Jail Journeys

<p>Originally published in 1989 <i>Jail Journeys</i> was a contemporary history of the English prison system in the words of those who had endured it as prisoners or who had worked within it. More than 1000 extracts from more than 150 first-hand accounts of life ‘inside’ chronicle the empty routines of the prison day and tell of the loneliness the despair the squalor the fights the friendships the sex the humour. There are also eye-witness accounts of the Dartmoor Mutiny of hangings and floggings of escapes and personal statements by the well-known – James Phelan Wilfred Macartney Albert Pierrepoint Charles Kray John McVicar Jimmy Boyle Alfie Hinds Lord Alfred Douglas – and by many others less well known. These testimonies by turn dramatic literate and naïve add up to an implicit sociology of the twentieth-century English prison depicting a divided social structure with ‘screws’ on one side and ‘cons’ on the other.</p><p>The book is aimed at anyone with an interest in social issues and twentieth-century history as well as students of law history sociology criminology and social administration and at professionals working in all these fields.</p>