I have just finished reading the above book. It cost me a penny and £2.80 postage and packaging from the Capitalist War Machine that don't pay taxes and are named after a Brazilian river and rain forest (I'm nothing if not a hypocrite) so I'll wager that Charles Bronson (Mike Peterson) wont see a penny of that as I have not seen a penny of 'royalties' since I published my memoirs in paperback 2014.
We don't do it for the money although the money would be nice. We do it for the notoriety. I did 4 and a bit months porridge. He is coming up to 50 years in the cage, most of that in solitary confinement, having been in a Remand Centre First in 1968. It makes my bit of bird, my bit of stir laughable in comparison but there really is nothing to laugh about in the above book. Charles Bronson has been beasted and brutalised by a Victorian Prison System that is still alive and kicking in UK PLC. A timely blog post perhaps as you will see from the link to the BBC website that a private prison has been taken back into Government hands. The experiment of imprisonment for profit has not worked although the Prisons Minister is spinning the line that G4S run three very good prisons. I'm sorry but unless you have had that cell door close on you of a night, night upon night you shouldn't really be allowed to spin that shit about colour televisions and living in luxury at tax payers' expense. Charles Bronson has never killed anybody yet he is still in prison today! Keeping a 65 year old man incarcerated for violent acts against the system is surely violating his human rights. They wont let him out because they know that the Compensation Bill will bankrupt the Prison Service. He has taken hostages, he has attacked guards and he has staged roof top protests. He has been in prison longer than people who have taken other peoples' lives. Incarceration has turned this man into a media manipulated 'monster' but you only have to read his words to know that he isn't one.
"The insanity never stops - mysterious deaths, very mysterious. So who's the maddest of the mad? Shall I tell you who? The maddest fucker in the system is....the system. It's also a fucking disgrace." Page 292
"Prisons are the most shaming of all our public institutions. This country, the United Kingdom, imprisons more of its people that virtually any other country in Western Europe in conditions that are frequently an affront to civilised values and at great cost to the taxpayer. Yet the vast majority of our prisoners don't present a serious threat to life or limb. Their crimes are such that they can be more humanely, economically and effectively dealt with in the community."
"Prison has a poor track record. I dare any of those in power to show the relationship between a society's rate of incarceration and its rate of crime. Prison keeps some offenders off the streets, but it definitely doesn't deter the majority of offenders who go on to become recidivists;neither does it reform" Page 255
"I ask you a question - for how long have they been locking people up in prisons? Thousands of years! So how do you evaluate the effectiveness of prison, which has been repeatedly condemned as a blunt instrument of torture, yet has been continuously used by those you class to be intelligent? Let me tell you this. One day, prison will be outlawed and laughed at as much as the slave ships of the past that became obsolete! Eventually, prison will only exist for the most dangerous of humans, mark my words!" Page 256
With this Brexit baloney creating a prison ship of the UK, life on the island has become very much a man made prison for many suffering at the hands of austerity cuts imposed by the Conservative & Unionist government. We are hot housing human souls in Victorian Prisons and nicely built newer private prisons run for profit. We are festering a wound that when unleashed upon society will scare the well behaved little tax payer into wishing that they were behind bars away from the ones who have newly been released because having been inside and on the outside, I have to ask who is it that is actually in Prison? Us on the outside or those on the inside?
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