Postcode Peace!

From high profile organised crime ringleader to prison reform charity boss, Andrew Pritchard tells Erwin James why he wants to change the lives of young prisoners and make our prisons more productive and our communities safer 

It was a bold move. Serving a long sentence in HMP Belmarsh, former career criminal and Cat A prisoner Andrew Pritchard could see the damage young, imprisoned Postcode gang members were inflicting on each other in the jail – and the chaos their inter-gang violence was wreaking on each other and the prison community. He and fellow long term prisoner Clifford Hobbs, also a Cat A prisoner with a long history of involvement in serious crime and similarly also reformed, went to the Belmarsh Safer Custody Governor and set out a proposal. The result was One Postcode.

A different ball game

“The reality of it is”, says Andrew  “when young people get to prison, there is still a lot of bravado – it’s a defensive thing. It’s a game, until reality kicks in – then there is an understanding that you are going to spend a very very long time in prison. But here is the thing – there are three elements – no one really wants to kill anyone – when that happens with young gang members it’s usually a question of misguided ‘respect’ and again, bravado, ‘making their mark’. They’re not thinking about the consequences.  Number two, they don’t want to be killed – and number three they certainly don’t want to serve the rest of their lives in prison. The nature of postcode gangs is that you have an enemy on every corner. When you are on the street and you have your friends around you and you have that misguided sense of belonging it seems manageable. But in prison, you soon learn you are on your own. You might be together on remand, but you are going to be split up as soon as you go into the dispersal system. Now, you can’t duck and dive and avoid people if you are serving 30 year recs. It’s a completely different ball game.” 

“Madness”

One thing that comes across powerfully in our conversation, perhaps to some, ironic, is Andrew’s honesty. He left school at fifteen with no qualifications and made the choice to make entrepreneurship and organised crime his profession. His first encounter with the criminal justice system was more than three decades ago when he was sentenced to eighteen months in youth custody. An illegal Rave party organiser, he soon moved into the world of high end local, and then international drug dealing. It was a slippery slope. He says when he looks back now his criminal activities make him feel partly responsible for “the madness” of gang related knife crime.  

Serious injuries

Incredibly his commitment to rehabilitation and making a change began in Belmarsh. “Every day young men would arrive at the prison either on remand, freshly sentenced or returning from the high- security prison dispersal system to receive their accumulated visits (a temporary transfer to a prison nearer your family to receive their visits),” he says. On the wings he says he soon noticed that there were numerous acts of violence happening among the younger prisoners – often resulting in serious injuries to prisoners and the prison officers as they tried to restore order. “This led to all of us being denied privileges and finding ourselves regularly locked up in cells for up to 23 hours a day.” 

He says he began to realise that many of these young prisoners were gang members, having been members of postcode gangs outside. And while their numbers were smaller in prison, they still engineered relationships and allegiances that were territorial, and this created tension and hostility. “While conflict between these groups was not always down to gang issues, it was sometimes about their need to establish status, dominance, and respect, however, in a prison environment, such rivalries and needs can escalate very quickly into seriously heavy and bloody violence.”

Safer custody

Andrew and Clifford proposed the idea of One Postcode. “We were all in the same place,” he says, “all of us trying to live in some kind of order and peace.” The Governor was initially suspicious and took a little while to offer trust. Having high security prisoners run groups and programmes with no officers present, (in order to gain the trust of the participants), was on the face of it a huge risk. But Safer Custody Governor Beverley Clark decided to take the plunge. She says of the programme: “It is run by a professional leader and two peer mentors who understand gang culture. To try and stop the gang fighting while in custody and hence wanting them all to live under One Postcode, that of Belmarsh. One Postcode groups can help promote a violent free environment to live in and hopefully take this thought process away with them either on release or into other establishments”.

Her colleague Anthony Travers, Head of Safer Prisons at Belmarsh said: In response to the rising levels of violence in prisons the Safer Prisons team and a motivated group of prisoners examined some of the underlying causal factors and what could be done to address these. The One Post Code initiative saw a significant number of resolutions of known conflicts across the establishment. The project has had clear success”.  

The way ahead

Today, Andrew Pritchard is a free man and runs the AP Foundation. He’s taking his ideas into a number of prisons and perhaps more importantly in the realm of ‘through the gate.’  In Belmarsh he connected with the famous Peacock Gym in East London for One Postcode and which now also supports his Foundation, and in October the Foundation is opening in partnership with Training 360, a trading and recruitment centre in Basildon, specialising in skills and training for people with criminal convictions. “Some of the courses we will be running and offering job opportunities in are; steel-fixing, plant operations, plastering, fenestration installation, carpentry, and peer mentoring. Given the current deficit in industries across the board, our plan is to have people in prison trained in proper work skills. People coming out of prisons just want the same as the rest of us, a home, a job, an income. They may have done wrong, but if they can achieve these basics, our communities will be safer – and they will be contributors rather than causers of harm.” 

He’s keen to tell me about the service provision contract his foundation has won with the new prison HMP/YOI Fosse Way, a Serco run prison on the site of the old Glen Parva site, which will open mid-2023. “These prisons are being built along the lines of the Scandinavian model. They’re all about rehabilitation, which we’ve been saying for years is the way forward. There’ll be 1600 Cat C prisoners, and they will have all worked to get there.”

Build it, they will come…

His most exciting project are lightweight steel framed buildings for people coming out of prison, he’s hoping local councils will get on board. “We want people in D Cat prisons actually manufacturing the components. Its social housing with a real community purpose. Ideally, we want prisoners to learn the necessary skills, then get out and build this accommodation. We want to bring in partners like probation and other agencies to be a part of what I believe has the potential to be a real rehabilitation revolution.”