Part of my Crime Fiction Experts series
Naomi Jeacock spent 30 years inside and learned that holding a prison wing takes judgement, not just the kit on your belt.
Naomi Jeacock trained alongside the men she joined up with in 1991 and passed everything they passed. When it came to issuing kit for personal protection, the men were handed a thick wooden stave. Naomi was given a kubaton: “a miniature plastic baton, about the same size as a marker pen.” It was “only effective to manage compliance by pain once a prisoner was already restrained and certainly wouldn’t help me if I came under attack.”
She had expected the hard part of the job to be earning respect from the prisoners. It wasn’t. Mixed-sex posting was still new and most of the male staff had never worked with a woman. Plenty of them “could see no value in having a ‘woman to do a man’s job'”, and she was treated as “an additional burden and risk.”
How far did that go? One Saturday she bumped into a male colleague while she was out shopping, smiled, went to say hello, and he looked straight through her and walked off. He came to find her on the Monday to apologise. He hadn’t dared speak to her in public because his wife believed all female officers were “big, fat lesbians”!
So Naomi couldn’t lean on size or stature, and that turned out to matter far less than you’d think. What she leaned on instead is the thing crime fiction rarely credits an officer with: the knack of reading people and taking the heat out of a room before it tipped into violence. She held a clear line too, and as she puts it, she was “not a lady to back off when my authority was challenged.”
That’s where I want to start, because it’s where most prison fiction goes wrong before the first lock has even turned.
The real skill was knowing how to read a wing
Officers in fiction tend to come in two flavours: the brute and the bent one. Naomi’s career proves both of them wrong.
The officers who lasted, the ones who actually kept a prison wing steady, managed it through judgement rather than force. They stayed calm and even-handed with people most of society had written off, and they were careful never to let hard-won trust tip over into friendship. And the sharpest operator on a landing rarely looks the part.
One of the best intelligence gatherers Naomi worked with was known to the prisoners as “Village”, as in village idiot. They were convinced he was thick. He was nothing of the sort. Because they underestimated him, “they talked openly around him, as though he didn’t exist”, and he quietly gathered information on everything that mattered.
There’s a gift in that for any writer. Your cleverest prison character doesn’t need to announce it. The one everyone dismisses might be the one who knows exactly what’s going on.
That line between being friendly and being friends mattered for a darker reason too. Naomi is clear that corruption inside rarely begins with a brown envelope or an open threat. It tends to start far more gently, with warmth, charm and a slow testing of where the lines are. When someone is facing 25 years, spending six months building a bond with an officer costs them nothing. For a writer, that’s a great deal more interesting than the bent officer cliché.
The most frightening people were rarely the biggest
Naomi transferred to HMP Whitemoor, a maximum-security prison where, at the time, more than half the population were Cat A, High Risk Cat A and Exceptional Risk Cat A. Walking in, in her words, “was intimidating.” During her induction week a male officer had boiling oil thrown over him, “ending his career and causing life changing injuries.”
But the menace in a place like that often didn’t match the menace in a script. She remembers the leader of a prolific, violent armed robbery gang arriving on the unit. The first time she spoke to him, he answered in a voice “that sounded like George Formby on helium.” It took everything she had not to laugh.
And then the other side of it, which is far harder to shake off. “I have looked into some of the most soulless eyes that made my blood run cold and I knew that person could, and would, kill me in a heartbeat.”
I’ve said this before about policing, and it’s just as true inside prisons: danger doesn’t always announce itself. Real menace was rarely about the size of a man. It tended to live in the eyes, or in how still a person could be. Sometimes, the most frightening person in the room is the one doing the least. If you take one thing from that for your own pages, make it the quiet one.
A women’s prison runs on completely different rules
This is the part Naomi could talk about for hours, and the part fiction tends to skip altogether. A women’s prison is not a men’s prison with different inmates. It’s a different world.
Start with who’s walking through the gate. Many of the women are sole carers. Naomi has known women arrive expecting a suspended sentence because their brief told them to bank on one, having left their children with a neighbour, “or even home alone.” That little detail might change how you write a woman’s first night inside.
The dynamics differ too. In a men’s prison a single cell is a privilege. Many women would rather share because, as Naomi puts it, “they don’t like being alone for long periods of time.” Women are more complex, unpredictable and manipulative, relationships run hotter, and some can be more violent than many men. Self-harm is more prevalent, and a woman who is volatile and abusive one minute is often in tears and apologising the next.
And they are routinely underestimated, which is its own kind of danger. Naomi once flagged that a prison minister was getting “overly familiar” with his chapel orderly, who happened to be “a woman who tried to hire a hitman to kill her husband.” For her trouble she earned the rather ungodly nickname “Hitler in knickers.”
The part of the job fiction never lets you see
Here’s a detail that surprised me, and I suspect it’ll surprise you too. Ask most people how many officers are watching a wing and they’ll picture a corridor lined with staff. The reality, Naomi says, is that “in a Category C prison, you might have three to four staff on a wing with 120 prisoners.” That one made me think, because it changes how you’d build tension. Instead of 20 officers piling through a gate, you’re writing a handful of people trying to hold a whole wing steady and hoping it doesn’t tip. It’s worth keeping that ratio in mind the next time you put a prison incident on the page.
And then there’s what it costs you. Most jobs hand you some measure of whether you did well. This one mostly doesn’t. You never really know how many lives you helped turn around or how many crimes you prevented, “because those victims don’t exist and those crimes don’t happen.”
And yet, ask any honest officer and they’ll tell you a prison is one of the funniest places they’ve ever worked. Naomi remembers an arsonist who was so relentlessly irritating that the other prisoners eventually stuffed him into a large laundry bag and shut him in a chest freezer. When staff hauled him out, he “resembled a cat that had been caught in a sack.”
Her advice to writers is to let that side breathe. “Have fun with the characters.” Prisons, she says, are “very funny places full of stories that are almost unbelievable, but they are true.”
Before you write a single word
Naomi’s first piece of advice for anyone setting a story inside is about period. A prison is a product of its time. The staff and prisoners she worked with in the 1990s are “very different to the staff and prisoners of today”, so if you’re writing about a particular decade, keep faith with it. Get the era right and everything else has something solid to stand on.
Naomi joined the Prison Service in 1991 and retired more than 30 years later as an Operational Governor, having worked everywhere from a young offender institution to the Special Secure Unit at Whitemoor, the segregation unit, and the women’s estate. She piloted GPS tagging in this country before most people had heard of it. These days she works as a civil funeral celebrant. It feels less like a departure than another version of the same instinct: reading people closely and finding the human story. By her own account, it has finally given her the kind of reward the job inside so rarely did. She’s one of my Crime Fiction Experts, and I bring her in because she sees the people before the procedure, every time.
If this has done its job, your next prison scene will be quieter, and a good deal more human, than the one you were about to write. And the officer at the heart of it might not be holding the prison wing with force at all, but with the thing Naomi had to learn early: how to read the room before it boiled over.
If you’re working on something set inside, or anywhere else the police and prison worlds touch your story, come and talk to me. One-to-one advice, manuscript reads and my crime-writing courses are all there for exactly this.
Naomi Jeacock spent more than 30 years in the Prison Service, retiring as an Operational Governor. She worked across the prison estate, including high-security, women’s and segregation units, and later in court custody, prisoner transport and GPS tagging. She’s now a civil funeral celebrant and one of my Crime Fiction Experts. Naomi brings the detail that helps a prison scene feel lived-in rather than researched, from the way staff read a wing to the relationships and dark humour that shape life inside. You’ll find her on my website here.
