Founded 1980
Chair:        
Secretary: 
Treasurer: 

Graham Smith
Jan Thompson
Graham Mumby-Croft


We started with pleasantries in my office where I provided tea and biscuits. In those days there were grotesquely mean and detailed rules about such things. I could provide at public expense, tea and biscuits, but not a meal, to a foreign dignitary, but the cost was limited to some tiny and precise amount, let's say £0.42p per person, and public servants on duty could not be offered refreshment at public expense, so none for the chief inspector (you will be glad to hear I was never one for blind obedience to the rules). Who had engaged and paid the interpreter I was not clear, so whether she was a temporary public servant, and so to be tea-less, I never found out.

We then set out to tour the prison. Littlehey was designed and built by the public sector before the introduction of private design and construction. It was quite lavish even by the standards of the time. lt has (or at least had, like the rest of us time may not have treated it kindly) attractive buildings, extensive grounds and large workshop and educational facilities. lt was for medium and long term Cat C prisoners, with a large number of serious sex offenders and slightly more good honest criminals, (a category we had in those days, bank robbers, lorry hijackers, protection racket gangsters etc.) serving sentences of over 4 years, and some in the middle of much longer sentences including lifers. There were some tasty characters among them! During the unlock day there was free movement within the grounds and, so on a
fine summers day as this was, large numbers were around and about the grounds.

I could see lvan's immediate impression was one of bafflement. This was in the days of the real USSR, pre-Gorbachev. lvan was a very senior policeman, in charge of a chunk of some bit of the USSR although I was never clear exactly what his role was and the degree to which prison management formed part of it. Things were not helped by the interpreter. She was a Russian-born lady, with Russian as her first language, who had lived in the UK for a long time. She was very obviously a stern critic of the regime in the USSR and was not going to miss her chance to tell a representative of that regime exactly what she thought about many of the things it did. Speaking no Russian I had no idea of what she was saying to lvan, but it was obviously from his and her body language that her views were very critical and expressed with considerable force. lvan looked very uncomfortable and was clearly wondering why this women was not in a gulag somewhere.
As an aside, the chief inspector told me that, as they were driving to the prison, lvan had pointed to a largish farm house just off the road and asked what that was. When told it was a house where people, probably farmers, lived, he asked to go and look inside it. When it was explained that this was not possible, in the UK a policeman could not just turn up at a house and demand to look around, lvan had seemed surprised at such a lack of proper authority for an officer of the state.

I had told lvan he was going to be shown a prison for serious offenders, and this seemed to him to be some sort of resort. We visited the large gym and the extensive education facilities. He clearly thought we were either part of some huge deception designed to give him a particular view of the capitalist west, or we had simply taken leave of our senses. I was interested in John Ramwell's account when he described well resourced educational and rehabilitative facilities in the Russian prison he visited. lt was very clear that lvan would have had no truck with such nonsense.

As I have said it was a nice summer day and prisoners were walking around in T shirts, shorts etc. This displayed the many tattoos many of them carried. lvan was fascinated by tattoos. I have learned since that tattoos play an important part in the Russian criminal subculture and what you have tattooed on
your body indicates who and what you are in that world. So whenever we passed a prisoner with a tattoo that sparked lvan's interest he would grab him, pull the tattooed limb close, point at it and say something in Russian. Clearly this would have been a perfectly normal way to behave in a Russian prison, but the average con in what was a fairly relaxed U K jail was not used to this and liable take offence. I was terrified that if he grabbed the wrong con he would end up on his back and I would end up in the middle of a very awkward diplomatic row. Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly as it was obvious to all that the man was a foreigner with ways different from our own, the cons took it in good, if bewildered, part. And perhaps we were lucky and just didn't bump into the wrong con.

We toured the workshops. Being close the shoe manufacturing area around Northampton, Littlehey had been set up a with a large workshop full of very expensive and sophisticated equipment that heated and cooled and bent and glued various types of rubber and fake leather into slip-on shoes for issue to prisoners throughout the service. The shoes were pretty dreadful, prisoners hated them and they had an average working life measured in weeks. lvan was very interested in this, and was greatly taken with the shoes. I asked one of the prisoners working there to estimate his shoe size and produce a pair that might fit him, which he duly did. lvan was delighted, removed his own shoes immediately in the middle of the workshop with 30 interested prisoners looking on, put on the prison shoes, pronounced himself pleased with them, and completed the visit wearing them.

In the final chat in my office lvan thanked me, via his persecutor, and said it had been very interesting. The Chief Inspector seem happy with the way things had gone. In due course they left. lvan and I never got to discuss penal philosophy. Had we, I think it fair to say that it would not have been a meeting of minds.

I don't know what the rest of the party made of the sugar beet factory, perhaps less of a culture shock for them.

STEVE TWINN

Steven Twinn


​A RUSSIAN VISITS AN ENGLISH PRISON

Reading in the spring edition of the Newsletter, John Ramwell's account of a visit to a Russian prison has prompted me to record the other side of the coin, a visit to an English prison by a Russian.

lt was in the late 1980's, I was the governor of Littlehey Prison, which I had opened two or three years earlier and which was, at that time, the only prison in Cambridgeshire.

One morning I received a phone call from a Chief Inspector at Cambridge police HQ. He was after a favour. It seems that Cambridge Council (I think) were entertaining a delegation of Russians. The next day they were scheduled to visit a sugar beet factory but one of the delegation, a very senior Russian policeman, had said he did not want to do that but wanted to see something more in his line of work. Would I, the Chief Inspector asked, accommodate a visit, which I said I was happy to do.

So next morning the delegation arrived. In those days, stereotyping and cultural assumptions were not particularly frowned upon so I can say the Russian. I cannot member his name if indeed I ever knew it, so for the purposes of this piece I shall call him lvan, who was exactly what I had expected, pudgy, coarse featured, grey complexioned, and wearing a very badly made suit. He was accompanied by the chief inspector and an interpreter, a small, very lively lady in her early sixties, immaculately turned out and, as I was soon to find out, assertive to the point of being aggressive.


Issue No 89 Autumn 2023