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were quite literally ‘political prisoners’ who had been attacked without reason by the police who saw any convictions as weakening the solidarity of the strikers and publicly disciplining other miners. I wrote a Turn of the Screw to put the case of the miners in prison and as a final articulation of how the police and the courts functioned during the strike. At the same time as writing the book, with a small group of miners I started the organisation called NOMPAS, a national  organisation to support the miners in prisons.

 

Frightened for my Life; Deaths in British prisons. Geoff Coggan and Martin Walker. Fontana.  (1982)

 

In the 1970s, Britain had the highest per capita number of prisoners of any European country and a disproportionate number of these prisoners died while incarcerated, either by their own hand or at the hands of the regime. In the late seventies, Geoff Coggan and I wrote Frightened for my Life an analysis of the ‘way of death’ in English prisons. The book sold over 7,000 copies in the first couple of years of its distribution until a screw wrote threatening a libel action against Fontana. Considering that the late and high earning Carter Ruck,  had read the book for libel and put us through hour upon hour of discursive hell reflecting on the meaning of a full stop here, and a comma there, I was somewhat surprised when Fontana capitulated without even a decent exchange of letters. Thousands of copies of the book were pulped.

 

With Extreme Prejudice: Police Vigilantism in Manchester. Canary Press, London (1987)

 

The book of which I am most proud, written during this period is, With Extreme Prejudice. The book tells the story of a campaign of harassment against two University of Manchester students. It was written after a long investigation, carried out in part with David Pallister of the Guardian and the staff of the Manchester City Council Police Committee Unit, with the support of Manchester City Council. Although our investigation never found the officers who had threatened one of the students with rape and stubbed a cigarette out on the face of the other, we did prove a conspiracy, which in this day and age is quite something. When, a year after the case was closed, a lone teenage youth was charged with the burglary of the female students flat, we ran a defence that he had been used by the police to carry out the burglary and clean-up any evidence against the police. A jury found the young man not guilty and the police officers responsible were named in court.

 

In 1987, Jenny Turner wrote what at the time, and since has been one of the most complementary reviews specifically of With Extreme Prejudice and more generally of my work around this time.  In The Edinburgh Review, she wrote: