When Damian was 22 he broke into a woman's house and forced her to have oral sex with him. He was jailed for eight years that time. Then, a few months after his release, he did it again — burgled a flat and assaulted another woman in the same way. His latest victim now sleeps with a rape alarm and a knife. There is barbed wire around the garden. Even more worrying, Damian, now 35, is eligible for parole next year. Can anything stop him from finding another victim?
Damian is seeking admission to Britain's most unusual jail, the last hope, both for him and his next potential victim. In conventional jails, vicious murderers and sex attackers have little incentive to behave well or change. But at Grendon prison in Buckinghamshire they are encouraged to change their minds for the better through years of group psychotherapy.
The question is whether this can make any difference. David Blunkett does not seem to have much faith in the possibility of reform. As the political rhetoric around sentencing hots up, he is talking tough: he would like sadistic killers to serve actual life sentences, and murderers of policemen and prison officers to face a 30-year tariff. Grendon's approach goes against the flow and it must therefore constantly prove its worth. Its methods are highly controversial, and it is very rare for any outsiders to see inside the prison. But The Sunday Times Magazine was given unprecedented access for this article.
Set beside the village of Grendon Underwood, a few miles from Aylesbury, Grendon is, on the face of it, a cushy number. There is the usual concrete wall, the endless rattling of keys in locks, but the 200-inmate institution still seems like a pretend prison.At one time, it had its own staff-inmate brass band. The football club failed to join the Aylesbury League, only because of problems with "away" games. In the early years, the Bucks Advertiser said drama productions at the prison should be compulsory viewing for local repertory companies. At Christmas, an inmate dressed as Santa would come out of the chimney of a large wooden house wheeled into the gym, and prisoners' children would be given a toy made at the occupational-therapy unit.
Prisoners are volunteers and, though they can't get themselves out of jail, they can and do vote to eject fellow inmates. This may have some influence on the governor, who has the final decision on whether to send inmates back to a conventional prison. The average prison officer elsewhere thinks the lunatics have taken over the asylum, and inmates at other jails dismiss it as a "grasses' and nonces' nick" (ballet lessons that were once held at Grendon prompted the front-page tabloid headline "It's Tutu Much").
There are individual cells, and everyone, the governor and murderers alike, is on first-name terms. The old hierarchy of blaggers (armed robbers) at the top and sex offenders at the bottom is gone. Family days, when spouses and children come to the wing, are more frequent than in other jails. Prisoners are unlocked from dawn till dusk and do not face a monotonous prison regimen: they are required to do nothing but bare their souls at daily group sessions with fellow inmates. But men like Damian say it's the toughest time they have ever served.
"It's terrifying," he says. "Most adults, whether in jail or not, have skeletons in the closet. But it doesn't take long here to realise they expect you to get them all out. Suddenly you want to run — because that is what you have done all your life."
Last year, after 14 months at Grendon, Damian gave up, requested a move and was returned to the general prison system. But a few days back in a straightforward maximum-security prison made him see there was no alternative for a man whose next sentence could be life. "I got back and found all my old friends still talking about the jobs they've done, drugs, sex and what they are going to do when they get out."
Damian has just arrived back on Grendon's assessment wing — where newcomers live while being assessed for their suitability to become a permanent resident — asking for a second chance to explore what he thinks lies at the heart of his sex offences. "When I was here before," he explains, "I realised that I was angry with my mother for leaving me with a violent father and then putting me in a children's home. It brought up for me all the feelings I had as a child of being angry, of not being in control. I was sexually abused as a kid by someone in the family, but never penetrated. I never penetrated this woman or the last one. I love my mum, so I couldn't make her feel the way I did as a child — but I think I wanted to make my victims feel like I felt."
It is, perhaps, a slightly too tidy narrative. Damian began revealing it during his first, 14-month stay at Grendon. But that time, the other inmates on the wing voted him out of the prison, a decision the governor endorsed. They could no longer tolerate his repeated escapes from truth-telling by smoking cannabis. Now, seeking a second Grendon stretch, he knows, as other prisoners keep telling me, "You can't con a con." They will chip away at any self-deception during the gruelling group sessions, which are at the heart of the programme — though psychodrama and art therapy are also used.
For the past 40 years, group psychotherapy has been at the centre of Grendon's regime. Its ambition — some say overambition — is to get to the roots of violence, often in childhood, and transform damaged personalities so that they no longer have the urge to commit crimes, many of which are of the most sadistic nature. "We have to be able to be in sympathy with them to have some understanding of their despair," says David Jones, chief therapist on the assessment wing, and the editor of Working with Dangerous People: the Psychotherapy of Violence.
Grendon has survived deep unfashionability — particularly during the chill Thatcher years — as an institution founded on the principle that some inmates were ill and prison could cure them. Yet it was a Conservative chancellor, Rab Butler, who approved its funding and who, as home secretary, pushed for it to be opened in 1960. "The regime must be flexible with an accent on treatment; and success will depend above all on an enlightened staff-inmate relationship," declared Butler.
Indeed, Grendon, though often regarded as a strange child of the 1960s, was first proposed in a 1939 government report and represents the apex of liberal thinking on prison reform that goes back to the 1850s, when the first units were developed to treat, rather than merely isolate, prisoners with mental-health problems. Its pioneering work owes much to Maxwell Jones and Tom Main, two British psychiatrists who developed therapeutic communities in military hospitals for shell-shock victims during the second world war. Today, the local Bucks Herald, rather than running scare stories about "monster" prisoners, proudly refers to Grendon as Britain's "leading therapeutic prison".
