Try wearing my shoes

Try wearing my shoes

From: Charles Bronson - HMP Wakefield

I love Inside Time, especially the Mailbag pages where cons are snivelling over petty things; it just cracks me up … a real tonic! If they had to live my existence they would really have something to moan about; let me educate you guys what real porridge is all about.

My world is a cage…isolated…year after year of total emptiness and hopelessness. It's nine years since I had an open visit, even my parole reviews are closed, the judge is told I'm too dangerous to be in the same room – it's all done in order to prevent me progressing; I can't progress, I'm not even allowed to become enhanced. Nine of us are on this Wakefield cemetery CSC graveyard; all buried along with our dreams. Doubtless some will say 'good', it's what Bronson deserves. Ten, twenty, thirty years ago I would have agreed with you; I accept I was a really nasty bastard, but what a lot of people don't realise is that I’m now marching on sixty.

In the last eight years I've been anti-violent, I've only had a handful of minor nickings. I really have proved I've changed but here I still remain, buried, with no hope of ever winning parole. How can a judge free me when I'm not even allowed to mix with fellow cons or be trusted in a room with people?

My latest book, Loontology, hits the shops soon. It’s 500 pages of pure madness. I called it Loontology because that's how I see the penal system. It's insane. We are all living in one big asylum! You'd better believe it! It's no longer porridge, it's cornflakes; no longer mailbags, it's making fairy cakes; no longer planning the next bank job, it's doing an anger management course. The screws no longer wear studded boots and peaked hats, they wear moccasins and gel their hair! The days of hard cons and brutal screws are a thing of the past; even prison governors are softies – political correctness comes first.

I just wish some of you cons could live my existence for just a month, then and only then you’d wake up and start to appreciate just what you have got; TV, radio, CD’s, carpets, curtains, flasks, own clothes, open visits, phone calls, gym, pool, canteen – even the food is not so bad. Accept it, be grateful for it, and stop moaning about pathetic things!

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Response from: Inside Time

Inside Time writes: Charles Bronson is the subject of a new film and has been advising the film-makers from his cell on how he should be characterised. A feature drama about 55-year-old Bronson, who has been in prison for 34 years, 30 of them in solitary confinement, is among several films about criminals being promoted at the Cannes Film Festival. His visitors now include Tom Hardy, the British actor who appeared with Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg's epic Band of Brothers and who has been cast to play him in Bronson, and Danny Hansford, one of the film's producers.

The two men began working on the film four years ago. Hansford said: “Everyone told me I was insane to get involved but he was very friendly from the beginning. We get across his humour and his warmth. He is one of the funniest people I've met. Being with him is like being with Billy Connolly for two hours.

“How the hell can this guy still be in Wakefield prison?' His violent days are over, I totally believe it, but they are making an example out of him, like the Krays, because he's so notorious”.

Comment: Try wearing my shoes? I don't think so. I suspect they would be too big and smelly for my liking. As I understand it, Charles Bronson has had ample opportunities to live a life outside of the segregation units. There was a time when my reputation would go before me, and then some was added to it, and I was expected to live up to this. About then I decided to put my reputation behind me. I haven't looked back since. Reform takes place in the offender's head and with the assistance of the system it can become a reality. Being funny one side of the cage is not the same as being a minimum risk the other side.