RAPHAEL ROWE | Wrongly Sentenced To Life & Visiting The World's Toughest Prisons | JHHP #52

early in the hours of the morning on the 18th of december 1988 i'm in bed hear these loud noises and i was met with guns being pointed at my face and i was being accused of murder and a series of robberies that had happened around the m25 over a period of one night can you imagine you're innocent and the judge is telling you you're going to prison for the rest of your life just as you're about to turn and scream and shout he says hold on 15 years 15 years 15 years and then another eight years on top of that i always thought at some point they were going to open my cell within a cell and say to me we're sorry we made the mistake i believed even after i'd been convicted even after i'd been condemned to the rest of my life in prison that this wasn't going to be my life i wasn't going to allow it to be my life six or seven prison officers would rush into myself they gave me a little beating they banged me up and then they take me down to the isolation plot where i'd spend the next week two weeks month six weeks two months and i'd be there on my own i met people like reggie craig charles bronson you know they were probably our most notorious prisoners you know me and reggie kay became good friends charlie bronson i i knew very well in fact i knew him before he became this notorious prisoner that he is today he's got this boiling water kettle they poured it over his face and then you know that sugar water and he was quite a dark black kid but his face turned as pink as a pig's body one person gets killed in that prison every two weeks um we sat down and i started talking to him about what he was in there for and he told me that he and his wife killed their poor children what was not mentioned in the film was that they also cut the hearts out of these kids and buried them it was only because the local villagers in the village that he came from started to smell death and that paraguaya incident reminds me all the time that the threat is real the darkness of the detail without any remorse without any facial expressions that may have been the medication you know that was controlling he wasn't kicking the tongue his eyes were kind of moving and i just felt more and more uncomfortable and he was looking at me like you're looking at me now jack with that kind of shock horror and i thought we need to cut this hello guys and welcome back to jackmates happy hour now stevie yeah i don't know how happy this hour or two is going to be because we've had an array of guests on from youtubers comedians and randolph and and today we we we've got a man who's when i say he's pretty much done it all i don't think i'm underselling it um or i don't i know i should say i don't think i'm overselling it i think he literally has done it oh we've got a guy called raphael rowe who's a presenter journalist documentarian which is a word i've been trying to read trying to rehearse documentation say it documentarian documentarian is that right yeah right raph can i call you rap or is it raphael raphael whatever you want how the hell are you sir i'm good actually it was um a little drive up here but it was good i've been looking forward to this i've been listening to some of your previous podcasts and this is quite exciting it's exciting to be here appealing to a completely different audience to what i normally draw in right yeah because you were saying you you're very much tv personality aren't you i am yeah youtube and and the sort of social media thing i'm kind of catching up with it i've never really watched youtubers and all that kind of thing it kind of passed me by i was so focused on bbc that was my platform so youtube is new to me and what you guys do right fair well i'm sure we'll have a little bit of a chat about youtube but before we move on we should just say you're um how how would you describe what you what you do do now obviously you you came from tougher beginnings you um you were sentenced to a murder that you you didn't commit and uh since coming out of prison many many moons ago you've turned your hand and and you've you're now a journalist are you how how would you describe what i i i'm a current i'm i'm currently a host and i'm a presenter which is slightly different from being what i've been for many years which is a reporter an investigative journalist so i've started my stuff investigating issues from corporate companies to individual criminals or stories that i think matters so that's the kind of thing i've done throughout the whole of my career and i was very lucky to get down onto that so i'm an investigative journalist and i report issues that i think matter and can make a difference that's what i really do right and and more recently you're you're the um the presenter behind um netflix's inside the world's toughest prisons have i got that right you have inside the world's toughest prison so i host the show yeah i kind of embed myself in these prisons around the world yeah quite harrowing stuff that's putting it lightly mate i mean i spent the uh the vast majority of yesterday just binge watching the series i like to leave all my research to the last minute i'm a model pro this is probably the most research you've ever done though so yeah yeah because i i wasn't familiar with your work and then um we we thankfully we were offered you because as soon as i started [ __ ] researching i was like this guy has has pretty much done and been everywhere now before we get to we'll probably get to the netflix show in the second half of the show i want to find out a bit more about you and a bit more about your your life now i know you you were born in southeast london is that is that correct yeah i was actually born in a flat on the woolworth road which is in southeast london so i wasn't even born in a hospital you know i was quick to come out right i was born on the king and queen street on woolworth road which is in southeast london um and i'm a true cockney although i changed the tone of my voice over the years of being a bbc journalist once upon a time i was you know um a southeast londoner i still am a southeast londoner but i was born on the wolf road in the house um you know my my dad's jamaica my mum's english so i come from a mixed um cultural background and and i grew up in campbell in southeast london so i'm a londoner i still live in london i still live in south east london i don't know anywhere else so that that's my kind of back story you know growing up in a council estate with my three sisters my mum and dad as simple as that yeah what was it what was it what was it like was it did you have a bit of a rough upbringing or or was it a fairly was a fairly happy childhood that you had i i think like most people who grow up in in social housing my my background was you know we didn't have any money my dad was a laborer my mum was a housewife she had three kids four kids actually my three sisters and me at almost the same time sort of a year apart my dad was banging away quietly i didn't give my mom any time to rest you know and then i came along and i was the only boys and i was the last one so yeah i grew up in a council estate in social housing we didn't have much money it was it was a tough neighborhood and i grew up not long after i sort of was born we moved into campbell well again another social flat you know um in a block of flats and and and i was one of those kids that kind of grew up amongst other kids i was very fortunate in my upbringing in that everyone around me came from a different background you know we we had the the smelly kid the the fat sort of kid we didn't look at you deliberately you know we're gonna have a fun two hours you know he's listening to it when he knows he's allowed to bully me he said smelly and fat look straight we had a bit of everything or i did so i was very fortunate that everyone around me came from a different kind of background the black kid the white kid the scottish kid the irish kid so i i was very fortunate that i was in a very diverse community and that made a big difference in my outlook in life yeah but but we had nothing as a family we we had nothing you know i think my biggest toy when i was a kid was a robot you know i remember my mum coming home one day this is like a childhood memory she came home and she gave me a robot and it was my i sort of idolized this toy but it didn't work you know it didn't matter that it didn't work it was just the gift from my mum because we didn't have very much did you ever have a spud gun do you remember them i do remember a spad gun i used to use it yeah i just stick it into my mum's potatoes fire it away i think i bought one not too long ago for my son actually and he kind of looked at me and kind of put it down and never used it i think that was the reaction i got when i was a kid and i got one you're looking at me stevie you're like you don't know what a spell oh i know what spud goodness it's just funny that that went into your mind what's this bad gun [Laughter] you put into a potato and shoot at people rafael asked the hard-hitting questions we've seen his shows we know what he's about what was you what was your what were your dreams and aspirations as a kid because i i didn't have anything to be a footballer i loved football you know i was one of those we come down from the block of flats and in front of of all of our houses or flats was a patch of grass and so we'd all congregate on this space and we kick a ball and from morning to night so wanting to be a footballer was probably the biggest aspiration i had and i was a good footballer i was little i was you know low sense of gravity if you like i was a good footballer and that was the only aspiration because it was the only thing that was around me boxing sports that was the kind of thing that i watched as a kid i was exposed to a lot of that so being in the sport arena if you like is what i wanted to do what position central midfielder oh engine room engine room yeah yeah yeah that was my position it still is today only i don't play football as much as i'd like to well we've we've seen you kick up all about a bit over the time on netflix and some of these prisons that you've been in and whatnot oh the goal in one of them not an easy thing because gold people weren't really nice asher i think his name was in the german prison and he was a bit of a character anyway but yeah love the love of football the love of sports i used to think i was john conte when we used to box in the in the porch way you know so that was my thing did you when you um your life obviously took quite a drastic turn as you as you become a a young adult and um we're going to get on to that shortly um putting this in the nicest way was you a bit of a naughty kid because i know a few of a few people i grew up with they've taken the wrong turn in life and stuff and often the ones that have like got gone to prison and and stuff weren't always the naughty kid they might have just mixed with the wrong crowd now i know that sounds like a typical question but i'm quite interested because obviously you've done loads in your life you seem like an absolutely lovely fella now but what what what were then what was you like as a teenager i guess is what i'm getting at i came from a laura biden's family if you like so none of my family got in trouble with the law but when i hit the age of about 15 and 16 before that let's say when i was 11 12 i started getting into trouble in school so i was hanging around with the wrong kid so i was good at school i was intelligent but i didn't take to school education wasn't my thing so by the time i hit the age of 15 and i was smoking splits and i was breaking into cars that was my thing you know they in those days had kind of car stereos and you could break into a karnicker car stereo and send it or sell it to someone else and that was how i made money so i was a bit of a thief more breaking into cars and that progressed actually into burglary so i by the age of 16 17 i was breaking into people's houses breaking into factories nicking things that's what i was doing and it was to make money there was no other motive it was simply because i had nothing i wanted something i didn't have any prospect of getting a job or anything like that you know the environment that i came from and it was interesting when i listened to one of your earlier podcast the copper who talked about being a copper in the 70s in peckham and and their whole demeanor at the time was to sort of fly in on people and i was one of those victims it was a bit later than the 70s in the early 80s but i was one of those subjects that the police would often jump out these spg vans and arrest us or they'd stop us and question us for no reason but yeah i grew up as a little a little tear away you know i i could fight and i'd get into fights i i wouldn't say that i hanged around with with gangs but i had a group of friends that you would today describe as a gang but we were like a very close knit um group of guys um and all the older guys around us were were our mentors and these were criminals these were people that had been to prison and funnily enough we'd look up to them and think you're tough you're hard because you've been to prison and that was our aspiration if you like yeah that if you go to prison and you come out you get more respect it's as simple as that i think that's how it is though isn't it you do i remember i've i've never really been a naughty kid to be fair i'm just something like ginger lad from norwich but i think you do look up at the harder ones the ones that sort of give you [ __ ] and you do think like they're that that's they've they're they're the achievers in a way don't you know what i mean not me i've never had a detention in my life i'm the worst person for this i i've had lots of detentions but it's really i think it's really about the fact that there is no other mentor around you there's no one else you can look up to so what you do see is people that have money through selling drugs or committing crime and the only education you get from those people is what they do so you think that's what you need to do because there was no one you know my parents as i say were law abiding citizens and so my dad would often tell me if i get in trouble i'm going to end up in prison and all i get is bread and water and he was very disciplinarian you know jamaican so he was quite hard on me and anybody around us but at the same time they had their own lives and once i got into my own sort of circle of friends i did my own thing and that was a circle of friends who were caught up in i would describe it as petty crime nothing serious the older guys were probably into something more serious but i lived in an environment where petty crime was the way forward if you like and i just followed in people's footsteps when when you were stealing these like car stereos and stuff that's that's fascinating to me because i would [ __ ] myself if i if i had to do stuff like that like was it was it was it not scary or because you started with like smaller things and got bigger and bigger was it just like a natural progression man you bring back memories i'm just i'm having flashbacks of what i did and i'll give you a description so what we would have is these old files you know like files like metal files that you get you probably don't know this but you do you you had these metal files so you go up to a car and in the corner of the window you get this this kind of fire or some piece of metal and you tap the corner of the window and the whole of the car window would shatter and then you put the window through you dive through you grab the stereo yank it out the wires and you'd be pulling and pulling and pulling probably cut your arms and stuff you pull the stereo out and then you'd run and then you find someone to sell it either at garage or somebody who's got a car and they want big speakers and big stereos and you've got this stereo because that's what it was and that's what i used to do wow and now we've taught our audience how to steal from again yeah but i mean if you if you're stealing stereos now you're not going to get much money yeah yeah some old cars yeah steal the car i think the the only thing i used to steal when i was younger you remember them little dust caps that they used to have on cars like i think it was why was that such a thing that was a big thing yeah when we were younger that people would steal yeah they're not about the hubcaps no the little tiny little rubber things that were on there what did you do well because in like the early 2000's do you not remember when there was um they didn't do this the people some people wouldn't have the rubber ones anymore so they were getting like silver like dies you'd get cool ones yeah like little diamond like a little dice yeah yeah this is cool do you remember that yeah so i think i just had a huge collection of them that was the naughtiest thing i ever did i do remember once i i stole a humbug penny suite from asda and my dad grounded me for it i used to shoplift i used to come home from school so i just go to a school in camberwell and then on my way home there was a co-op and i used to go into the co-op and nick curly wurlies snicker bars well they were called marathons at the time and in my bedroom at home i had a drawer full of chocolate and it wasn't about not being able to get the chocolate it was just being able to do i it was exciting it was exciting to feed and and get these chocolates so i had a drawer full of chocolates and ones when my dad found out i got in serious trouble seriously i can imagine there is quite a frill i think i think i probably had a thrill when i nicked that humbug at like nine years old look at me i'm sat in a room with raphael row and i'm like nick the humvee not impressed by that you've met some pretty [ __ ] hard people now obviously um the uh you got sentenced to a much worser crime is worser a word just say what it is now much worse much worse crime i think when he was 19 years old what was it was it murder and robbery that you were so so so it was a progression so when i was 17 18 years old i was sort of now i've moved away from home i was living with a best mate of mine and together we were like a duo of thieves you know we were shoplifting and we were burglary and that was probably the most serious things we were doing um and it was just purely to make money smoke we we were like night owls so we'd be out thieving during the day shoplifting or we'd break into people's houses um which i regret let's make that clear i regret doing that but it was the only thing i knew at the time and the only way of earning money and then when i was 18 19 years old me and my best mate michael we were living in a flat together and one day out of nowhere i'm in bed i'm fast asleep and um i hear loud noises do you want me to go into the detail now oh mate all of the details yeah i'm i'm in bed um i i probably been sort of banging some bird the night before because that's how i lived my life you know i was thieving during the day meeting girls at night and i lived a life like that i was a happy-go-lucky teenager doing what people from my environment did yeah yeah and we had quite a reputation we had quite a reputation around us in in the sort of southeast london area so the triangle of peckham brixton and campbell we had quite a big reputation as this little this little firm of criminals who who were game foreign i bet you felt like you kind of ran the area don't you because a lot of yeah well among the people that knew us i think we had a reputation that you you know we we had each other's backs i i you know i emphasized that we were not a gang because we were just individuals who did things that we thought and we kept it within ourselves um but on this morning at late early in the hours of the morning on the um 19 15 16 17 18 december 1988 i'm in bed hear these loud noises my best mate was with his brother downstairs we were living in this two-part flat and um i was woken up by loud noises now i thought it was my mate and his brother having an argument so um i got up rubbed my eyes lit a cigarette went downstairs to find out what the [ __ ] was going on and i was met with guns being pointed at my face so i had men at my flat door i was watching my mate's brother being frog marched out of the flat and i had these guns and men in balaclavas pointing these guns at me telling me to get the [ __ ] down on the floor and i had this cigarette in my mouth and i remember it distinctly it was kind of burning down to the butt so it was burning my lips and i went to move my hands to move the cigarette and all hell broke loose they were screaming that they were going to shoot me if i didn't so i hit the floor and before i knew it i had men all over me my hands were put behind my back they were handcuffed with these plastic cuffs and then i was frog marched out of my flat i only had on my boxer shorts i was taking out my flat down some stairs fell down the stairs the police officers dragged me and i remember seeing one of the other residents of one of the flats sort of flat on the floor with a police officer on his back and he looked up at me and his eyes were terrified you know that was a terrifying moment they took me out of the flat and i was put into the back of a van and my two flatmates michael and his brother were in the same van and then a police officer came into the van and he called my name i