Pain of Confinement: Prison Diaries

Description

Scotland had a brutal prison system in the 1970s – and Jimmy Boyle spent fifteen years locked up.Born in 1944, Boyle grew up in Glasgow’s Gorbals, slum tenements now cleared but back then synonymous with crime and deprivation. As he himself has said, he never really had a chance. He got involved in gang violence and at the age of twenty-three was sentenced to life for murder.But he is a survivor. Despite clashes with authorities and spells in solitary confinement, he became one of the first offenders to participate in a program which included art therapy. Within a few years he had published a best-selling memoir and learned how to sculpt. He also negotiated with prison officials on behalf of other prisoners, and lobbied government for reform.Pain of Confinement, written in diary form, records in grim detail the monotony and degradation of prison life. But it is also an inspiring account of one man’s rehabilitation and redemption. Boyle has always denied committing the crime for which he was imprisoned. This is both an indictment of a society too ready to lock up young men from poor backgrounds, and of the brutality of the penal system once inside.Jimmy Boyle was released on parole in 1980. He had successfully overcome the system and was at last free. He never returned to crime, and now lives in the South of France.‘Astounding and justifiably famous diary of one man's incarceration at the hands of the brutal Scottish penal system’- GoodreadsJimmy Boyle has published a memoir A Sense of Freedom, and two novels, Hero of the Underworld and A Stolen Smile. He is also an internationally acclaimed artist and sculptor. He divides his time between France and Morocco with his second wife, British actress Kate Fenwick.