WHENEVER ANYBODY ASKS how I could possibly write in the suffocatingly restrictive condition of a prison cell, I always reply that it was the highly structured regime that I followed that allowed me to sustain the necessary levels of concentration to meet the exacting standards demanded by great newspapers such as The Times.

Writers in prison and prisoners who write have produced, between them, an oeuvre of global significance. From Boethius in 6th-century Rome, they have triumphed over carceral adversity through a combination of willpower and literary excellence. Malory, Bunyan, Cervantes, Vanbrugh and Voltaire might, at first glance, seem a pretty disparate lot. It is only where one throws in their “previous convictions” that a mutual connectedness becomes apparent. In far-flung prisons across half a millennium, each man managed to transcend his predicament by drawing strength and inspiration from it.

By the time we reach Oscar Wilde, the prison scenario has taken a sort of sacerdotal otherworldliness. It is “always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart”, he writes from Reading Gaol, languorous and forlorn. But before we get carried away with the pathos of his confinement, remember that De Profundis was written purely and simply for the benefit of Alfred Douglas. The classic air of martyrdom hid a far less solipsistic Wilde. Look at the compassion in The Ballad of Reading Gaol; or the concerns he shows (early after his release) to make sure that a promised Postal Order reaches the spindle-shanked youth along the landing who’d caught his eye.

Prisoner C.3.3 was not the only writer from inside affected by the misfortune of his fellow man. After the First World War, the ultra-humanitarian account of prison life, Among the Broad-arrowed Men, was dedicated to “the tramps, the outcasts, the wrong ’uns and the wronged the world over”. Its author was simply identified by the prison number B.2.15.

Permanently peripatetic Jim Phelan joined the growing legion of literary lags when, after a bank robbery went wrong, he received the death sentence commuted to life imprisonment in 1927. Billing himself as “an explorer . . . of a virgin science” (one assumes he meant penology), Phelan wrote what was probably the first sociological account of English prison life, based on his time in Parkhurst. “No writer is normal,” he declares in his Jail Journeyof 1940, “if he is worth reading at all. In 1927 I buried myself on the Island and I wrote. I was happy, for the jail could deprive me of nothing.”

There are times when I wonder about my own “normality” after 23 years of almost continual imprisonment. Nevertheless, it has always been my writing that has acted as the brightest beacon of hope amidst the all-encircling gloom.

Phelan’s one and only hope was to become a published writer on release.

And “on release” was a moot point. For the first 60 years of the 20th century, convicts were obliged to wait until after their release before they could even begin the writing process. Although Phelan and his ilk were issued exercise books, there was a long list of proscribed subject matter, including the inmate’s own life and crimes, those of their fellow prisoners and the prison conditions under which they were all forced to labour. If that wasn’t enough – what was there left to write about? – they then had to adhere to the final condition: that these exercise books were property of the Prison Service and had to be surrendered before release.

They ran a tight ship in those days. Yet, even now, the act of writing (especially if you’re writing about the actualité of your incarceration) is frowned upon. While still inside, I had to battle for the right to publish for remuneration, on the grounds that my talent and hard work would ultimately allow me the chance to live a constructive and crime-free life after my release.

I have 20-odd years’ worth of scintillating journals that I have hung on to come hell or high water in 30-something prisons. My main problem is what to leave out when it comes to the final draft of my magnum opus. Every potential publisher seems to believe that 90-100,000 words is the absolute limit. It seems that, in our age of serials and soundbites, even the most literate reader cannot cope with more. This limit would hardly allow me to cover even my first full prison sentence.

Establishment obstructiveness is not, to be fair, just plain old stick-in-the-mud resentment. When one considers some of the works that have been published, it is hardly surprising that the authorities err on the side of caution. The Gates of Janus, for instance, by the Moors murderer, Ian Brady, has been described (by Julian Broadhead, the editor of Prison Writing: a Collection of Fact, Fiction and Verse) as “a pseudo-academic and self-deluded analysis of 11 serial killers”. Ian Rankin says it is “the only book I would glady see burned”.

But the authorities do not appear to be consistent in their judgments. The Muswell Hill serial killer Dennis Nilsen’s putative autobiography was initially accepted for publication in the United Kingdom. Later, it was confiscated by the Governor of HMP Full Sutton because “of the likely effect . . . on members of the public including survivors and the families of victims”. However, I cannot see how it could have contained any material more disturbing than horrifying sketches of how Nilsen cut up his victims’ bodies. These were pruriently reproduced for general consumption in the “official” biographer Brian Master’s Killing for Company without a squeak of protest from the Home Office.

The most recent crop of prison writers may follow the lead of Wilde and of Brendan Behan, whose autobiographical Borstal Boy made waves in the late Fifties. They may, as Will Self once observed, convey “the subjective truth of their situations . . . in a way that no other account possibly can”. But we would struggle to identify a British Dostoevsky or a Solzhenitsyn, a Gramsci or a Genet, a Jack Henry Abbott, or even an Edward Bunker, among the likes of John McVicar, Jimmy Boyle, Hugh Collins, Norman Parker and Noël “Razor” Smith.

And this is one of the reasons why I have waited before setting out my own shop, preferring to develop my craft until I feel my skills sharp and abundant enough to do proper justice to the story of my life.

Of course, I can never hope to compete (in dedication, at any rate) with the American prisoner who sold his own blood to pay for the postage to send his manuscript to potential publishers. But, nonetheless, my direction is set. I intend to anatomise incarceration in a way that will enlighten and entertain future generations. It is my hope that, in future, readers will be able to read my work and say: “That was how it really was.” Then and only then will I consider my work in the penal demimonde complete.

Like Oscar Wilde, if I can “produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.” In the meantime, my mission continues.

The author was released on licence on July 25

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