identified myself and he told me to come out of the van and then everything broke loose from there i was taken to a police station i was interrogated for three days in in surrey stockbroker belt and i was being accused of murder and a series of robberies that had happened around the m25 over a period of one night wow that was the first i knew the allegations against me and then i didn't see that outside for many years that's what i was going to say when that when they've come and they've grabbed you and your live slope and [ __ ] twisted up on its head when you're being thrown into the back of that van did did you was this was were these these murders or or these um this robbery was that something that you'd heard about did you know about it or did you have no idea what was going on when you were i had no idea it was national news so it was on on the front page of all the national newspapers the sun the news of the world and all the kind of mass media broadcasters the bbc and everything that the police were hunting these i found this out later i didn't know at the time yeah and i didn't pay any attention to the news you know i was a happy-go-lucky [ __ ] what i could when i could smoking drugs and doing stuff like that so no at the time i was arrested i had no idea what i was being arrested for and although i had my brushes with the law and i knew that i was involved in criminality i knew when guns were pointing at me at that on that particular occasion that this was far more serious but there was this kind of i don't know this bounce about me at the time that i was still this cocky 20 year old 19 year old i was still cocky and talk like this is nothing to do with me um it was terrifying it was frightening but it's when i was in the police station when they were interrogating me and asking me questions about a murder and a series of robberies i got even cockier because i knew i didn't do anything like that so i you know i didn't do that no comment thing that often happens or you see on television oh i was prepared to tell them everything i could possibly tell them about who i was and what i was doing and felt very confident about it didn't make any difference well that's literally what i was going to was going to ask because you knew you was innocent i i'd like to think if i was in that situation i'd tell them everything because obviously you've got nothing to hide but so at what point in in the process from from that night you were arrested and obviously when you received the guilty verdict what at what point did it sink in that you might not be walking out of there again i think it was almost i i think it started when that police officer came to that van and called my name because they'd already identified me for some reason i didn't know it then why i mean we found out many years later but at the point i didn't know but i think it all started then when i was being interrogated by the police they were not interested in my willing to tell them anything because you say if you were in that situation you just kind of blab on where you've been what you've done who you've done what you've done even confessed to things that you had done because you thought this is like lesser crimes yeah yeah i mean i wasn't quite doing that but i was prepared to do that yeah i think it was when it really dawned on me was after the first two days of interrogation um where i was being asked where i was whether i was involved in a murder and then i was kind of being accused of the murder and robberies and it was serious crimes and then a police officer said to me one day in the police station that they were taking me to another police station where i'd be charged with these offenses and i'm asking if anybody else has been charged why are you charging me you know it was a scary moment and they did they took me from that police station to another police station they left me in the cell for sort of 24 hours and i was sort of almost banging my head against the wall terrified that they were going to charge me with these crimes and then they did they came into the cell took me out of the cell took me to the sergeant desk and then they charged me took my fingerprints took pictures did all that they do when they processed somebody and charged me with murder one count of manslaughter or attempted murder and two counts of aggravated robbery wow you make that whole situation sound quite confusing which obviously it is because you had no idea what was going on at the time we did say that we did a bit of research on it before even reading into it all looks very confusing how you even got involved as them thinking that you could have been guilty like each part we were reading through didn't seem to ever point towards you or another one who was also arrested that kind of detail doesn't materialize until the months go by so when i was charged by the police i still didn't know what it was they were accusing me of doing of course i knew i was being charged with murder i knew i was being charged with these other serious offenses and i knew that they were making allegations against me because often during the interviews the police officers were saying to me that this person's saying this this person's saying that they didn't come into the interview and sort of say we've got your fingerprints or your dabs all over the murder or we've got this forensic evidence or anything like that because that wouldn't have existed didn't exist never did exit so it was all always allegations people pointing fingers at me and saying things about me and that's all they were telling me at the time so that's all i knew at the time and then i'm charged i'm charged with this murder i'm put back in this cell and as you can imagine i go into this kind of munch scream kind of thing with my hands in my head and the nightmare had really begun wow when you're getting um interrogated by the police and that's the first time that you're learning of the details of the crime in which you're being told that you you did wha what can you go into any of the details of the crime what what what actually was it was it was it um something to do with the m25 iii gang yes it is that's what we would call we were called the m25 iii so it was this kill for kicks gang so the crimes were this simple you you had um three men took a car that was stolen they drove to the scene of the first crime where they came upon two men in a car who were involved in sexual um acts together one was an elderly man one was a young man during the commission of trying to take their car the elderly man was beaten the young man was beaten and they were tied up the elderly man died of a heart attack during the commission of the crime the three robbers then took their car and drove to the next crime same night within an hour they were arriving at another crime where they then broke into this house attacked the occupants the younger son in the house who was in his 30s he was stabbed and nearly died they took jury and money from that property they stole the car from that property the three perpetrators and they went on to another crime the same night within the hour broke into another house and stole property from those houses as well they took the two cars that were at the third offense and those were the cars that were discovered the next day being burned in a field somewhere in sid cup or something like that so that's the the essence of what the crimes were the murder at the scene of the first crime the attempted murder and aggravated robbery at the second and the aggravated robbery at the third offense wow that's so ruthless how they did it all in one [ __ ] night one gang the most crucial part of this was that when i hadn't been arrested here so this happened on the 15th 16th for december in the newspapers the following day all the details were about the police hunting this this gang which was now called the m25 gang because the crimes were committed around the m25 orbital and the headlines were all that the police were looking for two white men and one black man from the very outset we hadn't been arrested and so and and this evidence was coming from the victims and this is key because it's been key from the beginning to the end which is why your interview with that copper resonates with me because as he made clear during the 70s you know people would be fitted up especially people following a lot of racially motivated people absolutely i didn't think about that at the time as i say i grew up in the world of black and white so i didn't ever experience racism in that sense but here i was in a police station being accused of crimes that two white men and one black man had committed my two co-defendants who ended up serving as much years in prison as me were black as well so in essence what happened was the evidence was ignored because they wanted a conviction and it appeased the media at the time how how did you get involved in the case in the first place like what where did the prison that the police see everything that had happened and somehow get to you and your co-defendants so this day we still don't have that information oh my god we know what it is what happened was and this is the reality what happened was is the police had an informer who then told them that the people responsible for these crimes lived in this house and that me and my best friend and another man were involved in these crimes that's why they targeted our house as little as that it was as simple as that he was a police informer and he told them and this has never been given to us yeah but it came out because there was a huge reward and there was a secret recording with this witness many many years later on a bbc rough justice program that were investigating my miscarriage of justice and during that interview he confessed to them that he was the one who sent the police to our house just turns out that he was the only witness in our case who was white who had blue eyes and fair hair and that's important for this reason all of the victims from the crimes described one of the perpetrators as having fair hair and blue eyes now we free black guys as you can see don't have blue eyes okay we didn't have blue eyes but the victims not just from one scene of crime but from all the crimes described the white man as being the leader the blue eyes and the fair hair i saw that protruding through his balaclava sort of came face to face with him and those were the headlines face to face with the kill for kicks gangs um yet the police overlooked that and convicted us and the only blue eye fairhead man in my case was this one who sent the police to my address in the first place which is why we were arrested [ __ ] it that's mental how would the police i don't know how to say it but it's fairly obvious just from that that the police have gone in just because they want anyone to well in their mind i wouldn't say that's what happened i think the police at the beginning they targeted the house because it was a house known to be housed by lots of sort of petty criminals yeah me and other people it was a hostel and most of the people that were there had been sent there from the probation service no what happened was the police when they started to investigate actually investigate the crimes by now i'm charged i'm in a prison within a prison in brixton and we get to that but i'm talking about not just being in prison i was in a prison within a prison with the most notorious prisoners you could come across um but during the investigation and the police started to find evidence that pointed away from us i.e fingerprints found on the car at the scene of the murder didn't match any of us but it matched the blue eye and fair hair guy we've already been charged so rather than go back and reinvestigate and question this individual they then started to conspire with the witnesses to change their statements i know that's complex but it's very simple yeah when the police found the evidence that pointed in another direction they moved the goal post to fit us in so we weren't fitted up and i distinguish between being fitted up you know you get arrested you get thrown into a police station and you get fitted out evidence is planted on you no that's not what happened in my case what happened is the evidence started to point away from us being guilty afterwards afterwards once they discovered it they then started to move the goal post it's like it's like they found a key and then they decided which lock it was going to fit yeah something like that that's that's insane yeah one of the things i read was that the fingerprints of two of the guys were found on the car but then they just said that they were told to move it by you yes so yes yes but what you need to do whether there's none of your fingerprints on the car and there wouldn't be because we weren't involved in the crime but what they said about the fingerprints being found on the car and then saying that they moved it for us they didn't offer that information to the police it's only when the police found the fingerprint on the car and went back to them and they'd given three or four statements by this point when the police went back to them and said your fingerprints were on the car that's why i say they conspired with the witnesses because they then got the witnesses this is the police i believe they then got the witnesses to change their statements and say oh the reason my fingerprints were on the car is because raphael and his co-defendants asked me to move the car and that happened on numerous occasions evidence like property from the final robbery from the two cars that i mentioned that were burned in a field was found out one of his mates the blue eyed fair-haired guy the property was found at his girlfriend's flat he put it in his girlfriend's flat they didn't tell the police that when the police discovered that bit of information raided the girls flat he then changed his statement or made another statement and say oh they asked us to put it there so every time the evidence fighted in another direction they changed the goal post and that's why i say i was fitted up rather than fitted in as the evidence pointed away they then conspired to to fit us in as as when you're in when you're in the court in front of the jury and and you're hearing all of this i know what it's i'm not gonna put myself in that position but i know how frustrated i can be when i get accused of silly pointless [ __ ] that i haven't done let alone being up for a [ __ ] murder you had nothing to do with what did you all the way through that court case did you feel like you were gonna get off or did it start to think actually this is something bigger than me like this jacket started long before that when i was sitting in a prison cell on my own and and and and i emphasized this earlier on i was an acap prisoner so i was the highest category prisoner which meant that every time i was taken out of my cell to go for a piss or a poo i had two prison officers and a another prison officer with an alsatian dog follow me that's how dangerous they considered me to be i was 20 years old i was in a man's prison in a prison within a prison you know freddie foreman and the richardsons were sort of banged up with me ira terrorists colombian drug cartels these are the guys that i was socializing with in that 18 month period before i even got to trial and it was during that period i always thought at some point they were going to open my cell within a cell and say to me we're sorry we made the mistake in fact i got a a letter really important letter from an ex-girlfriend who'd given some damning evidence against me during my trial saying that she was sorry so i got this letter they they slip the letters under your door so when you're in the cell the prison officers screws they come round when they're distributing the the mouth prisoners and i got this letter under my door like i did other letters from my family and friends and i opened this letter and i read the letter and it was from an ex-girlfriend who was apologizing to me for giving false evidence to the police and i thought that was it that was it here it is somebody admitting that they've told a lie i gave that to my lawyer that didn't get me out so for 18 months i sat in a prison cell discovering every day new bits of information working on my own case by myself in that cell reading the archibald which is the equivalent to the bible in law i'm trying to understand more about what was happening to me um and then we get into the doc and i'm hearing the victims stand up imagine for a moment free black guys in the dock being accused of these crimes the victims of the crimes there wouldn't be no crimes without the victims the victims are standing up in the [ __ ] dock telling the jury and anybody else that was watching the trial that the perpetrator was white and you'd think at that moment they would quash our convictions not even but that didn't happen the prosecution was skilled in saying they must have been mistaken and they do it so good they convinced the jury not to believe the actual victims oh my god do you think stuff like that still happens in the uk or do you think that was when a i know obviously racism is [ __ ] always going to happen um but do you think it was more prevalent then was it when was that was that in the 90s or that was in the early 90s yeah do you think that was that was like the main motivation behind that well you you mentioned racism racism was an element of what happened to me you know the arrest the charging and and the preparedness to to continue pursuing innocent men but it was more about the criminal justice system getting it wrong and not being prepared to accept that they got it wrong you know arrogance arrogance is is is part of it but it's you know it it it can be harder to admit that they got it wrong then to pursue a wrongful conviction it would be difficult for the police to have turned around and say we made a mistake here and we're going to own up to that they don't do that they never do that they don't do it today they didn't do it then i mean it's evident in that police officers have never been charged in my case or any other case for the crimes that they commit the george floyd thing going on right now you know there's a lot of hoo-ha around the black lives movement and all that and that comes down to the police officers thinking they are above the law and that happened in my case and it still happens today didn't the j i know i'm going to move ahead a bit here i want to go back to prison life but didn't the judge even once you were set free didn't even declare you was innocent then didn't apologize but this wasn't the same judge this was the appeal court judges and that's all about damage limitation you know we're going to let them out are you going to let out guilty men and then say um but they're not innocent because it was a damaged limitation exercise we'd won we've proven that we hadn't committed these crimes the european court had decided unanimously that we'd been denied the right to a fair trial because a lot of the evidence was never given to us right to present at our trial to the jury had they been aware of that evidence they probably would never have reached the conviction that they did you know sending me to prison for the rest of my life sorry how long was your original sentence for um i was sentenced to life imprisonment with an additional 54 years so without parole so basically if i hadn't won my conviction i'd still be in there now wow that's [ __ ] terrifying can you imagine when you're you're innocent and the judge is telling you you're going to prison for the rest of your life not only is his holiday just as you're about to turn and scream and shout he says hold on 15 years 15 years 15 years and then another eight years on top of that so you've got a life sentence which means you're condemned to prison for the rest of your life and then he adds another 54 years on top of that how did that not break you right then and there or did it do you know what i i it's hard to think back to that moment but obviously i screamed i shouted and i did everything you would possibly do as an innocent man saying you got this [ __ ] wrong my family were crying even some of the prosecution and and defense lawyers were shocked by the verdict to be honest i mean people say that but i think it was true i think i was so angry that i channeled that anger i mean i was broken you say was i because i was broken you you know i'm just being sent to prison as a 20 year old man for the rest of my life or something i didn't do and so it had a a serious effect on me then but i was able to channel that anger and and the wrong into fighting from that day on right i i hope this doesn't come across as an incense in insensitive question but something i i i've often pondered because i'm so far removed from any any kind of like criminality and prison and whatnot i always think if if i was in your shoes and you hear these stories all the time of innocent people going down i'd like for example to put it into youtube terms right so uh recently like um a lot of youtubers have been called out for um sort of like sexual misconduct with their fans and stuff like that now obviously it goes without saying that i've never been involved in any of that but i always think when these because youtubers have been called out and they've come out and made videos i don't even know who this person is now i was having a conversation with my girlfriend the other