Dead Men's s Boots

After a high-profile lawsuit brought by the family of a guy named William Ball, who went into Pentonville sane and came out a frothing berserker, they started to liberalise the regime, and the whole idea of control by dehumanisation went into a bit of a decline in the UK until they opened Belmarsh in 1991. Pentonville’s not that bad today, if you compare it to somewhere like Brixton or the Scrubs. It’s even got its own pool room and a big bare hall where you can show movies – and its blindingly whitewashed frontage is so meticulously maintained that it causes regular pile-ups when drivers coming along the Caledonian Road incautiously glance across at it just as the sun breaks out of cloud cover.

All the same, as Juliet and I checked in through the clanging gates and banging doors the next morning, it didn’t seem like the jolliest place on earth. The acoustics in a prison are unique: every echo sounds like a taunt or an insinuation, and there are always a lot of echoes.

It didn’t help that the sky outside was blue-grey like a bruise, with the first drops of rain just starting to fall, or that the security procedures, even for remand prisoners, are so much like decontamination protocols: as though you’re bringing the outside world in with you, and they don’t want any atom of it touching the prisoners.

We were randomly chosen to be searched, but given the effect that Juliet has on people of all sexes and persuasions I wasn’t sure how much randomness was actually involved.

The women officers who searched her certainly took their time over it, and I had to loiter outside the guard station long after their male counterparts had impounded my hip flask and ceremonial dagger and given me a receipt. When the doors opened and Juliet strode on out with her hands nonchalantly in her pockets, the women warders who followed her looked a little dazed and haunted: it was just a standard non-intimate search – a ‘rub-down’ – but if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes also into you.

Reunited, we were ushered through another set of doors – more bangs and clangs, more echoes, like the opening credits of Porridge – to the interview hall.

Remand prisoners have their own visiting room, and although there’s a guard present the regime is a bit more relaxed than it is for other inmates.