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Graham Mumby-Croft


Brian Penfold
 Busman’s Holiday and House Swap – a story

While I was serving at Woodhill in 1996 and living in a village called Steeple Claydon in Bucks I had the idea of planning to have a cheap holiday and trying out a house swap with the USA. The way that these schemes work is that you join a club and after paying a fee you then received a book with contacts advertising their houses for a holiday swap. You then picked any that you fancied and wrote letters (really) and waited for replies.

We eventually made contact with a couple in California who lived near to Bakersfield on a farm and duly arranged to swap our house and car for a month. As it happened they came over first and we met for one day before we flew out. My car was a Ford Sierra and I duly took Gene out for a test drive and found that as he changed gear, with that darned manual shift and wrong side steering wheel, he looked down and not where he was going. After a few hairy aims at the ditch, I left him to it.

When we arrived after picking up their car from LAX it was indeed a farm situated along a dirt track with brothers and in-laws all along the track. You could walk out of the front door and pick a grapefruit off of a tree. One of those brothers had a contact in the California prison service and hey-ho it was arranged that as both myself and Jackie at that time, worked in our prison service, we could go as honoured guests to Tehachapi Prison.

Tehachapi Prison is a huge supermax establishment situated in Southern California and has 5 separate units (really prisons) which you need transport to move between. We were met by what would be the Deputy Governor who had a quad bike on the back of his pickup truck as he was going hunting later, as we all do. I was trying to act cool at this point as both of us were escorted into one of the lower category units. The CNA of Tehachapi was 2700 but the OP CAP was 3350 so they were using the gym as accommodation and it was full of bunk beds three high and when we went in hundreds of pairs of mainly Hispanic eyes turned to look at us. The officers said that we had better leave as they were expecting trouble.

We moved onto the high-security unit (prison) and we were taken into the control hub of one of the wings which was similar to the CSU system at Woodhill but the floor and walls were bulletproof glass with sally ports in them. In the office was a rack with a number of Armalite rifles in it and I noticed that it was not locked and the rifles had magazines in them. I asked the officer who would give permission to use the weapons and he just pointed at himself. The hub would give a clear line of sight to three single-level wings.
Outside I saw officers going into a building with flack jackets on and asked what they were doing. I was told that was the segregation unit and the staff had to wear the protection to prevent them from being stabbed through the bars. I said that we would not need to go in there. 

We then were taken up to what was a sniper position that overlooked the exercise yard with an armed office there at all times. On their SSU unit, the exercise yard was one officer with one prisoner. The rule was that if the prisoner stepped closer than 6 feet to the officer or the officer put his arm up, the overwatch would shoot to kill the prisoner. They had shot a number of prisoners in the first ten years but I was told that recently they had not had to shoot anyone, so in their opinion, the message had got through. Crickey, keep cool.
Before we left we were both invited to their security dept to look at their homemade weapon display (yawn) and then by the way, did we want to look at their book of prisoner assaults. Not sure what that would be but we said yes and we were both given a photo album to look through of prisoners that had been murdered by other prisoners. These photos were the scene of crime photo’s and I had seen nothing to compare with what we were shown. The staff were not trying to shock us, they told me that the police never investigated any crime within the prisons as they had no authority and the security department did all of that in house. I was still trying to act cool at that point but probably failing as we sat in our borrowed Cadillac to drive back to the farm after a long hot day.

One thing that happened from so many experiences on a very memorable trip was that I hit a kerb and lost a very posh hubcap from the Cadillac. I tried everywhere to get a replacement and one day we were driving in a desert area and I spotted some hubcaps lining the road in the sand. This led to a warehouse with a sign on it ‘The hubcap capital of the world’. Yes, I thought, this was going to be a good day. There were two people sitting outside the unit in rocking chairs and when I looked inside there were thousands of hubcaps piled up everywhere. I said, do you have a hubcap for a 69 Cadillac Deville? ‘Nope, ain't got one of those sunny’. I swear he had a spitoon and it went ping as I walked away. 
I offered to pay for the hubcap but Gene fessed up that he had made a dint in my old Sierra so all’s well that ends well. Just one dint was a bonus as far as I was concerned.

We did three house swaps altogether and the last one was to Canada and lo and behold the people that we swapped with had a contact in the Canadian Probation service. Did we want to visit any prisons? Yes please, we said. Kent max security prison and a rehabilitation prison that trained dogs but that will be another story.

Brian Penfold