day and i was thinking if some random girl did that to me by default there's going to be a large portion of online people that believe it and i and and i wouldn't judge those people for for believing it you're hearing it from somebody who's quite distressed i've started to believe some of some of the youtubers that i like that have come out and said they they don't so what i'm getting at is when you're there and the whole world thinks you've done it the press are putting whatever they want about you how certain are you that even your own family beli believe you does that make sense i hope that doesn't come across no and it's and it's the right question because there were many occasions where i sat down in the visiting hall inside the prison with my mum my dad and my sisters and you could see they were questioning you know they knew i was a little bit of a tear away but they knew i wasn't a murderer and they obviously asked me the question out right you know was you involved did you get involved did you do this did you do that and i'd always say no but surely there was a doubt in their head initially there would be mums and mums and mums will always say you know my son didn't do that my daughter didn't do that and i believe him end the story yeah um but yeah without a doubt they would have believed everything that they read because it was convincing you know we didn't get convicted um because the jury just wanted to to convict us you know the prosecution presented the case that made us look guilty that's what they do yeah you know would i have been sat in that dock and found somebody guilty when the overwhelming evidence suggested that the crimes were committed by people that didn't even look like the people in the dock bearing in mind as you see me now i wasn't like this back in those days i had dreadlocks as well yeah i've seen pictures yeah i was a good looking guy [Laughter] but my co-defendant had dreadlocks as well so you had two black guys in the dock with dreadlocks and you had another guy who was much darker than a sort of african appearance much darker than both me and my co-defendant and yet the jury were being told by the victims that one of the perpetrators had blonde air and blue eyes you know how do you get away from that i mean you just can't get away from that so yeah people will believe it because the prosecution are very skilled at what they do at convincing people in my case the jury that we were guilty wow we we just said um that when you were finally released that they actually never said that you were innocent have you been classed as innocent since that day well it depends how you define innocence because i think um you know it's not a search for justice or truth and justice um i believe that when the court quashed my conviction they knew i was innocent yeah otherwise they wouldn't have let me go in the same way they kept me in prison for 12 years so it was it was a vindication at that moment even if the judges in their summary of the appeal when they were crushing my conviction and setting me free then made a derogatory remark about this is not a declaration of innocence you you know why the [ __ ] are you letting out innocent and guilty yeah you know they knew we were innocent but they didn't we fought them hard we took on the system and we proved that we didn't commit these crimes do you think them saying that stopped them from having to do anything for you guys for being let free so i watch um a series on netflix called the innocence files and i've seen all of that and every time they got set free they don't get this lump sum of money for being put in but if they never classed you as innocent did they not have to do anything for you guys i was compensated okay today um there is a doctrine in the criminal justice system here in the uk that you will only be compensated if it is proven that you didn't commit the crime yeah that's why i was i was compensated that tells you a lot does it okay yeah yeah the the home office and all the officials that then go on and investigate your case before they give you compensation accepted that i must have been innocent and was innocent because they then compensated me would you say there's any form of compensation that is enough for what you went through not not financially listen man i've been scarred in ways that you couldn't imagine i've seen things that i shouldn't have seen i took part in things i shouldn't have taken part in in prison you know and those things will live with me for the rest of my life and i think the most important thing is who i am today yes i am this presenter of the netflix series and i go about doing my stuff in the best possible way i can but deep down inside me both physically and mentally i'm scarred by that experience and that would never leave me i've just been very very clever and strong enough to turn it to my advantage what was the first night like in prison that's a hard one to describe because the easy way would would to say i cried my eyes out you know i was like a baby in the corner in a cell you've got to remember when i went to prison it's not like you have an image of prisoner right you've seen my series and they're horrifying but in british prisons i was in a prison within a prison so when i went into brixton prison which was the first prison i went in the day after i was charged or i think on the same day i was charged when i entered the prison i was then as i say um surrounded by two prison guards and another prison guard with a dog i was taken into the sort of the beast of the prison if you like which is with the the wings the old victorian wings that you've probably seen on many tv programs these kind of cell doors along these landings when they took me into the prison i'd already been i didn't know them but i'd already been categorized as an acap prisoner which is the highest category prisoner i was escorted by those prison guards into the main body of the prison and that's where most people's journey ends they get put into a cell i was taken through that corridor i was i approached these metal steps they told me to go up these metal steps so i've come through the prison i go up these metal steps and there's this big solid door they bang on the door the slot opens the guard peeps out they say one on he shuts the slot he opens the door i'm then escorted in by these two prison officers the door's slammed the slot is shut another door is opened and then i go into the prison block that i'm going to be in there's about 20 cells and every one of those cells have either an e for an escapee signifying outside the cell door that this person is a threat for escaping or you have an a which means that this is the highest category prisoner and i was putting a cell there when i went into the cell there's no toilet there's no sink all there was was a bed a cardboard table and a cardboard chair and a plastic potty which i was expected to [ __ ] and piss in which i did for the next 18 months and every day alongside all the other prisoners when i was let out with those prisoners i spent many many many months on my own doing this um i come out myself with my chamber pot if you like we called it a piss pot with my [ __ ] and my piss and i go to the slop out area and alongside all the other prisoners i tip it in with all the other [ __ ] and piss being tipped in there and then i get my toothbrush brush my teeth over the same piss and [ __ ] and that's what my life was like for 18 18 months i have no idea i would have become the most angry man on the planet i think i was angry i can't emphasize how angry i was and and that anger lived with me throughout all the years that i was in prison it kind of manifest itself you asked the question what was it like the very first day i i just remembered the screws putting me in that cell after that kind of escapade of being escorted by two guards going into a prison within a prison and i never left that space apart from when i went for visit when i went on exercise yard i went on exercise by myself in a cage so it was a small cage and it was really designed for ira prisoners you know so they couldn't bring in helicopters to help them escape so it had you know barbed wire and metal grilling at the top and down the sides and it was a very small 20 by 20 space so i'd walk around that for 18 months on my own occasionally they might let another prisoner come out with me but generally i was on my own and it was a horrible experience i i mean i can't i can't find the words to describe what it's like to be putting yourself not only have i now been convicted of a crime i didn't commit but i'm going to spend the rest of my life in prison for a crime i didn't commit at what point do you do you ever accept that do you ever is there a point where it's been like a week a month a year where you think well this is my life now then because you didn't know that you were gonna be proven innocent at any point like but that's the point jack i did i i believe from the beginning i wouldn't be here today i would have crumbled broken down and never survived that that experience i believed even after i'd been convicted even after i've been condemned to the rest of my life in prison that this wasn't going to be my life i wasn't going to allow it to be my life i was going to use the anger and i did that's not to say that over the next four to five years i spent a lot of time in isolation fighting the system i didn't accept or embrace what i was going through so i didn't i didn't buy into the prison regime which got me into a lot of trouble for example a prison officer would come to my door he'd open my door and he told me to do something i tell him to [ __ ] off the consequence of that would be six or seven prison officers would rush into myself they give me a little beat and they bang me up and then they take me down to the isolation block where i'd spend the next week two weeks month six weeks two months and i'd be there on my own and you're not allowed anything in there they take the bed out during the day and you're on your own that was all real psychological damage but i kind of had this inner strength that i believed in myself and i believed one day even in these early days that this wasn't going to be me for the rest of my life i wasn't going to allow it to happen i have no idea how you managed to keep that much hope it's that anger you talked about the anger you'd be really anger but if you can turn that anger which is what i did into a strength you can make a difference and that's what i did but most importantly i learned more about my case than anybody else i got all the documentation i read every line every word every sentence over and over again and i made meticulous notes week after week month after month challenging people's testimony or the evidence that they used to convict me you see quite a lot in like tv shows and films of prison where people are protesting their innocence inside is are there a lot of people like that because i know it tends you tend to see prisoners not believe it they go oh everyone says that it seems like the cliche everyone's innocent in prison yeah and and it's exactly what you said do you accept it after a few years and those that go in protest in their innocence who are not innocent often do it could be three years four years and then they sort of say listen if i'm ever going to get out of it and i'm talking about people doing very long sentences life sentences 25 years not the six month type prisoners um they often turn around and accept their guilt they kind of bow over and they accept that they did what they did they tried their their arm it didn't work and so now they're going to accept it go through the the hoops if you like seeing the psychiatrist and the anger management and doing whatever it is they need to do to address their offending behavior i didn't take part in any of that so you can distinguish between those no one believed me because they didn't believe me when i was younger i was in this yeah are you talking about other inmates it was hard it was harder with the guards because i i was not only fighting the regime they were there to treat me like a convicted prisoner and i wouldn't accept that i was a guilty convicted prisoner with the prisoners you know they didn't believe me i mean one or two probably did early on and it wasn't until the publicity turned around and people were starting to question my convictions that more prisoners started to kind of come on side um but yeah at the beginning everybody believed i was innocent but i was very militaristic you know i'd march up and down the landings and wouldn't talk to people wouldn't socialize with other prisoners you know because i was on a mission to prove my innocence who was what what were the kind of people because not only were you imprisoned as an innocent man you just said that you was in the worst wing or worst block that that there are surrounded by the the worst of the worst wha what what what who was the worst person you you saw did anyone really stick with you like well i i over the years i mean initially when i was in prison within a prison now i wasn't in that same prison forever you know i i moved along the system but i didn't move along this i did all the brixton's wormwood scrubs the wandsworths the pentaville the parkhurst the maidstones the gosh you know i moved around why do they do that sorry but for two reasons one i was volatile and didn't buy into the system so their way of dealing with me was moving me from prison to prison i mean i was volatile i was 20 21 22 23 24 25 and i was fighting like you know my first fight and i'll tell you about that in a minute was with the biggest guy you could imagine you you you know but it was necessary and i'll tell you about that if you want to know about it but i met people like reggie craig charles bronson you know they were probably our most notorious prisoners you know me and reggie craig became good friends um charlie bronson i i knew very well in fact i knew him before he became this notorious prisoner that he is today um so i met lots of people but in that prison within a prison it was your colombian cartel drug barons it was the freddie foreman you know these notorious gangsters the the richardsons who were the southeast london enemies of the crate twins and stuff like that and then some really dangerous individuals who have committed some horrendous crimes including you know your top ira prisoners who had been reminded or convicted of of terror activities your life's like a movie mate it's like it's like a nightmare and a movie rolled into one what was what was charlie bronson like i have to ask i met him in the segregation unit where he spent a lot of time so it was one of those occasions where um i kicked up and um what would often happen is they take you to an isolation block so you get bent up your arms get pushed behind your back it's like one of those typical scenarios and i'd be taken down to the segregation area and i remember being in one of these isolation cells and in these isolation cells there are big poles that run through the back of the cells right so these are your heaters so you don't have radiators or anything like that you just have these big poles and they generate heat at each end of these poles there is like a scraping of the wall so prisoners will scrape round the pole so they could communicate with the guy next door that was our way of communication it wasn't be a plastic cup would be a string you put it against it was these scrapings in the wall and i remember being in this isolation show i'd just been bent up and put in there by these screws and i could hear someone tapping on the um the sort of pole that goes across and i've got down on the floor to who's that who's that and it's oh it's peter who's peter yeah it's peter i'm danny in isolation what are you down here for me and that was charlie bronson whose name was peter originally oh right he was peter at the time he was using his real name yeah and we just struck up a conversation we never because you're in isolation you never meet face to face but for the next month me and him had lots of giggles and laughs through that [ __ ] pole you know that that was it wow i then met him as the years went on and he now started to develop this this persona where he was the hardest prisoner in the prison system you know he grew this big beard his hair had fallen out and he'd gone bald and he'd walk around like a big muscle head um but you know he he's one of those individuals in my opinion who was unfortunate he wanted to be tough he wanted to live a life in prison where he was you know respected um and it just ended up being he ended up being the longest serving prisoner in our in our country and and and his original crime was for car theft or robbery yeah i think he robbed a post office or something something like that how what is it like walking around day to day with men like that around is is it i guess this is probably a stupid question like what i always mug you off or tv when you ask but is it boring but is it um do you feel unsafe in there do you because walking around with you you might have got on with peter charlie bronson like he might he might have sat down told you a story one day but in my mind i think there's no nothing stopping him just lashing out the next day and that happens all the time does it but i become one of them you you know i already had a reputation that i was the leader of this m25 gang who'd been convicted of this murder this notorious gang so i already had a reputation before i even entered the prison that kind of preceded me because of the media's interest so i already have this aura around me where people are slightly hesitant of approaching me or coming to me and you have to embrace that slightly to protect yourself so i had to live up to this not the reputation that i was a murderer no i tried to live up to the reputation that you know i would stand up for myself yeah and that's exactly what i did i guess that's the only kind of only minuscule positive in you being branded as this it helped me survive yeah for sure you know especially among the prisoners that were not in for such serious offences you know they might be you know million pound cocaine smugglers or whatever you know so they were all about the money and not the violence um but but but it it you know it doesn't stop you being hesitant every day you know antennas at the back of your head every time you come out of your cell you don't know whether you're going to be the victim of the next attack and it can be for something as simple as looking at somebody differently if you come out of your cell in the real world of prison and you don't acknowledge someone just a slight nod of the head to sort of say are you doing this morning without a word or you look them in the eye and and acknowledge them they get paranoid and that's what prison is about people get extremely paranoid so if i haven't nodded to someone they think then that i'm dissing them or something and that can create such violence and it happens all the time in prison i don't think there was a day in prison and this is not me hesitating or exaggerating i don't think there was a day in prison where some violent act took place wow that's what it's really like and i wasn't in i need to emphasize this i wasn't in your local prisons where it's a conveyor belt of prisoners coming in and out for spice or cocaine or whatever petty crimes i was in the deepest darkest prisons where people were serving very very long sentences and these are sort of the prisons out far where you only go to these prisons when you're doing 25 years plus yeah you know you alluded to your your first fight let's hear about that i was in a prison and um it was a very cocooned prison everybody in there was a life or serving long sentences and there was this guy in there it was a bit of a bully you know i didn't take the bullies very kindly especially if it was directed at me if it directed other people would they have to fight their own battles you can't and this particular guy was doing some really wicked things to people one of the things he did to me is he put a dead pigeon in my cell then he put another pigeon with a noose around its neck and hung it from my cell he was trying to intimidate me and he was a big guy big guy called daryl um and he was from the east end of london when i went into my cell on one occasion he sort of came to the door of the cell and the cells were really small in this prison in leicestershire tree really small prison and we'd get move every two weeks because i was an a-cap prisoner you never stayed in the same cell for more than two weeks so every two weeks you'd be taken out of your cell i could be taken out from cell one and moved into cell two every two weeks so from two back to one one back to two so you never sort of settled and on this occasion i was in the cell and i was putting my stuff down the little bits that i had and he came into the doorway just blocked out the whole of the doorway and started like sort of mouthing off to me and saying to me you know you think you're this your thing called that and it was simply because i was militaristic i didn't socialize with very many people i was on a mission to prove my innocence that's all that mattered to me all the time and he stood in the doorway and he started giving it and i thought if he comes in this cell he crushed me like a fly he was that big you know and he could quite easily i was fit and i was