A Prison Diary: Book 3: Heaven: by Jeffrey Archer

The cover photo with a patch of bright sky behind bars high above in the cell shown here is probably from the last cell he occupied in the place he surprisingly names Heaven (wouldn't earth be more appropriate, with Heaven reserved for home and family and freedom?) in this last part of his prison diaries, North Sea Camp, for one day.

That itself is a shocking turn of events stamping forever the British justice and other bureaucratic systems with a blot on the escutcheon, where individuals might be decent on the whole but bullied or otherwise persuaded into officially behaving otherwise, depending on their own bent of mind and heart or on their own individual circumstances. Anyone threatened with a loss of job or pension might do something rather unfair to someone however unwillingly.

And the fact of Archer being treated with unfair persecution, overblown noise about a lie and general misuse of law to punish someone for a completely different reason has been obvious from the start of the affair, even to the lay members of public reading about it all in news. Drunken drivers getting less sentence is just one example of this in evidence, as is the protective treatment of sex offenders in prison including paedophiles. And there is more.

Other than that the book is as others in the series full of interesting stories about how and why people, specifically men, end up in prison, and moreover might be decent apart from their specific crimes. The most horrendous crimes according to prisoners is sex crimes, and paedophiles need not only segregation but a cover story to be able to stay alive in prisons full of murderers. Going by the stories from just four prisons Archer gives this gradation is truly more along what should be put in place in dealing justice.

Strangely enough while prisoners including burglars and murderers see this as well as any general family people, most legal systems don't. Another one they - the legal systems - don't see the danger really of is drivers who drink, more than once being involved in accidents. These ought to be dealt with on par with potential manslaughter and illegal substance users, but in reality get a mere few weeks and have no remorse whatsoever.

His - Archer's - observations about how to prevent spread of intoxicants (I don't see why drugs should be used as a term both for therapeutic medicines and illegal unnecessary substances as well) and how to stop people going from comparatively mild and less harmful stuff like marijuana (much less harmful than tobacco or alcohol, much less addictive, as shown by its prevalent usage in so called less developed nations without any accompanying increase in crime) to seriously harmful substances like heroin, cocaine, and so forth, are very worth paying attention to - although given the circumstances of his persecution by authorities in Britain I would not be surprised if his recommendations are put in place by nations other than Britain first, even US. After all LA was almost the first place to make smoking illegal in public.

There are some human interest, even hilarious stories, about prisoners desperate to go to prison either from being more safe or for wanting to be with someone. There are observations about the general medical system being low compared to that in prison (one gets to see the doctor within an hour without appointment, and is taken to hospital as soon as needed).

And then there is the usual mistake, probably from Archer's need to protect the real names and complete indifference about providing another genuine one.

Patels being Sikh is about as likely as Archer being Romanov prince in entirely male lineage, less in fact. Or a Dubois being entirely Siberian, or a Smith being of Turkish ancestry in entirety.