Dear Erwin, I enjoyed meeting you and talking to you in prison the other day. Forgive me for using your pen name rather than your real name but since I have chosen to write to you in the slightly awkward form of an open letter, I thought it better to address you by the name you have used to sign the fortnightly column — A Life Inside — which has been appearing in the Guardian (in the tabloid second section, G2), for more than a year now. In that time you have won many fans both outside prison and inside. I was amused to hear that some of your fellow prisoners have adopted the nicknames you have given them in your column. And I know one of the letters you have had was from a lawyer who said he had been waiting for 50 years for someone to write about prisons in the way that you do.
I can understand that reaction. Over the years I have read a great deal about prison, both fact and fiction, but nothing quite so straightforward and direct and often very moving as the scenes from prison life that you give us, and certainly nothing like it in a newspaper.
Apart from the fact that you write enviably well you do it with an easy and unaffected humanity. I don’t think we have to know much about prison life to see this as something quite remarkable, reflecting credit on you but also on many of those who have been responsible for you in various prisons. It speaks volumes about the long, long journey that you have made and, I know you would agree, which you couldn’t have made if you had not confronted your crimes and the effect of what you did on others, if you hadn’t, so to speak, faced yourself as you were.
As you know, when we carried the first of your regular “dispatches on prison life”, in February last year, we prefaced it with the note “Erwin James has to date served 16 years of a life sentence for two murders.” And we have always added a line pointing out that you do not get paid for your contributions. The form this takes now is a note at the end saying “Erwin James is serving a life sentence. The fee for this article will be paid to charity.” In fact the money goes to the Prisoners’ Advice Service, which you nominated and which has helped you in the past.
When readers have questioned me about these arrangements I have written privately to them, saying, among other things, that they seem to me to have been made in an exemplary fashion, with the full cooperation of the Home Office and with a lot of care and thought by the features editor of the Guardian and his colleagues.
One or two readers have seemed inclined to believe that the arrangement for, let’s call it, non-payment is one imposed by the Guardian to exploit your situation to the paper’s advantage — journalists are not exactly near the summit of public esteem. In fact, earlier this week I spoke to the writer who introduced you to the Guardian and he said that he had advised you not to accept payment and you had agreed — before either of you knew that the rules, in any case, forbade it.
So far as we are concerned there are two sets of rules to be considered. The first are the prison rules which contain a straightforward ban on the transmission by convicted prisoners of material intended for publication in return for payment. The others are the self-imposed rules set out in the code of the Press Complaints Commission which all newspapers say they will abide by. The relevant bit of this bars payment to convicted criminals “except where the material ought to be published in the public interest and payment is necessary for this to be done”.
I don’t believe that this applies, or was ever intended to apply, to the kind of thing you have been writing for the Guardian or for anything similar that you might write after your eventual release. Suppose, for example, that you wrote a column called A Life Outside about the trials, if that’s not too evocative a word, of adjustment. In my mind there is no reason why an ex-prisoner should not be paid for that kind of thing. You do not write about your crimes. You certainly do not glamorise crime in general.
It sounds patronising to talk about the rehabilitative value for you of your writing. You told me how good for you it has been writing the column. But perhaps we should talk about the value of what you are doing for the rest of us.
I know that a former governor of a prison where you spent some years has said you are the only prisoner he has kept in touch with in his retirement. Your probation officer, just about to retire, told me that he will give you his home address and an invitation to keep in touch with him when you meet for the last time in prison.
I look forward to reading you in future, so don’t stop writing. Best wishes, Ian Mayes.
