Prison and Beyond

DescriptionThis book is one mans experience of his time incarcerated in the prison system of this country. Basically it is a diatribe against the system, what it does to human beings and how it affects the lives of those unfortunate enough to have been in the same predicament. The injustice of it all and the corruption that is so rife within the system but no one wants to acknowledge or talk about. Lots of books have been written on this subject but I have tried to take a slightly different slant on the story and go through some of the different types of people we have locked away in our prisons and their plights. We are always trying to find someone else to blame when we come across a bad situation instead of taking a good look at ourselves. This is the attitude taken through the whole of society, from the top to the bottom. Billions of pounds of taxpayers money is spent on trying to find solutions to our problems hence jails full of people who have no right in being there in the first place. The people that are responsible for this situation are the ones making the laws, you cannot fart in public these days without some individual proclaiming him or herself as the fart police and giving you a fine, madness, the whole kit and caboodle. I have not produced an answer to these problems, although I know there is one, I have merely tried to point out the madness of our prison system. The second part of this story is about getting out of prison and the changes I have noticed since my release, which are considerable and quite unbelievable in some cases. About the AuthorI am John Harry Simons and was born in Berwick on Tweed on 22nd August 1952, my dad was a sailor and my mum a housewife and mother, I have a younger brother called Andy. We lived in Wooler in Northumberland for the first 6 years of my life and then moved to Gravesend in Kent. My mum became a schoolteacher and my dad carried on sailing for a while. I ended up going to the H.M.S. Worcester nautical training college, a big square rigger moored at Greenhithe on the River Thames, where I learned to become a navigating officer in the Merchant Navy. I did my apprenticeship in the Merchant Navy and then left to pursue other ways of living and eventually got married and had 2 children, both of whom are now over 30 years old. I was divorced in 1982 and have had a very colourful career since then. I became a single parent when my son came to live with me in 1986 and was one until he went to university some six years later. I eventually got caught up in the world of cocaine smuggling and was caught in 2002 and sentenced to 8 years for my efforts. I have now been at liberty for just over a year and am trying my hand at writing, a skill which I picked up whilst at Her Majesty's Prisons.