The point where it all went wrong for me was when I was five years old.
I had a massive accident: I was electrocuted on an overground train line near Kings Cross. I had severe burns on my hands. I couldn’t speak properly. I had cognitive issues. It destroyed that educational period from the ages of five to eight. Now being a father of a six-year-old, I see how important that time is.
From the age of eight, I started bunking off school. My first crime was committed when I was nine.
No one ever talks about the feeling of embarrassment. A lot of people mask it. That’s what led me to leaving the classroom when I was 13. I just couldn’t cross over that threshold. I felt so far behind everyone. I felt like everyone was laughing at me.
And that embarrassment is where, for a lot of people, anger comes from. In school, the only options I had were either to go crazy and want to fight everyone or just run away. So I ran away and I never came back.
“I read my first book in prison”
I went to prison for the first time when I was 15 and was back in Pentonville in my twenties. That was the first time I’d gone back into education. The support they gave me – I’d never had it before.
I read my first book in prison. It was Jack Higgins’ The Eagle Has Landed. I loved the cover. I read about a quarter of it, understood even less, but I loved the little bit I understood. I thought, “Now I understand why people read.”
I got my English up to scratch and because I had started reading a lot my vocabulary was OK. One of the teachers, Mike, saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself and asked me to be a peer mentor in the ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) class.
I learned a lot from that role – gaining responsibilities and seeing that the skills I had in managing people in criminal activities could be put to better use. I started to realise that there is life and happiness outside of committing crime, and it is through reading and education.
But I didn’t have an epiphany. When I came out of prison, I was straight back into crime. I broke into commercial premises, and that went on for years. I was stunted: I might have been a 26-year-old man in prison, but really I was like a 13-year-old boy. It was working out how to bridge that gap – that was the big challenge to overcome.
“My value system changed”
I received an eight-year sentence and served four in prison. That’s when education had the most impact for me.
I dived headlong into it: I got up to Level 3 English, did an 18-month computer engineering course and reached out to PET to get funding for the Open University’s People, Work and Society Access module.
I lived at the library and that transformed me because with every book, every page that I turned, my value system changed. My orientation on life started to shift.
I was still dealing with a lot of problems. I have ADHD but at the time I didn’t know. The biggest challenge was being in a cell on my own. Being within my own thoughts was a torture that is hard for me to describe.
Reading was an absolute escape for it. It helps you to see another world, to see another perspective on things, even if you’re stuck in a cell. If you read a book, you get to travel.
Reading for early release?
Prison libraries are not tied into the rehabilitation process and that’s crazy because it’s so self-evident. In my opinion, change can only come through reading. We all know it: if you go into the most successful people’s houses, they have bookshelves. Why? One, because they want to look smart. And two, if you read them, you become smart.
If you were to ask me what one change would be fundamental in prisons, I’d say reading programmes tied into early release schemes – so for every book you read and do a dissertation on, you get a couple of days off your sentence.
I don’t care what people’s intentions are for reading (they’re all going to be reading to come home early): whether they know it or not, they’re going to change. Something inside of them is going to develop.
My whole intention from when I was young was to try and prove that the world was as dodgy and corrupt as I thought it was. So I’d try and confirm my own biases through the books I read. But the more I tried to confirm my biases, the more I’d break them down and realise there’s a lot of nuance involved.
I thought I’d come out of prison with the same intention of committing crime, but I grew so much on that sentence that I couldn’t be around the people that I was with before. Conversations that I had before didn’t resonate with me. My whole mindset, my whole value system, my whole outlook on life changed.
“They trust him, so we can trust him”
After prison, I studied for a Business Management and Entrepreneurship degree at the University of Sunderland in London. When I walked into the classroom, I just felt like I belonged there. I felt like I could hold my own in this room of people. It opened me up to thinking that I actually have a lot to offer, that there are massive opportunities out there for me.
I didn’t have any problem with the university accepting me because of my time in prison. It was the complete opposite: they put me on the Board of Trustees with their Students’ Union.
At the same time I got a job at the outsourcing company Capita. They must have thought, “They trust him, so we can trust him.”
When I was in prison, I was a rep for people from minority ethnic backgrounds and people who weren’t UK citizens, supporting them to access services. I loved the job because I like speaking to and interacting with people. That’s what led me to the role at Capita.
I was a Social Value Manager on their Turing Scheme, building cultural capital in underprivileged groups by allowing them to travel to other countries. Through positive cultural affirmation, through reading and travelling, we can overcome some of the factors at play in people committing crime.
I’ve now founded my own organisation – Anabranch Plus. We offer workshops, mentoring and career-focused programmes to help give prison leavers the skills and confidence they need to thrive in today’s world. Right now a lot of people leaving prison think, “I’ve got to get a job to keep my probation happy.” I want them to think, “I want to get a job so that I’m successful.”
Donate to PET and help people in prison find a new direction. You can also sign up to our email newsletter.