young and all i did was exercise so i offered him out as you do you know like you want to have a fight whatever fight but not here let's do it down in the association that kind of thing and there were a few people around so he couldn't not say yes and i saw the fear in his eyes and that was my moment when i offered him out as scared as i was when i offered him out i saw the fear in his eyes and that gave me the upper edge that's how i saw it and it stood be in good stead in my career when i looked these murderers in the eyes today and i saw the fear and then he marched off come on come on so he marched off down the corridor i marched off behind him and then we had this entourage of other prisoners making sure the guards didn't know what was going on we go down the stairs we go into the association room and it's sort of the biggest room in the prison block and we had a real tear-up you know biting punching in highs and and i i was kind of jumping up to punch him yeah super mario [Laughter] i was kind of jumping not hitting him landing back on the floor and he was kind of coming at me but we had a real proper kind of tear up there's no weapons involved i damaged him and he damaged me um but he earned me the respect i suppose the most frightening thing once the fight is going you're sort of adrenaline's pumping and we were having this real bad i got beaten quite bad he got beaten quite bad and i'd say the fight was fair i was faster quicker he was more powerful and painful [Laughter] my punches just bounced off him these ones kind of rocked me kind of thing yeah and i remember the fight and then after the fight to wash off the blood i remember going back up to to the cell block area where they have showers outside the cells and it had one of those kind of swing doors you know imagine the westerns where you swing into this so the shower doors had these swing doors and i knew then that if i went into that shower and he wasn't happy with the result of the fight because i'd done good in terms of my retaliation he could come into that shower and end my life he could come in he could stab me cut my throat and do what he would but i was beyond caring you know i really was beyond caring i'm in the shower and i'm showering and he came to the door my heart left but actually he reached over the door and he shook my hand and he said you're the first person to stand up to me and i respect that and all that and that was out of fear it was out of fear that's the only reason he did it because he knew i would stand up to him but now other people might stand up to him and that preceded every prison i went to from that moment on people knew raf would have a go he wouldn't let you bully him and he wouldn't stand up for himself we've seen that in in some of the netflix um series as well which we'll get to in the second half but [ __ ] how i guess you can't be certain that he's not just going to pull a shank out and and and and stab you then and there surely in the same prison i uh you know the first bit of violence i mean i'd seen lots of violence but i suppose one of the most harrowing things i saw in that same prison probably two days before was this young black guy he was a rapist no one knew he was a rapist at the time so he was allowed to be in the normal population and i remember being the person i was refusing to work in the prison or do anything that they want you to do i um i'm sitting in the television room on my own they allowed me out of my cell and this black guy was sitting behind me all of a sudden i heard a bit of commotion behind me and and some guys were dragging him dragging him out of his air and drank so i'm thinking you know don't get involved but what i want to do is see what's happening as you do and so i followed him and the guys who were dragging him they dragged him out into the smaller space they got this boiling water kettle they poured it over his face and then you know that sugar water and he was quite a dark black kid but his face turned as pink as a pig's body you know it was it was one of the most harrowing things i've seen it sort of and i stood there and watched it um did nothing about it because i couldn't and i wouldn't and that was because he was a rapist and they discovered that he committed rape and it made me realize how dangerous prison could be if somebody wanted to turn against you and that's what happened [ __ ] hell i've heard of the sugar water thing again but can you just clarify why they do that it it makes it it damages the skin more it peels the skin off and it it burns much more than just the hot water and it's unrepairable oh my god it's not the first time and the only time i've seen that happen i've seen it happen more than once your fight with that guy darren or dun what daryl daryl was was that the worst injury you got in prison no actually the worst injury i mean i had other fights some i won some i lost i'd say i lost one 110 you know right yeah i i did pretty well i was super fit when i was in prison i really was you know that's the only thing i did i refused to work so the only job they would allow me to do was to work in the gymnasium and that gave me the opportunity to keep super fit oh no but it was more than that it was more about the more i could keep my body physically fit the more i could keep my mind fit because i was fighting my demons every day of being wrongfully imprisoned no the worst the worst the worst was probably from the prison guards i was in wormwood scrubs i was sent there on a lie down a lie down is when you're too much trouble in one prison you're in your cell at the dead of night and the screws come in and they put a hood over your head and they take you out and they put you in a van and they drive you to another prisoner they call it a lie down you know in prison terms which is where you're taking from one prison to another and i ended up in wormwood scrubs and i ended up in the segregation of one with scrubs and wormer scrubs at the time had the most notorious reputation of having this kind of national front racist prison officers down in the segregation unit and i was taken into the segregation unit and i knew what was coming because you don't go down there and survive without a beating but the beating i got from the prison officers was so bad i was already stripped naked because they put me in a padded cell i was already stripped naked no one could hear what was going on and they came in and they kept the [ __ ] out of me they beat me black and blue and i was already naked couldn't fight back because they did what they did to me fortunately for me fortunately for me and what happens is the doctor and the prison governor are supposed to check on prisoners that are in isolation every day and they came into my cell the following morning i'm sort of swimming in my own blood and pain and and i remember the doctor coming in and they have this sheet of paper and you think of this sheet of paper it's got a skeleton diagram on it and they're supposed to mark any injuries from any prisoners and this doctor would often come in and he did it on many other prisoners this was discovered later but he'd hold a piece of paper and he'd tick and say no injuries but me being the person i was i grabbed the piece of paper and his pen and there were no sort of screws around him and i was able to scribble on the piece of paper now because they're sequenced in numbers he couldn't just get rid of that piece of paper lo and behold about four years later i remember getting a letter from a solitaire's firm who were taking on the wormwood scrubs custapo is what they called them so they had this class action and they asked me the simple question you know there was a piece of paper in this document that just showed some scribble but your name was attached to this document and then i was able to explain to them the brutality that i'd suffered and they took a case against and it was one of the first cases against the prison system and the whole system in segregation changed as a result wow even the doctors were on it all of them oh my god governors would turn the blind they come in and they'd see me and it wasn't that occasion they'd see me beaten but i would be blamed for it it's because you didn't conform you were not accepting the regime and you're going to keep suffering this until you do do you think even like the the the white blokes in there were getting that no it was it was indiscriminate i mean black guys more than anybody yeah i think it's because they couldn't understand the culture of black people which is an issue today isn't it i think they misinterpret people but no it was it was anybody you know the charles bronson's of the world they'd get that beat in just as much as i did [ __ ] it you go to wermer scrubs block during that period you suffered wow did you ever think of escaping i didn't actually there was one opportunity i had to escape was that such a bizarre situation because like you didn't take it i didn't take it because i was innocent i wanted to walk i didn't want to run for sure but i would have felt at that point he you you tried all the way through and nothing seemed to be working so then maybe well i think the the reality was as i've said many times the prisons that i was in were very dark and they were maximum security prisons so there was no escape no one escapes from there and there were a couple of big escapes that took place during these years but it was nothing i could ever achieve kind of thing you know tell katie on somebody's back didn't happen but on one occasion during an appeal process where i was you know sort of in the courts trying to get my appeal heard um this was late in my sentence you know i've calmed down now i'm in you know not conforming to the regime but i'm campaigning as opposed to fighting very different you know i was using my head and my knowledge and my insight and the education i gathered rather than trying to fight my way out of prison and i was going to an appeal hearing and by now prison officers have been replaced by g4s or one of these other serco type escort firms you know these private companies um and for me it was very rare that i'd get taken out of a prison and go on a long journey in in one of these kind of sweat boxes these little boxes that they could be called inside the vans and you get put in there and you sit like a little sardine for the journey and i remember getting in this gs4 or whatever it was g4 van we'd gone to the appeal call and these were more civilians than prison guards so they were a little bit more naive and on the way back from the call going to the prison they said they were hungry and wanted to stop to get something to eat bearing in mind i've been in prison probably eight years now yeah and they said they were going to stop at mcdonald's right and i'm like mcdonald's [ __ ] mcdonald's all i've eaten is sort of porridge for the last eight years so they're going to stop at mcdonald's and ask me if i wanted some and i'm kind of looking around thinking are they talking to me but they were and we stopped at mcdonald's drive and they asked me what i wanted i told them what i wanted what i always said when i was outside what was your order quarter panda of cheese with chips and a strawberry milkshake good man i love that that was my thing on the outside they stopped the van but it got bizarre because what they did then is they opened the cubicle door and the cubicle door it was a no-no you don't open a cubicle door on a category a prisoner or a high risk prisoner but they opened the cubicle door handed me my food and didn't shut the door they said you could eat it so i stepped out of the cubicle door waiting for the moment that someone would accuse me because remember i was very paranoid thinking that this was a setup they wanted me to run and i sat on the step of the the van the back door of the van which was now open eating this mcdonald's and the guards you know if i would have run i could have run backwards and laughed at them if they chased me you know i was that fit running marathons around a [ __ ] prison exercise yard that's how fit i was um but i sat on the steps and i'm thinking should i run or or is this a setup is this what they want so they can [ __ ] up my chances of appealing they can then say dangerous prisoner escapes and it just sets me back eight years because i've made progress by now documentaries were being made journalists were writing stories about and questioning my convictions so that was the only opportunity and i didn't take it i yet the quarter pounder with cheese drank the strawberry milkshake they put me back in the coop you come back to prison i went wow very tempted very tempted man that is one of the maddest things i've ever heard the temptation there and it was my first sniff of freedom you know that was the first time that i was able to in-house air from the outside beyond looking up because remember when you're in prison you can't see further than 100 or 200 yards you can only see the blue sky because there are these big solid walls i was never in a prison with just the fence all the prisons i was in had fences and walls so my vision was restricted to the wall you know for all those years i couldn't see beyond the wall i could see up and see the blue sky i was never in a a prison where there were buildings around me so i could look out for myself and see people living their life no it was not like that where i was so being on that step on that van sucking in fresh air seeing normal people walk around and not just prisoners was really bizarre and very tempting you're just sat there in in in handcuffs just i didn't handcuff herself i didn't i didn't have anything i think i don't know if there's many men on the on the planet that wouldn't have taken that but rightfully so because obviously you went on to prove your innocence how long how so how long after the big mac was you did you did you get that that in a quarter pounder sorry yeah come on panda yeah it took another four years actually right it was the downward thing you know the campaigning that started the media was starting to raise questions about my convictions you know the bbc rough justice which was a big kind of program that investigated miscarriages of the time of making documentaries about my case i remember watching it on a small tv that had been smuggled in to the prison cell that i was in i was watching it but by now they'd introduced toilets and i was in the prison without toilets i was hiding on the toilet seat looking at this little screen watching this program about me being the wrongfully convicted prisoner looking up at the door all the time to see if the screw was looking through the spiral but it took yeah four years after that wow what did it feel like when you was in that little cubicle watching it did was that a glimmer of hope amongst the darkness the biggest hope you know once the bbc had done what they'd done which is question the safety of my convictions i knew millions of people had been told i knew for them to even embark on investigating my case when there were lots of other cases going on i mean at the time that i was in prison protesting my innocence there were big cases being released the birmingham six at guilford iv you might not be familiar with these cases but there were some big miscarriages of justice cases coming to light and these convictions were being quashed and there were big questions about the criminal justice system at the time and i was kind of riding on that and it was through these people people like winston silco he was in there for the top and right murder of a police officer it was those kind of guys that were saying to me you can't keep fighting like this look at you you're being broken by the system you need to do it a different way you know you need to do it with a pen and paper rather than your fist right um so so it was a big change but it took four years and then you at this point you'd done 12 is that right 12 years and what was the what was the new evidence or the lack of initial evidence that ended up setting you free well initially it was um the european court of human rights had just been incorporated into british law and we were able to submit almost the same evidence two white men one black man not three black men fingerprint evidence fabricated police playing reward money to witnesses to change their stories because we know that's what happened the daily mao at the time paid a huge amount of money out we didn't know who got that money but it was in the bbc documentary with this guy who secretly recorded admitting that he conspired with the police and received the reward money so we now had new evidence evidence that was never given to us it was known by the police and the prosecution but they withheld that information we were now aware of that because of the bbc documentary and other journalists who had been asking questions so we compiled a document the british courts were never going to accept it but we were able to take that information go to the european court and they ruled unanimously 21 judges from across europe they ruled unanimously that this evidence that should have been provided to the defense at the time of their trial meant we didn't get a fair trial and on that basis unanimously they couldn't refer my case back to the court of appeal but they could insist that the british criminal justice system looked at my case again and that's exactly what they did i know it was a long process that obviously you fought for two for nail but when you get told that you're you're free does that almost feel like despite all the hard work does that almost feel quite instant like is it literally a case of as soon as they decide us that the door's open and you're pushed back out into the world you think so wouldn't you yeah it it it is but it isn't because i remember when the judges crossed our conviction there was this kind of silence in the court did they just say that your conviction's a question you're free are they going to say something else they didn't the judges started to shuffle up their papers and move the public gallery my family my lawyers were all jumping for joy i was still terrified i i didn't believe it was actually happening and i didn't just sort of walk out the front of the court there and then it wasn't like they said all right off you go like you see on television that doesn't happen you know i didn't have hugs with my family and and the lawyers know what they did i they took me back down into the i knew i was three now my conviction was quashed yeah you know i had nothing pending so i i should be so i was taken down and then there's this whole process that takes place down in the belly of the court of appeal where they give me a 54 pound discharge grant and then they have to phone the prison they phone the prison to check that i've got no outstanding um warrants or anything else that they need to keep me on so it took about two hours i was waiting in the call in the cell they still locked me although they left to sell doors open so my lawyers could come down and we could shake hands and do that kind of stuff but it took about two hours before they actually took me to the back door and opened the back door and that's when i was free do they do they treat you like like a like a normal civilian at that point or do they still treat you like a bit of a convict i i i think i was fortunate in that the last 12 months leading up to my eventual release everybody was on site prisoners and prison guards you know they believed in my innocence there was enough out there that was you know questioning the safety of my convictions and the decision about my appeal was pending so people knew the publicity was already saying they're going to be free they can't keep us in anymore right so the dynamics had changed slightly within the prison system but yeah i mean they still did that process they gave me 54 quid that was my district 54 quid what what for the random amount how do they work that out it's your bus fare home although i live in london yeah i don't know how they work that out we spoke about your first day in prison what was your first day back in the real world like i [ __ ] anything i possibly could [Laughter] i wish i wish it was as simple as that no it wasn't let me just walk you through what happened so they when i say they open up the back door it's the only door to the court of appeal it's the one where people are innocent or when their appeals walk out so they opened that door and then my family were there and and and that's the first time i cried in 12 years so i was raised by my family who'd campaigned in all those years so i was able to let go and that was the moment i let go the anger the bitterness and everything that i carried that got me through those 12 years and then i was kind of escorted out of the back door to the front steps of the court of appeal where i then made this statement um about you know spending all those years in prison as a young man and now they ruined my life and then my family and my sisters put me in the back of a black taxi i think it was and for the first time i was handed a mobile phone so i not up until that point ever touched a mobile phone you know i i given it didn't know what to do with it sounds silly but it's true they laughed at me and then i went off and [ __ ] anything i could what was the first meal you had was another quarter pounder i can't remember actually i i really can't remember i don't think i yet for the first two