- More
- Back
USA
USA
A Prison Diary 1 – Hell
‘The sun is shining through the bars of my window on what must be a glorious summer day. I’ve been incarcerated in a cell five paces by three for twelve and a half hours, and will not be let out again until midday; eighteen and a half hours of solitary confinement.’
The first novel in the Prison Diary series.
DAY 5 MONDAY 23 JULY 2001 5.53AM
‘The sun is shining through the bars of my window on what must be a glorious summer day.
I’ve been incarcerated in a cell five paces by three for twelve and a half hours, and will not be let out again until midday; eighteen and a half hours of solitary confinement.
There is a child of seventeen in the cell below me who has been charged with shoplifting – his first offence, not even convicted – and he is being locked up for eighteen and a half hours, unable to speak to anyone. This is Great Britain in the twenty-first century, not Turkey, not Nigeria, not Kosovo, but Britain.’
On Thursday 19 July 2001, after a perjury trial lasting seven weeks, Jeffrey Archer was sentenced to four years in jail. He was to spend the first twenty-two days and fourteen hours in HMP Belmarsh, a double A-Category high-security prison in South London, which houses some of Britain ‘s most violent criminals.
This is the author’s daily record of the time he spent there.
First published in 2002 – Macmillan.
Jeffrey Archer talks about his Prison Diaries.
A Prison Diary, Heaven, Volume III
A Prison Diary, Purgatory, Volume II
A Prison Diary, Hell, Volume I