Inside: One Man's Experience of Prison

John Hoskison

Let's try and come up with the unlikeliest prison inmate we can think of. Let's make him middle-class, obviously. Let's give him a job, maybe the manager of a sports equipment shop. Let's give him a devoted partner, loving parents and a young son. He should live, I think, in Surrey. In short, he should be a lot like you and me. And here's a thought, let's make him an ex-professional sportsman so he'll have known exotic foreign trips, trophies, large winners' cheques, past triumphs to reflect upon from his cell. But the sport should be something like golf, so he isn't necessarily a physically imposing speciman. Yes, he should be a scrawny 5'6" and under 10 stone. My God, he'd be eaten alive in prison.

This was John Hoskison in 1995 when he was sentenced to 3 years in prison for killing a cyclist in a drink-driving accident. The story of his time behind bars is an appalling one. The constant threat to his physical safety, the depravity of his fellow inmates and the cynicism, carelessness and brutality of the prison authorities is far worse than I could have imagined. Most appalling of all is the free availability of hard drugs in prison. It seems that most prisons are almost literally awash with heroin. It's the cause of misery, of course, in the prison population but also a major cause of instability and violence. Hoskison is puzzled by the unwillingness of the prison staff to stamp it out. Indeed, one of his favourite statistics (he cites it at least twice) is that 12% of drugs in prisons are brought in by the 'screws'. As one of the few known drug-free inmates he himself is drug-tested constantly - it's a favourite tactic of the authorities to test the clean so as to improve their stats.

But towards the end of the book a wider picture is revealed. Less and less does he place the blame on the frontline prison staff and more and more is revealed of the bungling interference of the Home Office in running our prisons. Funding for prisons was constantly being squeezed in the time Hoskison was inside. Education programmes and other worthy and useful initiatives would be axed without warning if government felt it needed to throw a bone to the tabloids which constantly howl for harsher treatment for offenders.

But all that really only comes in the last few pages of the book. It's more of a personal story than a political one and at times it's both gripping and chilling. It may not be the greatest account ever written of its kind (and I would personally have added a day to his sentence for each golfing metaphor) but John Hoskison knows how to structure his story and win our sympathy without descending into self-pity. He is also enormously assisted by the generous and forgiving spirit of his victim's family who, it turns out, had written to the judge and pleaded for leniency.