days i was too busy banging away you've got to remember you know i went in as as 20 so i came out 20 yeah although i'd aged 12 years i was still a 20 year old and i wanted to catch up on what i thought i'd missed out on i still am trying to catch up on what i i missed out on i can't remember what the first meal was i can't remember any of that kind of stuff all i know it was good i've got one picture of me holding a glass of champagne with one of my co-defendants as we were celebrating and that was probably the only thing i can remember wow what a story and then you completely flipped your life on its head by making a [ __ ] success of yourself and becoming a journalist like all the things we mentioned at the start documentarian and um we're going to get to that in in the second half of the show but for now i feel like this is becoming like that that prison that you went to in paraguay like the sweats dripping off us so we'll we'll go for a break there we'll go for a wee get some water and we'll come back for the second half of the show when we speak to rafael ro about his uh his netflix show so come back then hello guys and welcome back to jackmates not so happy out i mean i'm happy to be in your company raphael but the story's uh not the happiest happy ending that's a good thing yeah you know it's not in a sort of philippine sort of massage parlor don't start calling this jack mate's happy ending that's what he did on his first day out i exaggerated you know you know i was a seasoned wanker we were gonna we were gonna move jump straight into inside the world's toughest prisons but before that um i remembered i wanted to ask you a bit about the the craze you said that you mentioned you you you knew them in prison or you knew what was it reggie you know reggie yeah i met ronnie when he came to visit reggie in maidstone prison where where i was with reggie i was sort of banged on this side of the landing regime was where you were opposite me so we were banged up opposite each other for about three and a half years so i met ronnie when he came to visit reggie after i think it was their mother died or someone died in their family so they were brought together for one of the very first times right so how long how close were you to to reggie well like you say close i mean um he'd come into myself and have conversations there were some conversations i wouldn't repeat here but i'm going to write it in my book because get that promo in but i knew him well you know he was an old diving man to be honest with you you know he'd been in prison for 35 years and and i'd sometimes walk around the yard with him and i organized the charity football match with him and i remember reggie um for example in prison at the time one of the issued bits of garments that we wore with these blue and white striped shirts you know so today i think they give prisoners sort of grey track suits but back in my day you'd be issued with a blue and white famous shirt with hmp stamped on it so i had a cousin who played for brentford football team at the time and he brought in his team and the manager because they want to see reggie crane not necessarily play [ __ ] football with me but it was it was a charity event and um i had reggie sign all all the shirts um so i knew him well enough um and you know he was a man who you know he could pick out innocent and not innocent prisoners not that he cared about that oh wow but i was i was um i was impressed by the fact that in one of his last books before he died he did write in his book that when he met me um i was probably the only prisoner that he'd ever met who he truly believed was innocent so not in them words but you know it's an accolade when you've got a prisoner of that statue sort of declaring that you know he's seen him all heard them all but he believed me and he even took the trouble to write it in his book and i think that was just after i was released and then obviously when he died i went to his funeral because i'd mingled a mix with all those gangsters you know i was never on their side don't get me wrong yeah but you know i come out of myself sitting on the landing having a cup of tea and they'd all be around me and i was welcomed in the black clip the white click the gangsta click because i was not one of them and i didn't conform to who they were or what they were yeah um so yeah i i got to know him very well you know he's a man um you know came into my cell on one occasion i'm not going to give you too much detail but he came into my cell on one occasion cried his eyes out really sat down there cried his eyes out so you know so he he felt we knew each other enough that he could come and confine in me you know this is a gangster that he has this mythical reputation about him i had a lot of time for him a lot of respect for him not because he was reggie craig the grandstar but because he was a man who survived those many years in prison and and you know i look at people like that's how i'm not gonna [ __ ] be here for that long because he was a divering old man yeah and when i say diver in old man i mean he was someone who had been confined in herself for 35 years or more and so he shuffled around the prison you know he was still as sharp as a razor in the sense that you know he'd always wear clean clothes this gold chain around his neck um he was into sort of you know these kind of wishing well web things that you had hanging so he'd have them all hanging from his cell as if like dream catchers i think you can get them in prison you get lots of things in prison when you're in the deep dark bellies of the prison you can get a lot of things i mean it progressed over the years i mean as i say when i first went it was a piss pot it was a cardboard table and chair yeah over the years you can accumulate things and prisons progressed in that they introduced sanitation so you could piss and [ __ ] in a toilet in your cell as opposed to going down the landing and queueing up and waiting for every other [ __ ] to fill it up so so yeah things did progress and reggie had one of those cells where he had everything in he said and i'm not talking about luxuries i mean you're talking about a small nine by six full of things that he'd get sent in from people you know i go out on visits for example the visiting hall so we all go into the same visiting and then you'd have all wonders of celebrities coming up to visit him really yeah who would come to visit him simply because they wanted to be touched by reggie craig wow sometimes it was the wannabe criminals yeah you know um and and sometimes it was people were writing books or something but reggie was he was it was a sharp man who i i truly believe should have been released to to live the rest of his life outside because he wasn't a threat he didn't have you know he didn't have the pulling power of the gangster i mean he was locked up in the 60s yeah you know he died in prison or he was released just before he died i think he died in norwich actually from where he might have done yeah if i've got the right one because obviously i get the two mixed quite quite a lot is it was it did i guess because the celebrity i was going to ask you whether or not he was aware of his like how famous or infamous he was played up to it did he yeah of course he did i mean he was he wasn't somebody who kind of stood on the landings and puffed his chest out he's too old for that but but but he recognized he always looked to i thought exploit the situation because you know you could earn no money in prison you can't earn money in prison so someone wants to write a book about it about him he'd welcome that person somebody was offering an opportunity to sell his t-shirts he's welcomed those people when people made a lot of money out of him he very got he got very little of that i i i think um but yeah i think i think initially and i didn't know him here as a young man when he was first in the prison but in the dying days when i did know him and i met him not just in one prison but you know i i we kind of crossed paths in other prisons as as well and there are stories about him that i can't share with you now but i'm going to share in my book but but he's you know um he earned a lot of respect in prison but he also lost a lot of respect in prison because of what he become and the way he conducted himself on occasion well negatively it depends how you look at it yeah you know it depends on what your perspective is about people and who they are and what what you believe i suppose people like reggie craig he had a reputation of being this notorious gangsta from this twin and there were films made about in legends and all this kind of thing um but the reality from what i saw with my own eyes and what i heard with my own ears and lots of other prisoners were exposed to that too um and some didn't take to it kindly you know what they saw and what they witnessed was a bit of a bit of a strange character because i've watched a few like movies that depict them and stuff and obviously they dramatize that to sell tickets but he seemed a bit a bit odd was he a bit odd or was he a straightforward london gangster you see what you get it depends what you define as a straightforward london gangster you know he he's not like all the other gangsters in the sense that they've done some time when out might have done something else and ended up back in prison like foreman or some of these other uh sort of notorious gangsters with reputations he's a man who spent many many years in prison so of course he's going to be a bit strange and behave in a particular way you know you couldn't have a a straight conversation like i am with you right now with reggie for too long because his mind would wander and he'd give her off over there and do something not because he was mentally insane yeah or because he couldn't hold the conversation but he lost interest quite quickly and that's the repercussions of a prison cell i mean it happened to me it still happens to me you know so you wander off in a different direction and i've been allowed you know i've got my freedom back and i've sort of taken in new memories and thoughts but he's you know were confined to a prison cell and prison conversations for 35 years i mean what do you talk about after two years you know you've done all the talking you can talk about your memories on the outside now you're just talking about what goes on in prison and the fact is we're all seeing the same things what the [ __ ] you want to talk about that's true i've never thought about that yeah well you know when we did an episode a few weeks back where we we basically did an episode where i was like what would we do if we were stranded on a desert island if you could take one person with you blah blah blah i said didn't i i think it would take three years of living with somebody who's super interesting before they get [ __ ] boring and that's based on nothing yeah i'd say it's shorter really i'd say it's you know based on my experience of being in prison and finding people interesting initially once i told you their story six times times 15 times like reggie for [ __ ] sake have you have you seen um the the film legend tom hardy yeah how accurate is that portrayal i i i i on the outside i don't know because i didn't know him i wasn't even born when he ended up in prison i can only reflect on on on him as a man that i met in prison i'm not going to talk about he's i what i see what i hear i believe that's me and you know his authentic and and that's what i base my relationship on with someone like reggie craig based on our relationship when i say our relationship you know our acquaintance in prison at the time that i knew him he wasn't a mate of mine that would sit down and smoke a joint together or anything like that he had influence in prison but it wasn't a fearful influence it wasn't like oh really no it wasn't a fearful infant people didn't fear him he didn't have an army of prisoners around him prepared to do his dirty work that gone long time ago i suspect that might have been something in the early 70s when he was first in prison and was still a bit of a box i mean he still fancied himself as a boxer even in his 70s he would go out onto the exercise yard and he'd stand there with his shirt off you know he's got this whole man's body but still still looking like someone said that about me the other day actually when they watched his netflix series they said nice body but it's an old man's body now oh sure but he'd go out on the exercise yard in his little kind of skimpy shorts if you like no top on and he bounced around sort of sparring in thin air sometimes you know we'd all do it we'd all have some pads and and stuff and we'd go into a room like this that gets really hot in the laundry room and we'd spa you know a way of working out getting a sweat up and he'd often take part in that and he still had a grip like a lion you know punched like a sledgehammer you know even when he was aging you know yeah and he just had that he had that aura around him where people respected him at least initially you know and then as people knew people would come into the prison you know they'd be in ore and they'd watch him and they that's reggie craig but they'd say that about other prisoners who were notorious at the time whose names you know some of them were notorious for really bad reasons right um um people would say that but after a while when you've seen it five ten times you don't even give it a second glance and he was just one of those it must be weird because he must have been high up in the kind of prison hierarchy sort of thing to start with when you go in and then over the years you get the new fit of younger men coming you see that sort of that foothold on it crumble away you you do and it's really about respecting i mean they still respect him because of the reputation that he's had and this hierarchy that you talk about in the prisons that i was and it existed to a certain extent but it was really about money it was about if you're a gangster on the outside and you know loosely use the term gangster but if you're somebody who was making good money on the outside you know importing traffic in drugs then you've got money so when you're in prison that buys you a lot you know it buys you a lot of influence you know not not in terms of protection power or anything like that but it just means that you've got a little bit more money in your canteen which means you can buy more tobacco which you can then use as contraband to trade and that just brings you power it means you get more i don't know nice biscuits or [ __ ] custard cringe but it is as trivial as that yeah because you don't have the luxuries i mean i'll tell you something when i was in with reggie and a couple of other gangsters who were banged up next door to him it was the first time i saw a quantity of drugs that i'd never seen before in my life and this was in prison a maximum prison and i remember the guy was banged up two doors me so i was and say i was in free reggie was opposite me and then you had a gangster on the right of him a a sort of wife killer i suppose next to me and then some other kind of prisoner and i remember the other prisoner stephen was his name i remember him coming into my cell on one occasion with a sainsbury's carrier bag full of cannabis it was just so much i'd never seen a big lump it was like bulky out now prisoner didn't smuggle that in you know that's the influence that people who have money can have in prison so they pay a guard a guard brings it in and then it gets chopped up by the smaller prisoners and then it's distributed around the prison for a quarter of tobacco or an extra packet of wow biscuits and when he came into my cell and he was terrified because he i remember him coming in with this sainsbury bag full of cannabis and saying he didn't know what to do with it and so i sort of said you need to chop it up into small pieces you know like two pound deals five pound deals and then just plant it around the prison convince as many people as you can who you will pay maybe a little half an ounce or something to look after it um wow did red going back to reggie quickly did he did he draw things did he i've heard that he like used to draw a lot of things yeah i've got a few of those things i mean he what what he would often do um it's it this was these kind of famous thing if yeah if you like so there would often be a picture of him and his brother posing as boxers you know in their younger days and i've got a couple of these myself where he he he'd come and he'd give you these old black and white printed you know off of a printer photograph with his signature on there so he say to my dear friend raphael from reggie craig and he's in his scruffled writing now if you don't and they're not used to his writing you probably couldn't read it because again divering and the same with his writing um but yeah he did used to to draw but that was more charlie bronson charlie bronson i remember when he sent me a copy of his book and he did some very dark drawings you know he's famous for his very dark bloody kind of drawing bit like darley type things you know weird kind of things um that reminds me actually i lent the book to a friend and he's never given me [Laughter] okay i think we'll move on to um to your your latest venture you've been doing it for a few years now but i think series is series four the latest one is just dropped um inside the world's toughest prisons but with raphael rowe you've hosted season two and three and obviously now the fourth one in the in the new season you go to um paraguay germany mauritius and southern yeah is that the one it's a mountainous country and it's a landlocked country in south africa so it's not south africa but it's bang in the middle of south africa right okay and the first one because we'll probably what we'll do guys the listeners out there if you haven't watched this on netflix yet maybe debate pause on this podcast go and give it a watch and and stuff i mean it's a document documentary so there's no real spoilers as it goes but it'd be nice for you to have seen the show and then you can now listen to raphael explain first hand some of the stories and whatnot so i would suggest you go and check it out i spent most of yesterday yesterday watching it fascinating series the first episode obviously um you go to paraguay there we go before you came in he had all of these written down and kept going so how did you say that one how did that one i have the same issue when i'm on the ground actually with some of these terms but then i keep saying and schwarmstart which was the german one i still probably been saying that wrong yeah that was the one that we were actually going through it was transformed but the one in paraguay which was in the the heart of the slums that's been branded um as the world's most dangerous prison do you think it is it depends how you define dangerous i mean i i i it's difficult to compare it it's like no other that i've been to i've never walked into a prison i mean i've been into prisons like in brix um um brazil for example where i met people who chopped other people's heads off and used them as footballs and interviewed and spoken to these these prisoners you know and watch videos of them kicking their heads around and giggling and then i'm sitting down interviewing those guys about why they did it so you know when you talk about violent and dangerous i mean that was was really shocking paraguaya and takumbu shocked me because it was so openly violent in the sense that nearly all of the prisoners that i met openly carried knives and i'm talking about big knives that they talked about using or they smoked crack or meth openly you know and it wasn't something that the authorities did anything about and for me that generates such violence i mean they talk about one person gets killed in that prison every two weeks and i met individuals who had committed those murders some of it doesn't always make the screen but but um yeah it was a violent and dangerous place there's a guy called diego in it that shows you his blade and it must be like a 10 inch blade and i think he said he says then that every everyone has one of those just how safe do you feel in that moment because obviously there's precautions you're working with a netflix team and whatnot but how how safe are you really because if he just put he stood he stood like how we are right now away from you he can put that in you if he's if if he's a nutter you know i think you know when i talk about he hey no you're absolutely right and and and and there have been moments where we have been attacked in paraguay in particular we had snooker balls thrown at our head wow you know by a guy covered in blood he's not in the film because the snooker ball hit the camera and broke the camera kind of thing wow we were and have been attacked in in in paraguay i i think it goes back to that moment i told you about the fight i had in in in england when i was a prisoner and i've been able to look people in the eyes and see what i think is real danger and i experience that every day for 12 years so i like to think sometimes and this is not a guarantee obviously but when i'm talking to individuals like that long before he pulls the [ __ ] knife out yeah i've always or already have made an assessment about whether he is a real and present threat to me and whether he is a danger given the the nature of the job that he's doing and the