After being sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, Scottish criminal Jimmy Boyle was further punished for attempting to murder six prison officers while inside and was promptly moved to a secure unit within a top security wing within a top security prison.
"By a secure unit, they meant a cage, the sort of cage they keep animals in," he says. "They were built without political authorisation and nobody outside of the prison regime knew they existed." Once a week for the seven years Boyle was in the secure unit, he would be "thrown" a book by the warders. The first one he received was Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Gallows humour and all that.
It was, he thinks, the right book at the right time. Now 55, he was brought up in the notorious Gorbals area of Glasgow. "I was a dunce at school and a failure in life, so I took quickly to a life of crime," he says. Progressing from vandalism to thieving to money-lending rackets, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1967, aged 23, for the killing of a rival Glasgow hoodlum who, according to newspapers at the time, had been sliced open from forehead to abdomen. While Boyle says he did slash the man, he adds that he wasn't the one who killed him - and he only went down for life because he didn't want to grass up one of his friends.
He was dubbed "Scotland's most violent man" because of his problems with warders - "at the time I thought it was great, I thought I was a hero," he says. "I was deemed to be uncontrollable and I was treated like an animal. But in 1973 I was moved to a new, experimental unit in Barlinnie prison and one of the things that had been lined up for us was something I had never heard of before, called `art therapy'. What really intrigued us about this was not so much the art but that a woman, one of which I hadn't seen for years, would be coming in to explain what it was all about. I distinctly remember all of us combing our hair before she arrived and warning each other not to curse in front of her in case she never came back."
The art therapist gave him a lump of clay for reasons of "expression" and that single act changed his life. "Sculpting released a torrent in me, it was like something being released, the very fact of making something, of using skills," he says. Remembering the Dostoevsky book, he begged the prison to get him a typewriter, and began to write his autobiography, A Sense of Freedom (later made into a film), which he smuggled out. It was published to major acclaim in 1977.
"I wrote the book because I found the hardest part of my confinement in the secure unit was that it made me question my life, question who I was and what I did. I know what I did was an appalling thing and I had to be put away, but I wanted to question why was it I did it. I realised there were no opportunities for me growing up, it was the old working-class thing about either escaping through sport or through crime, and I was never much good at sport. "The book was looking at a certain set of social conditions and questioning the whole nature of the prison system. By saying things like it was the screws that caused most of the trouble in prisons, it wasn't popular with everybody. But there were things like prisoners doing so many drugs inside that when they were released, the first thing they had to do was go to rehab. I was also asking questions about the existence of an underclass: are we part of the community or are we not? What is the logical conclusion of treating us the way we are treated?
"The book did really well and to this day, people mention it to me and sometimes they say it stopped them from ending up inside. I didn't think it was right for me to profit from my crimes - I don't think anybody should - so all the money went to underprivileged children in Glasgow. But when people ask me about that, I wish they'd also ask chief constables who have retired and written books the same question."
While still in prison, he married Sarah Trevelyan and the couple have two children. He had two children from a previous relationship - his daughter is "doing all right" but his son, a heroin addict, was murdered four years ago. "I let the children down," he says, "If I had been what I should have been, my son would not have been killed."
On his release from prison in 1982, Boyle became a sculptor. Working mainly in bronze, he creates figurative pieces in which, he says, "my background, lack of confidence and experiences" loom large. He sells to private collectors and galleries all around the world and enjoys a comfortable existence.
His views on the criminal justice system are not sought out by the authorities, despite his claim to be "probably the biggest success Scottish prisons have ever had." He says this is because he "beat the system" and because of his oft-repeated view that there is "a lack of political will to deal with the problems of people who are thrown into an underclass". Ever remorseful of his past ("I hurt a lot of people, it's not a nice thing to have to live with"), he has directed a lot of his energies into The Gateway Exchange Trust in Edinburgh, where he now lives. It is an organisation which encourages creative self-expression among individuals and groups from disadvantaged areas. He has been encouraged to run for the new Scottish parliament but prefers to remain with his sculpting and, more so these days, his writing.
His first novel, Hero of the Underworld, is published this week and is such an adept piece of work that it has already been mentioned as a candidate for the Booker shortlist. Detailing the experiences of a man who has been institutionalised but who, on release, is determined to expose the corruption of society, it is partly autobiographical. "It asks the question of what sort of world we live in," he says, "and how we can go about getting there."
Hero of the Underworld is published by Serpent's Tale, price £9.99 in UK
