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Jail House Talk

Locked in a prison room with 500 of America’s most violent murderers, rapists and robbers, what would one of the North-east’s most successful businessmen do to grab their attention? – sing “Loch Lomond” of course.

That is what happened when Bob Keiller, boss of Aberdeen-based PSN visited Angola Prison in Louisiana recently, home to 5200 men, few of whom will taste freedom again.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as “The Farm” and once described as “America’s bloodiest,” is famous for the annual rodeo which draws thousands of members of the public.

It has been the inspiration for a number of films including Dead Man Walking which was partly filmed in the prison and The Green Mile which was based on life on death row in Angola in the 1930s.

Bob Keiller, Scottish Entrepreneur of the Year 2008, ended up in Angola because of his inspirational speaking ability and his company’s connections with Louisiana.

After addressing fellow entrepreneurs at a conference in Gleneagles at the invitation of Charan Gill, the curry-house king of Scotland, Keiller’s reputation for public speaking spread and eventually reached Cathy Fontenot, an assistant warden at Angola, when she attended a joint UK-USA conference.

She then invited Keiller to the prison the next time he visited his staff at Lafayette in Louisiana.

Since he led a management buy-out of international energy services company PSN three years ago, the company has become one of Scotland’s fastest growing private businesses and has created thousands of jobs around the globe.

However that has been done while adhering rigidly to a series of core values, which at times have cost multi-million pound deals, and he agreed to talk to the prisoners about “self belief, doing the unthinkable and achieving the unimaginable.”

“I did ask myself ‘Why would you speak to inmates in a prison?’” he said. “But the bottom line is that in the prison they encourage people to be entrepreneurial and to make products they can sell. They have rodeos which the public can go to and during these rodeos they allow the inmates to sell goods they have made to the public. With the proceeds they can buy materials for further craft and business ideas or they can buy books or bibles or building materials to build churches.

“They encourage a virtuous circle rather than a destructive circle.”

He recalled his night in prison for Business Bulletin, spent in a villa built by the prisoners rather than one of the 6ft x 9ft death row cells.

“It was an absolutely unique experience and the most daunting I have ever faced by a long way.

“My colleagues compared me to a prize fighter going into the ring beforehand because I was pacing backwards and forwards.”

He wanted to make it instantly clear that he “wasn’t from these parts” and contemplated wearing his kilt.

“It would have be a good differentiator but I am not sure if wearing a kilt in a roomful of 200 prisoners would have been a good idea.“

The tension increased when he found himself facing not the 80 prisoners he expected but 500 and when he asked the assistant warden how often they held these kind of events was told: “Oh, we ain’t never done nothing like this before.”

From the minute they heard “By yon bonnie banks ...” the prisoners were hooked.

“I started off by singing the first verse and chorus of Loch Lomond, which of course is a song about a prisoner stuck in Carlisle jail and how his journey back to Scotland would be quicker because when he died he would take the low road back through the earth to Scotland.

“I used the theme of high road and low road throughout the talk and spoke about making choices and how, if you continually take the high road in life you will ultimately climb to great heights.

“Nine out of 10 of the prisoners in front of me were there for life without any prospect of parole or release. Half were there for murder and the rest for things like rape and child molestation.

“I tried to treat them like business colleagues. I tried not to talk down to them or preach to them in any way. Questions were still coming thick and fast when we eventually had to draw a line under it.

“There were questions of all sorts about the business from profit margins to a potential listing in the New York Stock Exchange and there was one question which floored me completely.

“I had talked about PSN’s core values being the DNA of our business and I was asked: ‘How do you relate the DNA of your business to the DNA of planet earth?’ I put my hand up and admitted I couldn’t answer that one.”

He said his visit had been consistent with PSN’s “localisation” core value of putting something back into the communities in which they operated.

“It is a particularly unique way of doing it but it is absolutely consistent with our principles.”

He said the successful Angola philosophy was to keep people busy by finding their talents and skills and allowing then to use them.

In spite of the razor wire, bloodhounds for tracking escapees (which haven’t been used for six years) and 50 guard towers with armed guards the prison did not feel threatening or imposing.

“That was the biggest surprise,” he said.

Before leaving he was given a guided tour including the old death row block with its electric chair and a walk through the current death row where he spoke to prisoners who remain on average for 20 years before execution or their sentence is commuted.

“I even entered the room and saw the bed to which the prisoner is strapped for the lethal chemical injection,” he said.

“I also saw the two red phones on the wall which the state governor or others can call right at the last minute to literally effect a stay of execution.

“We were told of a case within the last 10 years when the phone call was made 15 minutes before the person was due to be put to death. There is a two hour window within which the governor has discretion for the execution so if the governor had decided to carry out the execution earlier the call would have been too late.

“It is mind numbing to think of the implications of all of this due process.”