John Steele has spent most of his adult life in prison, often in solitary confinement. As a prisoner he entertained his fellow-cons with ballads and verses and was persuaded by one of them that he ought to write an account of his life, both for its own sake and as a cautionary tale: the result is an autobiography in which a ruthless self-portrait of a man for whom theft and escape seem synonymous with life itself is combined with a denunciation of a system that brutalizes and degrades both the prisoners and the jailers. Steel grew up in the slums of Glasgow's East End, in a family for whom crime was a way of life. For his long-suffering mother and his blind, convivial grandmother he felt an uneasy mix of love and guilt. However he was terrorised and beaten by his father, a petty criminal who imbued him with his own loathing for the police and the powers-that-be, yet urged him, in vain, to follow in his footsteps and waste his life in jail. Repeatedly sentenced as a boy for theft and shop-breaking, Steele was sent to a series of reform schools and eventually to Borstal.
As he grew older, remand homes were replaced by Barlinnie Jail and - most devastating of all - a 12-year sentence to Peterhead, the prison reserved for Scotland's most hardened criminals. Unable to bear what little life offered, the despair of prison governors and often vicious and sadistic warders, he alternated between planning and executing ever-more ingenious escapes and persistent refusal to co-operate. This resulted in his solitary confinement, "dirt protests" in which he squatted naked in a cell empy of everything save his own filth, and several stints in the dreaded "cages" at Inverness Jail. Remorseless in its account of brutality and suffering, both horrific and - notably the escape scenes - exciting, this book is an account and an indictment of a wasted life.
- ISBN10 1856191249
- ISBN13 9781856191241
- Publish Date 15 June 1992
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 7 December 1994
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 320
- Language English