What awaits Vicky Pryce during her stay in Holloway Prison?

 
13 March 2013
WEST END FINAL

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Today is Vicky Pryce’s first day in Holloway, the infamous women’s prison in the borough of Islington that has held such criminals as Rose West and Maxine Carr in its imposing nineteenth-century walls.

Soon she may be out of Holloway and into a lower category jail, as a result of not being thought to pose any risk to the public, but for now the respected economist will have to acclimatise to a prison that few inmates would wish upon their enemies.

It is the second largest women’s prison in Europe, with about 501 inmates when it is at capacity, and is mainly made up of single cells – with some dormitories for new inmates and those thought not to pose a threat to others.

In the past Holloway was a byword for the grim conditions of Britain’s neglected prisons. The former chief inspector of prisons Sir David Ramsbotham recently described his visit to Holloway in 1995, saying: “during my first week in office, I discovered that expectant mothers in HMP Holloway were routinely chained while in labour, hardly something about which an allegedly civilised country should feel either happy or proud.”

On that visit, his team of inspectors walked out of Holloway half way through their visit in protest at the living conditions.

Even today, Pryce will hope her stay at Holloway is as brief as possible. An inspection three years ago found that nearly 60 per cent of inmates felt unsafe. It discovered an alarming 35 incidents of self-harm each week.

A recent report quoted an inmate saying that Holloway is “a very scary place for a first-time prisoner.”

Unlike her husband Chris Huhne, who is serving the first stretch of his sentence at Wandsworth, Pryce will have kept her own clothes because there is no prison-issue uniform for female offenders.

Holloway’s new arrivals are given clothes, including two pairs of knickers, but are not required to wear prison uniforms or undergo strip searches on arrival. They are also given a bag of toiletries.

If Pryce stays long enough, she may experience Holloway’s part-time educational program, which includes painting and gardening and various skills training workshops.

The saga of her joint trial with Huhne has been exposed the breakdown of the family’s relations, but should they visit her during her stay they will have the consolation of doing so in the family-friendly visitors’ centre, run by an independent charity called the Prison Advice & Care Trust. Pryce has two daughters from her first marriage to academic Gareth Pryce, and two sons and a daughter with Huhne.

Jonathan Aitken, the former Tory minister who served seven months in 1999 for perjury, has warned that she may not find it as easy as her husband will in Wandsworth: “perhaps Vicky Pryce will have a harder time in a women’s prison because it is quite emotional, more upsetting,” he has said.

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