In my articles I am conscious that I can be fairly critical of the prison system and with some good reason. However, today I’d like to consider if prisoners actually do enough to help themselves. Prisons offer many opportunities such as education, physical fitness and spiritual development. They also offer possibilities like drug taking, violence…

I was listening to the Today programme a wee while ago and Andrew Malkinson was the guest editor. If you don’t know who he is, I’d encourage you to do some research into his case. Basically, he is a totally innocent man who served 17 years following a miscarriage of justice. During the programme, he…

Tomorrow is Hogmanay, traditionally a time for celebration of the ending year and hope for the following one. I have spent a few Hogmanays in prison and they have now become the most significant of all of the different anniversaries inside. There are many anniversaries for prisoners – conviction date, sentencing date, date of arrest,…

Perhaps the biggest thing that happened to public sector organisations in the past 30 years is what I will call the Professionalism Revolution, referring to the modernisation of working practices and the implementation of things like service standards and performance indicators. Unfortunately, it is my experience that these modernisations have not yet reached the coal…

What an odd title for this week’s article. After all, don’t we all worry about the same things? On initial thinking, it may be assumed that most people have similar worries but, naturally, it is all dependent on context. For example, a 17-year-old, keen to go to university may worry most about the debt implications…

Today, I’d like to write about culture in prison. I don’t mean the kind of culture represented by poetry or art, I mean the ethos of prison. The manner in which the prison community interacts, the ways that the different elements engage with each other to create a way of life. People disagree about the…

I’m actually excited to share how things are in here.  Before I came into prison, I had all of those ideas about what prisons are like but very few of my preconceptions have proven to be accurate. For example, I had thought that a prison would be run on a military spec timetable and routine…

I’m sure everyone has noticed that the media is now in full “Christmas is soon” mode. The TV is bursting with adverts about how to have the perfect Christmas and programmes about the magic of Christmas. Even good newspapers are full of guides on how to cook the perfect turkey and reviews of the best…

I’ve been here long enough now to have observed many prisoners and I can conclude that prisoners morph into one of 3 categories – the giddy, the frowners and the downers. I’d like to tell you more about that, today. I think that about 20% of prisoners like it here – the giddy. They develop…

People say that society is becoming less religious and that the strength of the church is weakening. To be honest, I don’t have access to the statistics to back up that view but I do believe that it’s true. However, attendance at religious observance in prison is very popular so I wonder why this is…