While we’re waiting for my parole date to come through, I don’t want to keep repeating the same old stuff over and over again.
So I’m going to tell you real facts. Hard truths. Things about prison life that most people on the outside don’t see — and probably wouldn’t believe even if they did.
And I’ll tell you some of the things I’ve been through in here. The stuff that’s shaped me. Bruised me. Kept me awake at night, even after all these years.
I was seventeen when I was first locked up and put on remand. A kid, really — thought I was a man, but looking back now, I didn’t have a clue. I got convicted at eighteen. By nineteen, I was starred up. For anyone who doesn’t know, that means getting put in an adult jail before you're 21, usually because of poor behaviour. I was angry, reckless, and didn’t care about nothing — not myself, not the system, not even my own future.
I remember sitting in the chokey — the block — for weeks on end. Four walls. No window. Just concrete, piss-poor food, and time. Too much of it.
One day, I got called out for a visit. It was in the chapel at HMP Feltham. My dad turned up, suited and booted, looking like he was going to a funeral. I actually thought he was going to tell me my mum had passed. That’s the kind of thoughts that live in your head when you're locked away. But it wasn’t my mum. He told me my uncle had died. That was 1992.
Fast forward to 2006 — the year everything changed again. I lost my sister and my fiancée. Same day. Both to cancer. What are the odds of that? I still don’t know how I got through that week. I remember staring at the walls of my cell like they were going to answer me, explain it somehow. They never did.
Then came 2007. My best friend — only 24 — died in custody. Asthma attack and epileptic fit. He just never woke up. One of the funniest, brightest lads I’d met in here. Gone, just like that.
Then came the triple-hit.
End of December 2018, I lost my nan. She was everything. Tough old bird with a soft heart. Never missed a visit. Always sent a card, even when her hands hurt too much to write.
New Year’s Day, 2019 — my niece lost her unborn baby. The first of January. A brand new year, already broken.
And then the day after — 2nd of January — I went to the hospital to visit my dad. He was really ill. Sepsis. I was brought in under escort, cuffed, like I always am. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to see him.
And while I was in the hospital room, my niece — the one who’d just lost her baby — tried to come in too, to see both of us. And the officers… they wouldn’t allow it. They made her leave. I’ll never forget that. I couldn’t even hug her. Couldn’t say a word. Just sat there, watching my dad slip in and out of consciousness, knowing she was out there hurting and I couldn’t be with her.
My dad didn’t even know I was there. He was talking about me like I wasn’t in the room. Like I was a memory, not a person. And then the time came — the screws said I had to leave.
I stood up, leaned over, kissed his head. Whispered “goodnight.”
Never “goodbye.”
He always told me: Don’t say goodbye. Goodbye means goodbye.
And when I walked away, something told me that was the last time I’d see him. I looked back. Just once. He looked so small. So fragile. A war hero, reduced to wires and weakness.
He died on the 6th of January.
Three deaths in three weeks. And I had no one to hug. No one to hold. No arms around me. Just a fucking concrete cell and the silence that comes after you’ve cried all you can cry.
The next day, I got called to the chaplain’s office. I thought it was routine. I walked in, shut the door behind me. He looked me in the eye and said, “I’m sorry to hear about your father.”
And I said, “What do you mean, sorry to hear about my father? What’s wrong?”
That’s how I found out. A sentence dropped like a bomb.
He passed away on the sixth.
I was lucky — if you can call it that. I was allowed to go to the funeral. First one I’d ever been to in my life.
Seeing family I hadn’t seen in decades — grown up, grey, their own kids with them. It was too much. Overwhelming doesn’t even cover it. I felt like a ghost at my own father’s burial.
Everyone dressed in black. Me in a prison-issue suit, handcuffed, shadowed by officers, watching my family grieve from a distance.
That’s what people don’t see.
They think prison’s just about missing birthdays and barbecues. But it’s also missing your dad’s last words. Missing your niece when she needs you most. Missing the chance to stand with your family and be a man — not a prisoner in a pair of chain-linked cuffs.
And you carry that with you. Every single day.
So while I wait for the parole board to decide whether or not I get another shot at life — I’m not just waiting in boredom or frustration.
I’m waiting in grief.
In loss.
In memories that don’t fade just because you’re behind a locked door.
People say time heals. Maybe. But in prison, time hurts first.
And the waiting — that’s the part that gets in your bones.
But I keep going. Because I have to. Because my dad, my nan, my fiancée — they wouldn’t want me giving up.
And I won’t.
Not now. Not when I’ve come this far.
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