“In prison I used to get put in segregation for saying my piece and yet here I am giving you my comments and my thoughts and getting paid.”
Eric Allison, 71, spent around 16 years behind bars all for theft
related offences. In 2003, he applied for the job as the Guardian’s Prison
Correspondent with a criminal record for a CV. In the past decade, he
transformed his life from a prisoner to a prison reporter.
As a young boy, aged 11, Allison got his
first conviction for housebreaking on his criminal record, and three years on,
at 14 he was given his first custodial sentence.
I was always pretty anti-authority; if somebody told me
to do something I would go out of my way to not do it. I was very rebellious. I wasn’t very happy as a child. I had quite a
bad stammer and a squint in my eye, and I used to get a lot of name calling and
I would fight them. I was always fighting as a kid, and I stopped going to
secondary school. I was away from school far more then I attended.
I ran away
from home and broke into a day nursery to sleep. I was caught and put on
probation and when I was 14 years old I breached that probation because I stole
a chewing gum machine. I was sentenced at the juvenile court in Manchester and
two police officers took me down to Foston Hall detention centre, on the border
of Staffordshire and Derbyshire. It was December and it was dark when we got
there, it was a big sort of gloomy Victorian building with barbed wire fence
round. We went into the reception area and this guy told me to stand on the
white line and give my name, I said “Eric Allison” and I was going to say “Sir”
but because of the stammer the Sir wouldn’t come out. The guy just walked
across me, clenched his fist and punched me really hard across the face. I was
so frightened because I thought if he could assault me in front of two police
officers, what were they going to do when the police were gone? I was terrified
so much that I wet the bed in the cell that night. They put me in a dormitory
with other kids who wet the bed and they used to wake us up every hour to go to
the toilet whether we wanted to or not. We were knackered because it was run on
the military lines. You’d never stop.
“You
wouldn’t let the system beat you”
The
detention centre was meant to be a short sharp shock. The idea was to frighten
the life out of us so we wouldn’t come back, and of course it didn’t work. This
comes back to the defiance, you start sticking together and it becomes us
against them or them against us and you become determined not to let them win.
You wouldn’t let the system beat you.
I’ve been
locked up with murderers, terrorists, rapists and psychopaths. You name it,
even gangsters. I’ve seen a lot of examples of prisoners behaving badly towards
one another, but if I was to list the worst twenty acts in humanity that I have
ever seen in prison, not one of them in the top twenty would be carried out by
a prisoner. I’ve seen six or seven prison officers beat people to pulp, with sticks,
and I have had it, I’ve been beaten and batten myself. There had been times
when I thought: “These bastards are going to kill me.”
“I got a buzz out of it”
Not many
days would go by when I didn’t commit a crime. I loved the excitement; I got a
buzz out of it. I miss that excitement even now. It was never about the money,
it was actually the taking part. The buzz… I got a buzz from it without a
shadow of a doubt.
Around 1968,
I was sent to Strangeway’s prison for 4 and a half years, this was the longest
time I spent away in one go because I lost all the remission I may have got for
good behaviour. In the 60s, it was a stinking place, all the “slopping out”
because there was no in-cell sanitation then, everything was lousy, visiting was
lousy, the staff were lousy too; there were a lot of bullies, a lot of thugs. I
spent a long time in segregation.
On April fool’s day 1990, a time where
Allison was at liberty, a riot broke out in Strangeway’s Prison. The protest lasted
25 days, the biggest in British Penal History.
 |
| Prisoners protesting on the roof at Strangeways Prison |
I took a
loud-hailer down with me most days, and I was shouting up to them on the roof
and I was talking to people, all of the press that were there, I was telling
them what was wrong with the place. I just felt quite emotional; they did
something that we had never managed to do. I was elated for them, but also
concerned because I knew the ring leaders would pay a very heavy price and so
they did.
In 1996 Allison was sent back to Strangeway’s
prison, he was sentenced to seven years for scamming £1 million from Barclay’s
bank. This was the last time he was in jail, serving just over 3 years.
When I went
back in the 90s everything had changed, but the biggest change was the attitude
of the staff; all the thugs had gone. I had my own moral boundaries that I
wouldn’t cross in crime. I thought in a way I’ve
always been a good criminal, but when the system is cruel and unjust then
the criminal becomes the victim.
Freedom is a
funny thing, I came out just at the millennium but even now I get feelings, and
I visit prisons quite a lot so it still takes me back. Prison changes you…It’s
a bit like, you know, you….you sort of get solitude…
The first
time I was in a cell on my own it was very lonely, and I found the loneliness
quite difficult. You make a virtue out of a necessity and I began to embrace
loneliness then. I find it difficult to live with people. I’m much better off
living alone. I think prison has a lot to do with that.
My eldest
girl was at University while I was away and she had told me that somebody would
say “What does your dad do? – “Oh my dad’s a thief” - but having got
the job she says “my dad writes for the
Guardian”. That was a good moment in my life.
I always
enjoyed writing; it was always the one thing I was good at in school. I like
words and I got my education in prison. The Guardian advertised for the
position and I applied for the job. They wanted a 500 word essay and a CV, but
my CV was all prison and crime. I never thought for one second that I would get
the job; I didn’t even think that I wanted it. I just thought I would tell them
what was wrong with the prison system.
I couldn’t type;
I didn’t know one end of the computer from the other. I had to start absolutely
from scratch. When they said the jobs yours I had to go away and think about it.
I just knew it would be a massive change. I can’t remember when I didn’t steal…
I was five or six when I started nicking stuff, I was quite frightened by the
idea of being a straight go-er and even now I feel like a bit of an imposter
sometimes.
This will be
my eleventh year at the Guardian now, sometimes it seems as if I have been here
all my life and other times it feels like I’ve just arrived. Occasionally I do
stuff for ‘Comment is Free’ and they’re always very apologetic it’s only 90
quid, but I say, “Are you kidding?”
In prison I used to get put in segregation for saying my piece and yet here I
am giving you my comments and my thoughts and getting paid…it’s odd.
A version of this article has been published on The Justice Gap, a trade magazine on the law and justice. Click here.