trust he's been given by the prisons is always taken into consideration as well so i kind of assess the situation long before i have conversations with them and build up a rapport that in itself is is enough to protect me but you're right there's nothing to stop him thinking i mean he he would have a lot to lose but there are lots of prisoners who i've met who wouldn't have anything to lose sticking a knife in me or taking my team hostage is a real threat all the time yeah yeah because i mean to murder yeah it was going to be a bit of a win for a for a guy that's already in prison for the whole whole life you know i mean it's like don't say that he's not doing a season time i don't think they listen to us in prison though all the things i've survived you just set me up for death a shitty podcast host from norwich just signed your your death wish talk us through um the tinglado i think it's called which it was like an outside kind of sheltered or not sheltered maybe it wasn't no it's a corrugated space concrete space and and in that space were were the lows of the lows if you like and that's not my words i'm just trying to describe because i don't consider anybody i think they're unfortunate that they've ended up in that situation but you're talking about individuals in the outside world who are drug habit users you know serious drug problems they get thrown into prison for whatever crime they've committed and they just continue their lifestyle in the confines of a prison space and this space was like nothing i'd seen before i mean i've seen horrendous prison conditions but i've never seen anything like that in numbers of prisoners that i saw in that tin lado which is where individual prisoners are sleeping on concrete floors or they're sleeping on bits of cardboard or really dirty smelly and you can't emphasize you can't smell the television but fat believe me you can smell it when you're standing there you know their [ __ ] and pierce um and they just openly use drugs and trade drugs among themselves all day long openly in front of the prison guards you know in the film you'll see people swinging little knives around that they use to cut up their drugs but also to protect themselves and probably use to attack other people i think that you know you can't i can't emphasize how dangerous that that space is and it's controlled by one drug lord who i met and spoke to in there he is in paraguay the biggest drug dealer in the slums outside so he controls not only the drugs on the outside but he controls the drugs throughout the paraguayan prison system [ __ ] he was moved out what was really interesting about this this guy he's a big muscly guy you know he's somebody that doesn't use drugs himself clever guy but he he was moved out of the prison and the riots kicked off so the director had to bring him back to the prison to supply the prison with drugs so that they could reduce the violence which is what i say at the end as i walk out you know to keep the peace he allows this to go on the director told me i remember sitting in the office speaking to him and he said to me i remember the name of the guy but he sort of said he came into the office put a load of money on the table and he said that's for you for allowing me to continue what i'm doing and bringing me back and the director said to me said to me he didn't take the money right yeah but they're still doing it wow that's insane because i think at one point you mentioned that there's 125 inmates to every one officer no there are 35 guards to 4 000 prisoners so whatever that equates to you probably brian right no but that probably is what your question is so 35 guards on any one occasion who work at that prison and that's not being in the prison at that very moment you're talking probably 10 guards on any one occasion trying to that the prisoners police themselves that there is this kind of trust amongst the prisoners and in this particular prison there are different areas as you saw the lado and then you've got the space that i was in and then you've got the other kind of market place and all these little i mean i'd never where i did the tattoo and i thought i did a good job actually under the circumstances for sure yeah given that i was tattooing the boss of the market area yeah one mistake and i wasn't leaving there i couldn't believe where he was i mean he was the kingpin intern of the market area so he rents out all the shops where all the prisoners to apply their trade but where he was sleeping was like in a sewer it doesn't really come out as you see it in the film it was dark and dingy but it was like i had to go through this rabbit warren of a broken down dungeon down into this what looked like a very deep cellar no windows no light which is where he slept it was just it was just so bizarre and it wasn't allocated to him by the authorities it was a space that the kingpin took for himself wow out of anywhere and he's he's chosen chosen that or is that just because of the options he's got available i think it's because it's the furthest away from from threat because you can't come at him from behind you can only come at him from the front so if he's there at the very corner of that space no one can attack him from the ice we can see what's coming wow and he probably has guys in the little stairwells and corridors so plotted and protecting him i mean there is a a method to this madness it's not just diabolical there is a clever instinct going on there now you're a presenter that doesn't mind getting his hands dirty because we see it we see in that episode when you the pris as a prison truck drives past drops loads of prism waste um i think it is in that thing isn't it yeah and yeah and and you you get in and help him sort of like forage for stuff what kind of stuff is what was was we looking at there you think about putting all of your vegetables into a blender taking out any goodness in it and any food in it and then it's just little bits of skin and bone and seeds that are left mixed with piss and [ __ ] mixed with anything that's discarded i mean you think of a you think of your rubbish bin and what you put in your rubbish and then throw out at the end of the day times that by 500 and then you get a sense of how there is nothing in there when he was searching i was in genuine shock at him scavenging and other prisoners some they wouldn't take part during that bit of the filming but you saw they then jumped on the van and they were rummaging to this container but honestly i could i was picking up bits of things that i wouldn't even give to well i wouldn't give it i wouldn't even give it to the rubbish and yet he was taking it and saw there was a commodity there and there [ __ ] is he could make money out of those bits of things and i i thought he was taking it to eat for himself initially i thought okay you found yourself a pee you found yourself a rotten orange that's already been eaten and all you've got left is the white bit of dry skin oh but he told me that what he did with this stuff was that he then prepared he prepared a meal with it and then sold it to another prisoner so it wasn't even for himself it was to make money to support his drug habit and then and then he got these plastic bottles and was cutting them and using them as commodities yeah to other prisoners that fascinated me because when he's picking up all these dirty bottles and they're still full of [ __ ] on the inside and then you see you see later on this is why i say to people you should you really need to watch the show before you get involved in this but you see later on that when you when you you're all being handed out the um little bits of food that they get like the roles in that he's cut the bottles in half to make a bowl in which he's then selling for other other bread rolls and stuff i mean clever guy i guess it is i mean initially and this is why this is why it's important it's because a face value you think a scavenger scavenging through that such a low life but there is a purpose to his reason you know he does it for a reason and you have to sit back and sort of say oh my god because he does he you know he he sells it for the bread rolls the bread rolls then he sells to prisoners who want extra it made sense yeah that makes sense but initially if we just cut out there or i walked away then it doesn't make sense it just you know here's another prisoner which escapes which is what we do in british documentaries we just show the bad and not tell the whole story yeah and we can't do that entirely here but at least we finish his story and show that there is a method to his madness yeah for sure in that same episode you see it you see a shrine um to police officers that have lost their lives while working at that prison and i mean it's quite graphic but some of them had lost their lives through like prison riots stabbings fires now the for a prison officer losing his life um or i guess it's always male that work in them than prisons is it or no you do get females right well his or hers life um is always a tragedy um stabbing seemed like the most common thing but you go on to say in the show that there was there was a guy that had been beheaded which is [ __ ] next next level next level stuff did you feel like when you heard that it was time to [ __ ] off out of there or it's not the first time i've heard it and and i know the backstory i mean the back story starts from the very first episode i do which is in portavelo in in brazil and what you have there is you have what you don't have almost anywhere in the world maybe south africa potentially but but but in brazil you have two faction gangs the pcc and the red command and these are warring drug gangs not just in prison they were created in prison but they they now spread out and across the whole of brazil and they're now moving into other territories like paraguay so what was happening in paraguaya is the brazilian drug gangs who controlled the drugs and and you know these are big drug dealers but they they control all the prisoners you know i can't emphasize that these guys do have control over the prisoners and what's happening in paraguay at the moment is the pcc the brazilian gangs are going into the paraguayan prisoners and they're trying to take control from the guy that i met so it was his friends or he's comrades or whatever that had their heads taken off just a couple of weeks before i'd gone there and that was the brazilian's way of sending a message to him that they're coming and so when i met him he had an entourage of prisoners around him it was quite intimidating actually and i think the reason that that interview didn't make the film is because he was very it was just a very difficult interview to get across because he had this entourage denied everything that he was in there for and i just thought he's not cooperating in the way that we need him to cooperate in this i mean i would love to have seen what he had to say in the film but sometimes you have to make decisions um but that's the reason so when i'm talking to people it's because the pcc are now inflicting the beheadings in paraguay like they do in brazil on a regular basis i mean if you saw what i've seen in brazil in terms of the the bodies piled high without their heads in the prison following the the the fighting between the two gangs it's horrifying you've seen that hell and then i meet i meet the guys who are involved who kind of but but it's a it's a different culture you know it it's their world you know it's like i was saying at the very beginning of this podcast you know my world of growing up on a councillor state and criminality being around me was all i knew well you know magnify that million times and go into the slums of brazil and all these guys know is murder and it means nothing to them absolutely nothing to them to take someone's life or to even lose their own life when you're standing in front of a young man of 18 and you're saying to him you know why don't you look for something different he said he's deaf or you know kill or be killed and they mean it yeah they genuinely mean it it's shocked there's a guy in in the in the final episode in the fourth one that tells you that he would die for money and it's such a sad sad outlook on life isn't it but i mean they're from much sort of tougher upbringings than i can ever ever imagine then we move on to um the second episode which was how do you pronounce it stevie schwarmstadt schwarm start this was a a complete contrast in a way to the to the first one in paraguay where they brand this as the therapy prison don't they so so there's a scene when you when you first this is in germany by the way and when you first go in they i was shocked to see they give you your own keys to yourself is that anything you've ever experienced before never never you know i was so anti-prison i would never lots of prisoners when it's bang-up time they bang their own door you know go behind the door everybody's got to be behind for a certain time and then i was never one of those the screws always and they didn't like me for it because it meant they had to walk along the corridor and i was always in the corner itself the reasons i said earlier no one can attack you then and and i never shut my door so it was always shut for me there's never a handle inside or a key inside so yeah it did shock me and surprise me but but don't let that fool you it doesn't mean that those prisoners can let themselves in and out of that cell at any time there is still a control by the guards they have access to their cells during their unlock period so they can enter and exit their own cell but during the lock-up period they are confined and can't come out of the ceiling oh right i think maybe that's what i didn't get i thought they could just like freely go around was that was that prison on a hole was that way more relaxed than the other ones there was a tension about it because um when i first got there and and the dynamics are important in all of the prisons and the building of the trust whether that's because prisoners find out that i myself have been to prison so they give me a little bit more respect and time whether it's because i build up a trust through the questions but germany um it initially started out where they were very cooperative and prisoners wanted to talk to me you know i was playing football with them and i kind of got in with them by the end of the film there was a real animosity going on and i don't know where that came from to my whole filming team oh right you know there was an animosity that you felt there were people that we were hoping to speak to that i cultivated in the early days yeah that had been warned by other prisoners not to talk to us and that doesn't happen very often but it's always something i'm worn in my team that i'm working with most of the people that come in with me have never been in prison before never been inside a prison before yeah so they're going go and talk to a prisoner quite openly like it's their mate and i'm sort of saying next week you're going to be killed because that person now knows where you live how old you are whether you've got a family what hotel we're staying at you're putting us all at risk i'm always telling my team that when we're not actually filming in the moment get you back up against the wall so you can see everything that's going right around you because you just don't know whether there is that person you've now set up to kill me out there or in there there is always a real present threat you know this is not staged we don't go in there with with we have a format but like in germany the the the atmosphere changed and it changed quite quickly where people were not cooperating luckily for us it was at the end of the shoot and we've got most of the characters that we had spoken to but it was quite a tricky one i think when you when you emphasize that how real it is and how it's not set up i think that shines through by the fact that you are quite clearly in some scenes like unnerved and like a little bit a little bit on edge has there ever been a moment during filming the whole series or all of the series that it's been too much and you've had to like get out of there i i think you're thinking about lesotho i think the pseudo was for me for the very first time and and even in british prisons where i come face to face with guys who wanted to kill me and like to fight for my life or at least talk my way out of a situation um even then when it was threatening and dangerous i don't think i ever have ever felt as uncomfortable as i did during the initiation period in the lesotho episode yeah where i go into this this dormitory with all these prisoners i'd already been warned if you saw just before i get into the dormitory this bloody guard is saying to me as i'm carrying this mattress that you're on your own you know these guys will rape or kill you and and there will be no one there to protect you so be prepared for that and he meant it he wasn't just it wasn't for effect he was telling me the existence of what i was about to experience what all prisoners who go their experience let's jump there now and we'll go back to the the german one in a minute and this is this is the one in in southern southern africa and um the prisons very much populated by a lot of sex offenders isn't it i think you mentioned at one point that 45 of of the inmates in there had been had been sentenced because of um rape and and whatnot so i mean i think we're all in agreement that's pretty much the worst crime there that there is and and you you um you often mention that in the show because you go from maybe a prison where you might you're always speaking to the to like people that have committed horrible crimes but you might have gone from like a prison a prisoner who's robbed a few cars you know in this prison you're facing on the people that you're very outspoken about for the right reasons but does that mean how does that change your approach to to enter in that that prison when you know they've done those things i i try to not let it change my approach but i can't but help when i'm looking a man in a face who's committed such a horrendous crime and it's the same for murder but my reaction is different because maybe because i was accused of a murder i didn't commit maybe because murder is definitive you know you've killed someone um the victims are suffering but they're still it's a different they're still living with the fact that they've lost a loved one or something it just feels slightly different i i always try to remain professional and i always try to to not judge the individual but i can't help but look at that person in the face and think what you've done is is is pre-meditate you can kill someone because jack mean you could have a fight right now you fall over you hit your head what happened to my dad that's exactly what happened to my dad yeah he got he literally got in a fight with with um short story joanna shall i just say that he um he he was in thetford and i think one of his his mates at the time got pissed and uh some older bloke in the pub challenged him to a race to norwich um which is about 30 30 mile drive and uh my dad was like he's not doing it he's not doing it and then the guy's turned around and was like who the [ __ ] are you is you his boyfriend whatever blah blah blah they ended up just having a scrap my dad's always brought me up to not fight he's always said just just run away because he knows the the other side of the coin and then my dad hit him and then the guys fallen to the floor hit his head and then died and now for the rest of my dad's life he has to he has to walk around with people knowing that he's killed someone he did six years for manslaughter so you're exactly right yeah that's uh to put you back on your train of thought what you were saying that things can turn in a in a moment where there's a shocking story i mean um but you know i'm sure you learned a lot lot from that whereas something like rape it requires premeditation you take someone you take their clothes off you violate them in a way where you're doing everything that you're doing is pre-meditating in my my view you know you're doing things deliberately you nick something from a sweet shop to sell or whatever you have a motive to make money because you can't afford to feed your kids or something yeah so i kind of measure it in in that sense so going into this particular prism where i knew most of the offenders were um in there for sexual offenses i tried to put it into context and the culture that they come from you know it's difficult to measure who they are with who we are and how we sing things in in our world because you know some of them come from a remote part of the world where they're i wouldn't say they're uneducated but they're not um as educated about certain things that we are so their education is different i would never say anybody is more educated than anybody else of course you can be more academically but your experience and my experiences are very different and my education is very different from yeah it doesn't make you any better than me that you went to at a university or blah blah blah yeah so i'm not demeaning these people that i met simply because they come from a remote region um and they don't have very much in daddy-daddy so so so their world revolves around the the law which allows them to yeah to to have sex with women women are considered as second citizens so they live in a world