How nine weeks behind bars changed my life, by Vicky Pryce

It was while serving seven months for perjury and perverting the course of justice, that former government minister Jonathan Aitken rediscovered God. He began reading the Bible in his cell at Belmarsh and after enrolling on a theology course he is now president of Christian Solidarity Worldwide.

Vicky Pryce’s moment of revelation also came in prison. However, her Damascene moment wasn’t exactly a spiritual awakening.

“I used to go to the faith sessions, not because of any religious calling, but because they had good juice and biscuits,” she says. “It was a bit of an escape, if I’m honest, but then I began to notice that most of the women didn’t bother with a hymn book. At first I thought that they must just know them off by heart, but then I realised it was because they couldn’t read. I was shocked. How could it be that so many women could have got to adulthood without basic literacy?”

Pryce, it’s fair to say, was not the average inmate. When she was sentenced to seven months for accepting points on her licence on behalf of her estranged husband, the former Liberal Democrat MP Chris Huhne, she had spent much of her life cocooned within the British establishment.

Originally from Greece, Pryce had come to London to study at the London School of Economics as a teenager and spent the 1980s as chief economist at a succession of banks. By 2002 she was chief economic adviser at the Department of Trade and Industry and led a comfortable, largely anonymous life. But then in 2010 Huhne left her for another woman and Pryce seemed to embrace that old adage that revenge is a dish best served cold.

The revelations about the speeding ticket did end Huhne’s political career, but it also resulted in a trial which embroiled the couple’s three children and which left everyone involved looking at times hopelessly vindictive.

“I remember people telling me the first night in prison is usually spent crying, but that didn’t happen to me,” says the 62-year-old. “Honestly, I watched the coverage of the case on the television and then I just fell straight to sleep.

“Look, it would be inhuman not to have any black moments given what happened, but it’s now part of me. I know some people would have walked out of prison and drawn a line under it, they would have seen it as a part of their lives best forgotten. That’s not me. It changed my outlook on life.”

Quite quickly Pryce came to believe that the British prison system is broken and ever the economist she has since collated countless statistics to back up her theory, which now pepper her conversation.

According to the most recent figures, she says, just 27 per cent of all prisoners entered employment when they were released from prison. When it came to women, that figure fell to eight per cent. There’s more. Almost half of inmates lose contact with their family while behind bars… 30 per cent of women in prison were in care growing up….current reoffending rates cost the country £13bn a year.

“It is not working, but there seems to be a reluctance to change,” says Pryce, who later this month will be one of the guest speakers at Salon North, part of Harrogate International Festivals. “If there was a hospital where people went for a knee operation and then every six months we found out it hadn’t worked and it had to be done again and again, we wouldn’t raise taxes and throw more money at it. No, we would say it’s not fit for purpose and look for an alternative.”

When Pryce left prison she walked straight into an albeit unpaid role advising Vince Cable in the Department of Business and she could have easily slipped back into her old life. However, she says those nine weeks had such a profound effect that she’s donating proceeds from her book Prisonomics to Working Chance, the charity which helps women with criminal convictions find work and of which she is now patron. Putting her money where her mouth is, she also hired an ex-offender as her personal assistant.

“One of the few good things about British prisons is the education programme. I saw the difference it makes, but despite that for many prisoners, particularly women, custodial sentences don’t make any sense. I think there does need to be a greater emphasis on community service. There is a knee jerk reaction against sentences which are seen as somehow ‘soft’, but if these are better at reducing reoffending then surely that has to be a good thing.

“When I was in the last weeks of my sentence I saw women being moved to open prison who had spent years under the very strict regime of somewhere like Holloway. They were institutionalised to the point where they couldn’t cope with even limited freedom. They wanted to go back to regular prison because the outside world was just too frightening a prospect. Surely that’s not what we want from a service which is supposed to be about rehabilitation?”

When Pryce comes to Harrogate she won’t be talking about prisons. Instead the woman whose handbag was found to have £1,490 in cash when she first walked into Holloway will be talking about wealth. It’s almost become a dirty word in light of the recent financial crisis which exposed the greed at the top of the world’s banks, but Pryce will argue that in many ways money - and lots of it - is what makes the world go round.

“Globally, there is more financial equality than perhaps there has ever been and we should be wary of demonising the financial sector. It is easy to complain about the big bonuses that people receive, but if they are taxed correctly a significant amount of money comes back into the economy. If you ban bonuses all that happens is that companies find another way of rewarding employees, ways which often don’t involve paying tax. I understand that getting rid of bankers’ bonuses is a popular move, but it can have unintended consequences.

“The more rich people there are, the more money they save and ultimately the more wealth there is to reinvest. Also without some inequality there is no impetus for growth or to make improvements, you only have to look at what happened to the Communist economies to see that.”

Some have wondered that whether having found her public voice, Pryce might be toying with the idea of following her ex-husband into politics. She won’t rule it out, but it’s clear she’s not entirely comfortable no longer being able to slip by anonymously.

“People on the whole have been very supportive and yes it has given me much more of a public profile than I ever had. People will come up to me and say, I know you from somewhere? Where is it? They’ll ask if I’m a member of a particular club or perhaps I lived in Sidcup at some point. Occasionally I just nod and say, ‘yes, Sidcup, that’s right’. Sometimes it’s just easier that way.”