painfully empty. The loss feels acute in these moments of waiting, waiting to get frisked again one by one, to get a strip search if the screws deem it necessary, and to get locked up again.

These are excerpts from Ruth Wyner's fascinating and moving personal account of her time in a women's prison. You can purchase 'From the Inside' at Waterstones or via Amazon or by contacting the publishers at the address below.

Ruth Wyner now works with the Dialogue Trust, which she helped to establish, on prison rehabilitation and prison reform.

'From the Inside' has been chosen as Book of the Week in the Times Educational Supplement and Critics Choice in the Daily Mail.

From the Inside is available at all good bookshops and online via Amazon or by contacting the publishers at the address below.

Aurum Press
25 Bedford Avenue
London
WC1B 3AT
Tel: 020 7637 3225
Fax: 020 7580 2469.
Email: graham.eames@aurumpress.co.uk