Before I went to prison I’d never heard of The Open University. University, as far as I was aware, was a sort of big college where ‘posh’ people went to learn to be doctors, lawyers, pilots or politicians. It wasn't a place for unimportant people, and even less important people like me. I never had what might be termed in conventional terms a ‘social circle’ – there was nobody I’d ever known during the journey of my life who had been to university. None of my family were particularly educated, certainly not beyond secondary school. Convicted of murder and condemned to a life sentence in 1984 the idea that I might ever attend any kind of university, apart from the university of crime, and one day live a meaningful, contributing life was as remote as it was fanciful.

My life before prison had been one long catalogue of dysfunction and chaos. It had been a painful life, painful, for me for sure – but, more pertinently, painful for other people because of me. All these years later I still remember the calm that came over me as the judge, Justice Otton, pronounced sentence, “Life imprisonment, take him down.”

The wooden steps leading from the number one courthouse at London's Old Bailey were steep and narrow. But all I felt as I was escorted down to the cells below was a huge sense of relief that I did not have to go back out on those streets again. After a few hours in an iron-barred holding cell underneath the court known as ‘the cage’ reserved for those who, on paper and in the eyes of the media and the public, were among the most dangerous in the country, I was taken under heavy escort as a Category A prisoner to Wandsworth prison in the south of the city.

Stripped and searched in the reception area and handed my prison garb of stripes and denims and a bedroll, along with a plastic mug, knife, spoon and fork, soon I was being marched along the corridors, clanging through steel gate after steel gate, finally ending up in a solitary cell on ‘D2’ – the landing designated for ‘Cat. A’s.