A gentle giant in a woman's world

A former national league basketball player, and more than a little brawny, he seems to loom even taller than his official 6ft 4ins stature.

Standing like a rock among the sea of comparatively diminutive female prisoners, Ed, 39, could easily look the stereotypical spit of the prison "heavy" who rattles all the keys.

But for someone of such imposing physique, there's an overiding gentleness to him; blond hair, soft blue eyes and a guileless face which seem slightly incongruous with his form.

For all his size, his footfalls are soft, his steps deliberate, almost delicate as he walks the floors - checking here and there as he goes. The peculiar brand of quiet kindness he emanates renders you trusting of him, almost immediately.

And therein lies his strength. Ed himself tells me kindness is as much a part of the job as the prerequisite air of authority every official must develop. For many of the women inside, he - and the few other male officers - are the first and only men that haven't abused or violated them. Many of them are used to lean, mean types, not gentle giants. After some goading, Ed tells me the women inside accept him, and some other male officers, as 'Okay guys' - quite a compliment in this environment.

"You can sometimes be the first man some women come across in here who hasn't abused them or wanted to abuse them, so you take on this role of bringing them round to accepting you," says Ed, who lives with his wife and two children in County Durham.

But although he's always there to listen, he has his boundaries and sticks to them rigorously. He feels empathy for many of the women inside, but he'd never visit them if, and when, they leave for other prisons, or take anecdotes of notorious prisoners home with him. "It can be a very emotionally-draining job so you must draw a line between 'it' and the rest of your life," he says.

Comparing his two years' work at the female centre to over 13 years in all-male institutions, including Frankland and Durham prisons, he believes in the innate differences between the sexes more than he ever did before.

Incarcerated women behave in a generic way, as do men, he says. But men can take "no" for an answer from a prison official quicker than a woman can. Women always explore the reasons behind a negative decision. Women will be more resourceful, much more emotionally open and curious - but they tend to come with more "baggage".

Self-harm is rife as are family crises. Ed says he's seen women to be very good at visiting their men in prison while men have proved a lot lazier. The visiting lounge is never packed out for female prisoners and some face a long wait indeed before a visit from a boyfriend or husband, with children in tow, comes their way. Having said that, women are more likely to be estranged from their families as Durham is a long way from many of their homes.

There have been incidences in the centre that have left Ed jaded but nothing has put him off his job. While he's had chairs thrown at him and jagged vases brandished before him, these are one-off occurrences and it is the greater emotional demands to be met in a women's wing that he finds most challenging.

But for the 15-odd years Ed's been working for the Prison Service, he's never become institutionalised as the "big bad prison officer" that television programmes like Bad Girls boast. There is no power hunger or officiousness in him. He wears his rank of deputy governor like an ordinary shirt and tie and treats the women with friendly informality. He says he wouldn't swap his job and, for every demand, there's a reward that comes his way, in the shape of a kindness or an achievement by a prisoner.

But prison culture didn't always allow this affability. Being on the prison floor when he started out as a fresh-faced 24-year-old was like being on something of a front-line. He entered the profession for the job security and the pension scheme, but he didn't know what he was in for, or how his perspectives would change.

The "them-and-us" prisoner-versus-warden equation still held firm and, at the time, there was strict gender segregation - no man could work on a women's wing and vice versa. There were a lot more ex-army men who joined the Prison Service and the regime was fairly militaristic. Because there were no toilets in cells, slopping out the contents of buckets from the night before was an everyday norm, which made the stench almost unbearable most mornings.

Four men in a cell was not unusual - the space being so small, all four could not get out of their beds at the same time. Twenty-three hour lock-ins weren't considered cruel. As draconian as all this seems now, it was just another day in the life of a prisoner in London's Pentonville, a place that held 1,200 men in a space that was supposed to house 500, and where Ed was posted for his initial prison training, after a vocation prison course in Wakefield.

There were still prison parades and the service had an unbendable pecking order: he was called a "sprog" at first and given the worst duties. It wasn't anything personal. It's just the way it was. "They were not conditions you questioned. They were the norm then and you accepted them, just as the prisoners did," says Ed.

But after the watershed riots at Strangeways in 1991 - which he witnessed first-hand for seven days and found quite frightening for the first time in his career - prison life became more humane.

But, while prisons may have changed beyond all recognition, Ed's non-judgemental attitude has remained strong. As far as he's concerned, he's not there to punish female prisoners. He's there to oversee their punishment, that is, the loss of personal liberty. What keeps him happy is the smaller victories. They make him feel like he is in a job worth doing. Seeing a woman transform be-yond recognition after an emotionally-charged term of rehabilitation.

"When you see people change, you can see you've done something. And that's what we're here for," he says.

Other moments leave him feeling compassion. When the centre created a "lifer's lounge", where women doing life sentences could sit together, he remembers one woman being overwhelmed at sitting on a settee. Being in prison, she hadn't sat on one for seven years and she'd forgotten how good it felt. Another told him recently she'd never seen a £2 coin and she wished she knew what it looked like. Insignificant instances to some, but deeply poignant for Ed, and the women inside.

A sense of humour is imperative, he says, and the prison officers have their own cliquey, quirky brand. Sometimes it verges on the dark or irreverent, but it is merely to provide some levity when it all gets too fraught. His humour is self-evident. He thinks it's a hoot being interviewed and jokes every time Female Centre governor, Moira Bartlett, steps into the office. "Have I told you about the time I won a medal for my heroics in Strangeways?" he says to me in a stage whisper. Moira doesn't bat an eyelid but perhaps raises an eyebrow. She's obviously used to Ed's japes and takes them with a pinch of salt.

After our chat, Ed takes me on a guided tour. One of the first rooms we enter is a training area for women on a beauty therapy course. They carry on chatting about the joys of false nails and hot wax as he enters. And Ed does not feel uncomfortable. He's watched women at their most abject and helped them through their darkest times, as well as listened in on small talk about lipstick and lingerie on a daily basis.

Despite all his outward strength and manly stature, Ed belies a deeply emotional empathy that makes him, well and truly, a man at home in a woman's world.