where they the culture of it is completely different i get exactly what what you're trying to say i i really do like it doesn't mean that we're sat here saying oh it's any less wrong in those countries but they've been brought up on a culture that that's ingrained into their brains so often like or maybe you could even argue a case do they really know how wrong that is well yeah they do there's one guy in there isn't there who i meet in the workshop who's now doing 70-something years yeah and i really genuinely and it made me think for the very first time i really genuinely don't believe that he knew because he you know you got the bit that you get in the the episode but i spent more time as i do with these people he's a young lad isn't he he was a young lad and he was a feral lad who was doing lots of things but as he was describing to me the crimes that he committed previous to the the sexual offenses and whatever he didn't see it any different than burglary in a house or or doing something because he didn't consider taking a woman and raping her with these friends as as any more of a crime than a driving offense or something like that not because he didn't think that the crime was serious enough but he doesn't know any different and that was hard to to comprehend so when i came away from that interview i thought to myself [ __ ] you know for the first time i'm questioning if people really understand the crimes and the nature of the crimes that they committed yeah there was the other guy um who was doing quite a lot of years i think i've been up 15 years for rape and you asked how old the girl was and he said 10 or 12. and when he said that that kind of shocked me so i said how could you not know the age like obviously at the time you wouldn't but once you've been convicted you think that's something that would stick with you and if that doesn't it's just so casual like it just seemed a little bit strange to not know the answer to that question he seemed to have a i mean i wasn't there i wasn't looking into the man's eyes he seemed to have a bit of remorse about it but the scary thing was with him before because you you you speak to this guy you know like the chubby lad that you're you're cleaning the rugs without doing my little dance yeah yeah yeah um you're chatting to him before you ask his crime um for us quite some time god knows how long it was before the before the cameras were on or what got cut out but we even see it as the viewers that you're chatting to him for quite some time and i mean i'll be the first to say he just seemed like a normal lad he was having a laugh about him about him being chubbier than you and it was just like it's somebody you could bump into down the shops like he was no different and then i see your face changed the moment that he told told you that he'd raped a 10 year old kid how do you as an interviewer i mean we're lucky we get lovely people like you and youtubers but i don't know how you would approach your approach to that man must have changed halfway through that conversation but i think that's key to what i do i think it's important for what i do i don't find out i knew that a lot of the prisoners in that particular prison were in for sex offenses i don't know who they are i don't find out what somebody has done before i speak to him so i don't want my team to tell me that he's in for rape and he's done that on occasion i know you know the mass murderers that are in cells in cells in sales i know that because they wouldn't be there and i wouldn't be taken there if we weren't sort of convincing the authorities to give us that kind of access so i didn't know what he was in prison for right i i knew he was a prisoner obviously and i met with him and we had this little bit of bantamweight you just knew you were having a little dance with him washing the things um not knowing what his crime was anticipating it and as the conversation evolved he told me that he was in for raping a 10 12 year old girl and so you get my natural reaction um in the same way i would if someone gave me a joke and made me laugh you know so i'm going to be shocked by what he said because that's how i feel about that particular crime and so it genuinely i think comes out but it is part of the format that i do tell my team for 90 of the people i meet that i don't know what they're in for do you prefer to find out after getting to know them as a person first because a lot of the time you always asked a few minutes into the interview obviously in your world you would have spoken to him a lot more before that moment well i think you just hit then now on the head when you sort of said he seemed like a lovely guy and that's how i'm judging people beforehand they're a prisoner i was a prisoner and i'm a lovely guy i wasn't then but i'm a lovely guy now kind of thing so so i i think it's unfair to judge someone based on the fact that they're in prison once you know what they're imprisoned for what they've done what they think about that whether they're remorseful or not et cetera et cetera et cetera then you can make a judgment your dad you said he's been in prison for manslaughter people judge him as being you know if he was just judged as a man who's committed this crime no one would but you know him as your dad he's the loveliest man in the world he's brought me up with all my morals and everything that i have yeah and i wouldn't be like the success that i think i am today without without him he's taught me everything so i think i think it's really admirable how you do that and i think it's it's testament to your work and why you are you are a great journalist because you do go in with a very open mind and and you're able to because as you just quite rightly said you've been that person in prison that people look at as a monster when you know you're not so jack if this if this country had its way i would have been hung when the when the tabloid newspapers were calling for this m25 gang to be um caught they were called in to bring back hanging so they could have hung me if i was in america i'd have been dead so i was being called a monster it's been called all the things under the sun's nothing worse is there to be be called that and bounce back so i think it is important that i allow people to to get a feel for who this person is like m pity he was another one the guy who i played that game with the stones yeah and in the room but look at the [ __ ] horrendous crime that he committed you know not and and i can't comprehend that he you know carjacking okay you got the car you got what you set out for why'd you rape the woman and he just said because i could because she didn't give me what i wanted when i wanted it and it's like jaw-dropping stuff it's like how can you say that how can you even think that but before i knew that i got to know him all right he tried to rape me in the sun and kill me that i tried to run out of but it's about trying to get to know people before you judge them based on what other people have told you about what was that like that you just just joked about that moment that he tried to rape you but is that black and white really isn't it like you go into the you go into the cell you meet i think there's didn't they say there's 13 other cellmates in there um nine of them had been in for sexual offenses mainly rape what is that like i i know that most of my questions today is like what is that like but i can't think of anything better to say like well i i set it up by saying this i don't know where i'm going who i'm going to meet the team sometimes go into the prison maybe a week before i go in and they try and identify that i mean it's kind of research they're going in you know what what's it like where are we going are we going to be safe so they do that and then they meet a couple of individuals they won't meet everybody but they meet a couple of individuals so when i come into the prison and i'm being processed i don't see anything until i get off of that prison van in handcuffs and enter that prison and it's all real they're told to treat me like a prisoner the prisoners know that we're making a documentary obviously not everybody does you know there have been occasions where the cameras are pointing in that direction i'm in the prison uniform leaning up against one prisoners have come up to me and sort of confronted me and like you're the new prisoner what are you and what it is that and the other i'm with them mates don't don't you know i'm with this camera and then they back off quite quickly but when i walked into that dormitory um i'm meeting them for the first time and we often ask the prisoners to treat me like a prisoner if i was a real prisoner coming what would you do um sometimes they and they roll up a little bit you know we're not asking them to act or anything you know if it's just welcoming me put their arm around me make me feel comfortable and say you're not one of us live with us but in this occasion um that's what they do and they openly admit it and so when i was sitting there having been told by the the screw the prison guard not too long ago that you know i'm on my own and they could kill or rape me i'm now sitting there and these guys are sort of saying and they was deadly serious i i'd like to think that i can read these guys but they were coming at me in a way that for the first time made me feel very intimidated and scared in in this whole series a prisoner was killed in costa rica in in the block next to me that didn't scare me guys were telling me they were going to stab me if i didn't pay them money and i told him i got my two phones in colombia yeah somebody tweeted me about that yesterday and said the [ __ ] balls on you to stand there and do that for some reason a lot of listeners watchers and viewers think i've got balls of steel i just want to correct the record they're just like [Laughter] but yeah i was for the first time quite scared and genuinely i didn't run to that door for dramatic effect or entertainment i for the first time felt really uncomfortable and scared because i knew i could be overpowered it's one thing having a one-to-one or fighting two people but when i ran to that door um i wanted to get out of there and then as i got to the door the atmosphere changed quite quickly and then i stopped and i thought when this door's locked you can't get out of here and anybody that comes in here for real would suffer what i was about to to suffer or what they told me they were going to do real or not and then we kind of i tried to use the i've been in prison i'm tough and i'm i'm not so you know i tried to turn the situation and it worked to some extent yes but it was genuine yeah watching that i found really uncomfortable and then obviously later on in that episode they then tell you that they do actually do that and that they have wives in the prison and that you were going to be their wife wife uh i found it quite funny though when when you're dashing out in the you moment not want to leave your shoes let them go i like how they won't know though they didn't even try and grab you we're having a knife i think you you've grabbed one didn't you and like because i know you got on tricho yeah i wasn't successful you know i needed to run once i'm out i put them on and then just shoot off yeah i don't know why it was all instinctive it was all in steam because i don't know what to expect i don't know whether they're going to welcome me give me a bowl of soup or something give me a glass of water or what really happened which is what really happened there and and you know the environment the the setup before i got there and everything made it all the more incredibly uncomfortable it's an absolutely fascinating show check it out if you haven't already i mean there's a there's a lot of shows out there that are like that that explore tough prisons and whatnot but seeing it from your angle as a man that's experienced it for real for for 12 years is um is something else i think what there was a guy in the same one we were talking about the name i keep forgetting the name oh the end of the episode the last interview well there's there's two that fascinate me in that like in the southern african one yeah i feel like you you've met a lot of um the worst of the worst the the crate the crazy people and whatnot there's two in in i think both in or in this episode and the first one that i'd like to speak about is the uh the rapist guy with the car tires and stuff like that that was in mauritius was that oh okay three island place where right okay before we get to that then the one that i must be thinking of is the the man that killed is you know what i'm gonna say can you can you tell us a bit about him so i'm um we're always looking to meet and talk to interesting people i say interesting people people that will commit crimes um and then i hear about this individual who done some despicable crimes didn't know what they were i was just told that he uh generated a lot of publicity in a country that doesn't normally write about these sort of things so i asked to meet him the um prison guard said to me a day later or something he'd be up for talking to you so off i went to meet this guy i didn't know what he was in for so i then sit down outside the cell of this prisoner who comes he's got very shifty eyes so i i couldn't look him in the eye and read him it's a bit harder than normal we sat down and i started talking to him about what he was in there for and he told me that under the influence of some hallucinated drugs that he took that were given to him by a witch doctor he then and his wife killed their four children they four small kids so i think the smallest was two years old the oldest was 12 years old they killed all four of their children um what was not mentioned in the film was that they also cut the hearts out of these kids and buried themselves oh my god he hadn't been convicted so i'm gonna say as a disclaimer you know he's in this until proven guilty although he admits what he did what his defense is that he did this under the influence of a witch doctor now why i'm not comfortable with what he has to say is because he committed these crimes buried the bodies of his kid hid the hearts of these kids and then continued living his life for the next four months and it was only because it wasn't like he was caught overnight and now regrets it because the drugs have worn off he tried to conceal as did his wife for the next four months and it was only because the local villagers in the village that he came from in this remote part of the world started to smell death and so they were then asking where are your kids we haven't seen your kids for a long time they kept fobbing them off saying that they were you know away with relatives and then lo behold they then brought in the village police who then searched their farm and found the bodies of these kids and they said that they did it because and and again i put this in there these people do come from a world where they believe in witchcraft in the same way that people here believe in christianity or or or other religions you know so they believe in witchcraft and i just couldn't believe why he was telling me he was prepared to kill his kids because it was going to bring him wealth and fortune so replacing your kids for money killing your kids for money it was just shocking it was horrible do you think the witchcraft stuff holds up in court there as well it does so there is a chance that he would actually get if he can prove if his lawyers can prove that he had taken the drug that then made him act um out of character or whatever that's putting it lightly yeah then the chances are that and because it's it's been known other people have um hell with the details with that with the hearts are particularly gruesome is that the reason that that didn't get put kept in the final cut of the of the netflix show it's because it's gruesome but not really it's more to do with time you know we've only got 48 minutes and and you know there's lots of questions around all of these characters and there's more details even chubs who i kind of did the dance with you you know it turned out to be a kiddie rapist remorseful or not there's there's more to his story than meets the eye you know he's a wife for example would deny it to me on camera but the reality is you know one of the reasons he survives in there is because he he's become the wife of another prisoner but he would never admit that to me so there are lots of elements that we can't always bring into the film i'd love to i'd love to just allow it to play out because there's some fascinating stuff that don't always make the film um so yeah that's why i'm such a privilege to have you here today to hear hear the stories that didn't quite make the cut i guess that is my next question is there any has there ever been a moment like a big big moment that you thought would perhaps make the show that hadn't made the show for whatever reason well i'd say the whole [ __ ] lot should be in here yeah yeah yeah yeah because i go through a lot you know going back into this environment talking to these murderers and rapists and kid killers and and shoplifters and thieves and whatnot and it takes a lot out of me you know i spend a lot of time um no i think we do a good job at trying to reflect because it's not just about the entertainment it's not just about the gruesome stuff and the harrowing stuff and the scary stuff it's also about the bigger picture what is prison for does it rehabilitate what are the conditions like have they got the right resources are the staff protected in the way you know so the picture is bigger so we have to include those things which is why i spend a day with the guards trying to find out more about their side and if and when possible a member of parliament or a politician who runs the prisons to try and put it all into context because i think it's bigger than just an entertainment for me it is right i wouldn't just go in for the titillation factor i mean that comes out in itself but i try to remain true to who i am yeah all through the show there are obviously occasions where i have to do things i'm not comfortable with but i i i do them um but you know the paraguay i talk about you know i'm about to interview pablo he's the guy with a tattoo and he's become a cool celeb in paraguay at the moment i'm told that he's been moved to another prison because of the show because of the show yeah is he the tattoo artist he's the tattoo artist you know i mean brutal you know assassination of his dad and shot his another one of his relatives and he gives good reason for doing that he's good reason the right thing i mean he explains why he and there's more to his story but am i understanding that he's gone on to become quite a cool you know a famous individual but while i was playing pool with him when i first met him and i was beating him at the game i'm just going to point that out a transgender individual i don't know transvestite or as a transgender but he approached the pool table um out of camera shot covered in blood so blood was running down his face and as i looked up he picked up a snooker ball and threw it at me i was able to kind of left side it because i'm fast like that so it didn't hit me he picked up another one and threw it at my cameraman who is where you are so you imagine the camera on that side of your head by the time he turned around the ball hit the camera there was no rushing of guards to protect us because there's none around we're on our own we we have one guard who if when necessary opens and locks doors so we can get through the prison because you can't give them to the prisoners yeah but it kind of it was kind of a moment where you thought do you attack him do you do do you go after him how do you respond none of the prisoners kind of responded because they say that on a daily basis and it just kind of defused itself quite quickly few people laughed i think his partner or friend came put his arms around him and pulled him away my my thinking is the reason he did that is because he wanted us to film with him and because we didn't film with him because i think he kind of offered himself up as somebody who could give us an interview um i don't know why we didn't film with him but we didn't and then he got nakey about it and that's not the first time that's happened and i'm constantly reminding my team that we must show respect to all of the prisoners and not just the ones that we're meeting and talking to because it's the guys that are behind us who are watching us and listening to us who are getting jealous and envious maybe that they're not on the camera and want to be so they then start to poison other prisoners and that puts us in real danger so i'm always telling the team to be aware of that and conscious of that when i was interviewing let me give you this one when i was in and i know you're going to go there in a minute the mauritius guy i sit there and as well as doing the interview and you don't need to do this with me jack neither of you do when i'm sitting there and i'm talking to those guys who have committed these horrendous crimes i'm thinking he comes at me with the left hand i'll block it like that and then i'll punch him in the face if he comes at me straight like that i'll go for his neck and start strangling so i'm thinking defense mechanism although i'm interviewing them about their horrendous crimes if they're unpredictable so i'm not just sitting there