In prison, he had time to stop and think. He put his name down for evening classes and remembered his childhood love of reading and writing. He did homework in his cell, listened to current affairs on the radio, passed the UK’s school-leaving exams, then graduated from the Open University, majoring in history.
Early in his sentence, he met Branton in the “psycho’s office” near the gated entrance to Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire.
“All she wanted me to do was succeed in being a better person,” he says. “She wasn’t thinking about the future. She was thinking, with the life that you’ve got left, you ought to use it to do the best you can.”
The Guardian column came about by chance. A probation officer who knew James liked to write lived next door to the Irish novelist and screenwriter, Ronan Bennett. After James and Bennett struck up a correspondence, Bennett mentioned the prisoner’s talents to Ian Katz, an editor at the newspaper.
All this reads like a story of redemption, a shining example of the good work prison can do, but James isn’t having it. Along with the books and the chats with Branton, he remembers the riots, the suicides of his fellow prisoners and the constant effort to look like nobody’s victim.
He kept the column a secret; jail was no place for a tall poppy.
“Even today, every four days on average in [British] jails, someone is killing themselves,” he says.
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