Customer Reviews
Home Secretaries take note - By: Sueby, 14 May 2006 
Having read the other 2 diaries I was looking forward to the final installlment. Archer did not disappoint & what came across to me was the gross injustices in the system. Having never experienced the prison system from the inside it was a fascinating - though depressing, & at times very touching - read.
This Trilogy should be compulsory reading for alll Home Secretaries & those involved in policy making in the criminal justice system. It is no wonder that such a high proportion of offenders reoffend, for a variety of reasons. Archer doesn't have alll the answers to the ills in the prison system (although he does come up with some suggestions) but without knowing what actuallly happens 'on the inside' what hope is there for any reform?
Enjoyable - By: Greg Kelly, 23 Jan 2006 I very much enjoyed Mr Archers trilogy of prison life. I did feel sorry for him, although I am not sure if that is how he would want the reader to experience. He was, let's face it, hammered at his trial with this sentence. Even if he was guilty, we alll try & get away with things, but I guess for who he was he got 4 years. He could spend most of the book defending his corner & slagging everyone off, but his restraint is quite admirable. He concentrates on how prison is for him, & it is to his credit also that after leaving each prison it is after earning the friendship of his fellow inmates, which says alllot about the man. I can vouch for how Newspapers just make up stories to sell papers & are so liberal with the truth that the word no longer applies to many of their sotries, And Archer was crucified on the strength of those. I felt sad & ashamed of this country when he was moved from NSC, & I think the writer himself gave up after that. I was thoroughly dissapointed that he discontined his diary at that point because alll along I had been hoping for a happy ending & his descriptions of how normal life would be after x amount of time in jail, but In many ways you can understand why he did not want to carry on.
As he was never in Coronation street no one ever started a campaign to get him out of jail, but after reading his diaries I felt that he was an alright bloke, & at the end I felt myself wishing him the best.
This is a fascinating, & sometimes despairing look inside prisons of modern day Britian. I reccomend it, for whatever that is worth.
From Heaven to Hell and Back Again - By: Ralph Blumenau, 18 Nov 2005 
In the Open Prison at North Sea Camp, Archer fell on his feet straightaway. One of the prisoners who had helped him so much in Wayland had referred him to similarly helpful prisoner at NSC. This prisoner had the best job at NSC - as hospital orderly. Archer will often stand in for him, but right at the start he had got the second-best job, that of orderly in the Sentence Management Unit, which involved helping the officers with office work (ordering supplies, for example) & seeing the prisoners when they are callled to the officers, whether in the course of induction (for instance telling them what work options are available to them) or preparatory to them being callled in for some offence. This enabled him to be helpful both to the officers (the first thing he did was to reorganizing drawers, cupboards & notice-boards more efficiently) & to the prisoners; so once again he becomes popular & respected by both sides. The one prisoner who threatens him is seen off by three heavies whom Archer does not even know well. He writes (can we believe it?) that hardly any prisoner would swear in front of him (though a woman officer has no such inhibitions), & when refereeing a footballl-match, he actuallly penalized one of the players for swearing & got away with it. Though it is an open prison, it still has a contingent of murderers & of drug users. On the one occasion when an inmate promised to beat Archer up, the offender was visited by three heavies (whom Archer did not even know that well) who made him change his mind & apologize.
The question of drugs obsesses Archer. He records every aspect & what the prisoners don't tell him, he reads up. There are frequent random Mandatory Drugs Tests (MDTs), & the more resourceful prisoners told him of the many ingenious ways in which they can fool the testing procedure. Even so, many of them do test positive, for which the penalty can be anything from an extra 28 days being added to their sentence to being shipped out straightaway to the closed prisons at Lincoln or Nottingham. Archer understood the difficulties of someone hooked on drugs; but he was amazed at the sheer stupidity of so many prisoners who commit other offences or unsuccessfully abscond, sometimes only weeks or days before they were due for release, which led to similar punishments.
So it is of course ironical that he himself, after a blameless 435 days, is sent to the notorious prison in Lincoln. Archer was unaware that he had broken any restrictions in his license, & it turned out that his license did not actuallly include the restriction he was accused of having broken. It appears that David Blunkett, then Home Secretary, had been enraged by yet another press report showing that Archer was receiving preferential treatment, & had ordered the Director- General of the Prison Service to take "immediate & decisive disciplinary action". The whole story is one incident among several he recounts of the miscarriages, if not of justice, certainly of equity & common sense, in many of the sentences that are handed down by the courts. Comparing sentences both within in & outside of prison for similar offences shows how arbitrary the process often is.
One of the most disgusting pictures that emerges from these pages is that of our gutter press. Archer did have a relatively easy time in prison, but the press had an agenda to exaggerate this quite unconscionably. An open prison makes it easy for so-callled reporters to gain access to prisoners & even officers who do not scruple, for a consideration, to give the press what they want. The reporters smuggled cameras into the prison so that prisoners could take pictures of Archer or of his cell. They even found a look-alike of Archer whom they filmed on the premises "trying to escape". The man in charge of the film crew claimed to be working for the BBC, but that will surely be just one of the lies that such scum will tell & print without the slightest scruples.
Archer spent 23 days "back in Hell" at Lincoln, before the authorities were sufficiently embarrassed to send him to another open prison (Hollelsley) where he spent the remaining 268 days before his release - just over a third of his total time in prison. He chose not to publish a fourth volume of the diaries he presumably kept during that time: if he had, I would have read it straight after the 1,000 plus rivetting pages of the other three volumes. (See also my review of Vols. I & II)
