'I feel I'm the one doing time'

In the first part of a three part series, Nick Morrison reports on the forgotten victims of our justice system.

LIFE has become a matter of routine for Joe. But it's not just the hoovering and the dusting, the taking the dog for a walk and the hours in front of the television. What really act as the yardsticks in his life are the phone calls.

Every other day they come, at five to 12 in the morning, or at 25 to seven in the evening. They last just five minutes, sometimes ten, but no longer, and they're how Joe knows that time is passing.

It has been like this for almost seven months now, ever since Joe's partner was sent to prison.

Karen, 36, was sentenced to three-and-a-half years after she pleaded guilty to wounding the man she believes raped her daughter. The case against the alleged attacker had been dropped, she saw him in the street, she was high on drugs and she slashed his face with a Stanley knife. Joe knows it wasn't nice, and he was expecting her to go to prison, but when the sentence was handed down it still came as a shock.

"I was gobsmacked, to be honest. I knew it was coming, but there was just nothing I could do about it," he says. "I wanted to go out and get the guy she attacked, just out of revenge, but I would probably have been in the same place she is now, so I just got drunk instead. It just seemed the easiest thing at the time.

"Now I just take it day by day and wait for the phone calls."

Taking it day by day becomes a recurring theme of our conversation. Joe is 40, well-built and a bricklayer by trade. He does not seem a man given to showing much emotion, but it is clear that seeing his partner just once a week and waiting for her to ring every other day is taking its toll.

Just a few minutes later, he's saying: "You just have to take each day as it comes, day by day, and try and get through it." It's a phrase he repeats several times.

The days themselves have long since taken on a familiar feel. Karen may be the one in prison, but Joe feels the sentence just as keenly sitting in his living room in Spennymoor. While Karen has enrolled on a computer course to occupy her time, Joe has no such distraction.

"When I'm not working, I'm taking the dog for a walk and doing the hoovering and dusting. That is the highlight of my day. I even know what is on the telly seven days a week," he says.

"I don't bother people. If I want to go to the pub, I go on my own. I should be out enjoying myself, but I've just sat around for the last seven months. Don't ask me how I've done it, but I have."

Joe and Karen have been together for four years, but now their contact is limited to Joe's weekly visit to Low Newton Prison, near Durham, and those phone calls every two days. Karen can buy a £4 or £8 phone card every Tuesday, but once that is used up there is no more until the next Tuesday.

"You want to say that many things to her, but you can't. The prison officer walks past and tells her to get off the phone, and it will be just a matter of saying 'love you' and they cut you off.

"There is always something you forget to tell her, and you have to wait until the next call. I know I have only got five minutes and I've just got to accept that," Joe says.

To help him remember, Joe writes down what he wants to say on a sheet of A4 paper. He writes down what he has been doing, although there are still things he forgets to say.

Much of the time on the phone is spent reassuring Karen. She doesn't like him working away, so he has worked only five weeks since her imprisonment. Nor does she like him going out with the lads, although this happens very rarely anyway. The last time he did, he recalls "she said 'I can't enjoy myself, so what are you doing enjoying yourself?' I thought 'at least you have got somebody to talk to, I've got a dog.'"

But from what she tells him about the experience of her fellow inmates, her fears are understandable.

"Most of the women who are in there, their partners have left them," says Joe. "She thought I was going to do the same, but if I was going to do that I would have done it by now. It took some doing to calm her down - they convinced her I was going to leave, but it won't happen."

Joe's weekly visits to Low Newton are almost as fraught. Several times he has been singled out by a sniffer dog on the gate.

Although no drugs have been found on him - and he is adamant he has never used them and never carried them - simply being picked out means he has to have a closed visit, separated from Karen by a plastic screen and speaking through an intercom. If the dog has stopped a few people that day, then a shortage of secure booths means visits can be restricted to 20 minutes instead of one-and-a-half hours.

"You can't hold them or nothing. You can't give them a kiss and tell them everything is going to be alright," he says.

At one point, he was singled out so frequently that he stopped visiting for a while, but his last few trips have been uneventful.

Joe proposed to Karen in prison earlier this year. He says he is going to do it again, and this time be able to give her the ring he's bought her, when she gets out of prison, on November 11 next year. But he knows that, by that time, he will probably have reached the limit of what he can cope with on his own.

After what he has said about standing by his woman, what he says next comes as a bit of a surprise. But then, perhaps it just reveals the strain of living with a partner on the inside.

"If something like this ever happened again, I'm not hanging about again," he says. "I'm not going to go through the next four or five years being on my own.

"I'm not saying I would leave her if she got into bother again - it would depend what she had done wrong and what the sentence was - but if she ended up doing 25 years, no bloke in their right mind is going to sit around that long."

* Some of the names in this article have been changed

* NEPACS offers help and advice to prisoners' families in the North-East. They can be contacted on 0191-384 3096 or at 22 Old Elvet, Durham, DH1 3HW