taking in the answers i'm thinking how am i going to defend myself if this guy decides there's a moment here of him attacking me because i don't have guards around me to protect me and that paraguaya incident reminds me all the time that the threat is real imagine that i mean i stress enough just asking questions let alone the threat of being punched or stabbed let's go there so the one in the mauritius it was um it was called melrose wasn't it the prison and that one um was branded as the extreme punishment prison and i think i'm right in saying three years ago was it three years ago they had a change in kind of like the government and the leadership of the prison and it went from being quite a relaxed kind of place where the prisoners could pretty much do what they want um to being very regimented and everything was banned even down to the cigarettes which seemed to surprise you quite a lot on there good thing or a bad thing the banning of the cigarettes or the changing of the regime let's go to the to the banning of the cigarettes that like just how strict it was is that is that a bad thing yeah i i i think it is actually because i think you're taking away something you know look when you lock somebody up regardless of the crime they've committed um that's the punishment the punishment is taking their liberty locking them up in prison and saying you are now not a part of society once you're in prison that in my view is punishment and enough you know it's tough i don't care where you are in the world and people often say to me you know that's a bit of a luxury prison that one's shocking but for me when your liberty is taken away you're taken away from the people you love and all that kind of thing let's forget the crimes for the moment i'm just sort of the reality of prison that's what it's about to then go on and punish the prisoners in prison by taking away things like cigarettes not giving them um you know access to having a shower keeping their self clean their hygiene and stuff like that that is excessive punishment and taking away their cigarettes in this particular prison um yeah it is used and i mentioned in my time in prison you know tobacco and cigarettes are a commodity it makes the prison work and for a lot of the guards they don't mind it because it means those who don't have any support outside and can't afford to buy those sort of things they can work in the prison doing certain things to earn those things taking away those cigarettes created but it wasn't just taking away the cigarettes in this particular prison it was the the sort of rod iron fist that this this new director had come in with and he was kind of running a regime that was quite eerie it was very austere it was very intimidating you know i i go into prison prisoners they're quite happy to talk because they're they're they're outgoing you know tough guys some of them or whatever but these guys were terrified to talk because of the consequences the consequences of telling me or sharing their stories um which is interesting because you know our negotiations with the prisons is that they cannot control who we speak to where i go you know providing it doesn't um you know expose security or anything that's going to jeopardize their working yeah so when the prisoners have been very cagey and scary and you saw that in this particular business because they were fearful that's horrible isn't it that is like that what what there's basic human rights to prisoners isn't there no matter what they've done surely and therein lies the dilemma is there you know once you've done something that warrants you being sent to prison where does the punishment stop what rights do you have in this country we don't have the right to vote if you're in prison and that's one of your ones you 18 it should be a right that you decide who runs this country whether you're a prisoner or not but you're not allowed to do that and it can be really extreme in other prisons and this was a prison that was really extreme but having said that there are things you saw me doing a little bit of tai chi and whatnot so they do offer other things and i'm a strong believer that if you if you succumb to the punishment and live by that suffering it will make your time in prison a lot harder as it did my time i think if you buy into taking part in opportunities to change your life then you can benefit it was quite strange to see obviously over the episodes prisons at completely opposite ends of the scale so in the first prison they were doing crack just out out in the open and then in that prison they couldn't even do anything without a garden smoke a cigarette is that where they mentioned the water the water cell probably seems strange probably the most shocking punishment i've ever heard in prison and i mean prison as you quite rightly said is punishment enough but yeah talk us through that water cell well what the guy told me is that when you get put into the cell and you saw the guy looking through the eyes i call him you know he was like i was taken to the segregation block to see what it was like and then i kind of reminisce this is what punishment is like you know when you're confined in here for 23 hours a day kind of closes in on your mind and if you're here for long enough it will do psychological damage i'm psychologically damaged from those experiences and when i walk out of that cell i see these eyes looking out of the the thing okay this guy was on medication and i speak to him but before that i spoke to another prisoner who very cagely told me that when you go into the punishment block one of the punishments is that they fill the cell up with water so that you can't sleep on the floor so they take your mattress out i mean that happens in british prisons when you're on punishment they take the mattress out so you have to sit on the hard floor you've got nowhere to lie on because they see that as a luxury um happen to many occasions so they take the mattresses out so all it is is concrete you know the concrete made up inside the cell and then they fill the cell with water so that you can't lie down on the floor [ __ ] it as simple as that part of the opponent the guard obviously denied that the prisoner said it's true who do you believe yeah there was a bit of uh yeah strange we were just saying how how do you actually know it seems like a very strange thing for someone to make up it it does um and why would he just say that he could have said they'd come in and beat you yeah he could have said a number of different things it's so specific i think i think i think we all kind of know who we believe in that situation well the truth of the matter is that the guard that said to me it doesn't happen said nothing [ __ ] happens now i i spoke to him sort of off camera if you like or or when they're telling me fibs and and and trying to paint a different picture um you know i speak to them about other things and and and which is why you see me walking down the corridor and we talk about me being to the left to him and him saying that i'll keep you to my left side and i'm sort of saying what so you can't punch me with your right hand i didn't just make that up at the top of my head it's because of what i've been hearing going on in that segregation unit from guards as well so there are some guards who will tell you off-camera what really goes on and that i think is a reflection of that regime the the this is not mama's house this is the kind of thing he is you know i think he's trying to do the right thing i just think he does it in the wrong way in the same way that the director in the belize episode for example which is not in these four but one of the previous episodes talks about people are born evil and criminal and that's his mentality that only you know god can change their behavior and i'm kind of like you think people are born with criminal genes yeah where'd you get that from so it's what you hear off a camera that sometimes dictates what i talk about on camera in the best possible way i can without exposing what i've been told why do the prisons allow the filming what what why do they want to be broadcast i think the bottom line is in somewhere like paraguaya it's because the director who's trying to run that establishment can't run it because he doesn't have the finances and by exposing it to the world it's as simple as that people see how bad this place is and i've had lots of messages from people on social media who come from that country or from outside of that country have said to me what can i do how can i help can i set up a charity you know some wealthy people as well who've come and sort of said can we do something although they talk about the corruption and how difficult it is but i think that's the bottom line they want to show either how good they are like the german prison you know we run our prisons on therapy we look at rehabilitation norway it's same um paraguay because we don't have the resources because it's this hidden world and they want their communities because often somewhere like mauritius for example often the public believe that prisoners are living a life of luxury that they have this they have that and the other and that's the picture that's painted i've had lots of messages from people in mauritia who said i really didn't know that that's what our prisons was like i always believed that they had luxury cells and stuff like that because this is a new prison that was built not too long ago with millions and millions of pounds and they don't think that that money should have been spent on the prison but now they can see that actually it's not quite what they thought it was right fair enough so it's often a message to the public what the prison is often trying to portray yeah yeah i think that that's the bottom line have you had over any of the seasons many changes made any changes thanks to your show to any of these prisons i know you've just said about like people wanting to donate and stuff but is there have you actually heard of any big changes for anything well i i mean in the recent series the paraguay one i've heard that the government have decided to build a new prison to replace that particular prison which i said at the end should be erased to the ground um and yeah i think in other places they've introduced other methods of dealing with prisoners based on the exposure or they've been given more resources from the government and then there are individuals i i don't i made the rule that when i you know i build up a ripple with some prisoners i leave the prison i leave it behind you know i have a shower i wash away the thoughts the feelings and everything that comes with it that's how i coped in the real prison that's how i cope leaving these prisons and so i've had prisoners who have got out contact me um to tell me how well they're doing the panther in the paraguay film the boxer who was able to get out i don't know what's happened to him and how they get on but um it's not my remit to kind of i'd love to follow it up at some point but it would take too much of my time to think about that i hope that i've done enough to generate enough public interest to question what is going on in that prison where it needs to change or at least them to see what's really going on in their name with their money you mentioned um just before we finish i want to quickly talk about the guy in mauritius yeah um the only time in the in the series that i watched where you tell the cameras to cut it's quite a quite a big moment um you also i think you'd learned just before you met him what his crimes were because you mentioned in this interview that sometimes when they were terrible crimes you'd learn you'd learn of that beforehand just to give you a little bit of a run-up and uh you made it clear you didn't want to touch him didn't want to shake his hand for it what was that what was that whole thing like what was his crimes i i think the rape is the the thing i don't want to shake the hand of a man who has deliberately gone out and violated a woman or a man and committed these rapes i i i don't i just i feel uncomfortable in in that sense so that's the reason i won't shake somebody's hand if i know that they're already in forensic crime it might sound weird to people to think well you'll shake the hand of a murderer or a thief and in my opinion that's just as bad etc etc cetera but look we've all got our our thing haven't we and that's my that's my thing i feel like i'm not that i've been raped i don't know anybody in my family that has been raped or gone through it so it's not coming from a place of um experience it's coming from a place that it just makes me feel uncomfortable to shake the hand of a rapist knowing what they they've done so i can't try and make a rule there sometimes i have and i didn't know brazil is where i learned my lesson this guy covered me in mud if you haven't seen the brazil episode you've got to i get covered in in mud by this guy i'm down on i've just got my boxer shorts on for all those ladies out there i've got my boxer shorts on this guy covers me in mud i will come back to your guy but he covers me in mud right so we're doing this ritual i call it the amazon ritual covers me in mud from head to toe makes me look like shrek someone said but i'm covered in head-to-toe mud and then i cover him in head to toe i don't know what he's in for and then i find that he's a [ __ ] serial rapist and i feel so uncomfortable knowing that and i don't let men touch my body yeah i've never let him touch my body to be honest but here is a man for the first time beyond the massage therapist touching my body from head to toe and then i find out he's a raping it made me feel so uncomfortable so i wouldn't take um shake the hand of this individual in in this this prison because of the nature of the crimes that he committed and so when i'm in the cell and i'm interviewing this guy it's quite clear from from the get-go that he's a disturbed character it's quite clear that he's on medication because it's all around his cell and he behaves in such a shifty way it was quite an intimidating uncomfortable situation so then i've got to sit down and try and draw this out without um judging him if you like i've already judged him in the sense that i know what he's in so i do this interview and i talk to you about wanting to kind of go for the neck or to protect myself because we sit that close closer than what you and i are now and there's nothing between us there's no guards there although there was a guard in this particular and then we have the conversation and i just think it was the the darkness of the detail without any remorse without any facial expressions that may have been the medication you know that was controlling he was you know it was often flicking the tongue his eyes were kind of moving and i just felt more and more uncomfortable because i was asking more and more tougher questions to him if you like that i felt that he was feeling uncomfortable and i think nearing the end of the interview he was starting to behave in a way where you couldn't see it off camera um and then i think the camera panned to me because he was behaving in a way where he weren't answering my questions anymore and he was looking at me like you're looking at me now jack with that kind of shock horror and i thought we need to cut this and that's why i thought he didn't but he he was shuffling in his chair a lot more than he was at at the beginning of the interview and that's because i i was you know pushing him you know it's not often you sit down with the person in any crime and they tell you they destroyed a woman yeah when they killed them i mean there's one thing to sort of say i killed them i shot them i strangled them and they give you that detail and that in itself is not nice to hear no but use the word destroy and then talk about sodomy how the other guys in such a bland way and then blame it on your mental state which is acceptable if that's the case because i wouldn't you know but imagine sometimes they use it as a get out of jail free card that's what i felt about him yeah really i do i think he he he was diagnosed with with this condition while he was in prison i think it's a condition i'm no therapist but i do think based on the conversation i had with him and the guards after and other prisoners i do think it's something that has manifested itself more since he's been in prison than what it was on the outside maybe it was managed on the outside because he was free and he wasn't cocooned in this space in prison it did manifest itself which is why he was in boy i can't the prison that he was in was so locked up you know it was like this it was like uh i i can't even describe it was like walls and then walls and then walls and walls and then the cell block and there was like a handful of prisoners in there who were deemed to be mauritius most dangerous this prison had been closed down and they reopened it well we'll think about wall wall wall and then cell block and he was in there so and it took some to get into him going through these cages and going into his cell to me so that gives you a sense of how ruthless and dangerous he he was but i do think that he's psychotic behavior manifest in prison because he was in that space not because of the crimes he committed initially but because of the crimes he committed whilst he's been in prison that's why he was taking out the normal population the hard one that we were in to this other one wow what a what what a monster i guess why is someone like that willing to talk to you because i know you've said before a lot of prisons just like to be on camera but why would he like surely he's getting nothing out of it i i i wouldn't agree that a lot of the prisoners want to be on camera i i a lot of prisoners don't want to be on camera what i think they they agree to do is share their story not many people ask them what really happened who they really are what they really think they're always in my view being told what to think how to behave um or to hide who they really are and i think for the very first time for many of these guys especially in some of these underdeveloped countries if you like or lack resources so they don't have therapists going in and speaking to them or working on their mental state i think for the first time they're being asked questions about themselves that they've never been asked before and and i think that's one of the reasons that they're prepared to talk to me because here's a chance for them for the very first time to sort of say this is what i did why i did it how i did it um because i don't think any of the guys that i've met in in any of the episodes glorify their their crimes they may have been one or two it sounds like i mean mpt who was the rapist in in the lesotho episode i think you know he's like jack the car she wouldn't give me it so we decided to take her and rape her and say [ __ ] do that you had the car why did you do that and i don't even think he was glorifying his crime he was justifying his actions um so yeah i think it's really about the very first time they've had someone ask them what they've never been asked before and it might just be a case of their moment in the sun their their their their time to shine they're 15 minutes i mean imagine if you get asked to be interviewed now you'd do it imagine being locked up for 10 15 years and then someone coming and wanting to speak to you that's true even though sometimes i do get the impression that they you know some of these people have never watched netflix i've met guys that have been in prison for 15 years netflix didn't exist they don't even know what it is all they know is there's a camera a western crew coming in especially if it's in a foreign country and they see it that they're going to be on television yeah we go you know great length to to get the consent you know we don't just go in and interview people we make sure everybody knows exactly what they're doing what they're taking part in where it's going to be broadcasters etc etc we get all videoed and everything after the interview there's one person who stays there and just videos their consent to make sure that they understand completely what we're doing and why we're doing what we're doing and it's a great show inside the world's toughest prisons um with raphael rowe out on netflix now series four can we expect to see a series five anytime a little wink there from raphael across the table rafael it's been an absolute pleasure thank you for coming in and being so open uh not only about the prisons but also your experience as well it's been an absolute eye-opener i've loved every minute of it so thank you very much thank you for having me and uh just the question that we finish on uh with all of our guests on series four answer as you please raphael what is the meaning of life that's my answer that's my answer you don't know make it up as you go along perfect there we go this has been jack makes happy hours stevie thank you very much that's all right raphael thank you and we'll see you next week [Music] you

Channel: Happy Hour Podcast

Views: 469,107

Rating: 4.947958 out of 5

Keywords: jaackmaate, podcast, happy, hour, happyhourpodcast, jaackmate, jackmaate, comedy, jhhp, Raphael Rowe, Rapheal Rowe, Inside Worlds Tougest Prisons, Inside World's Toughest Prisons, Raphael Rowe Inside Toughest Prisons, Raphael Rowe Netflix, Wrongly Accused, Wrongly Sentenced, Prison Stories, Happy Hour Raphael Rowe, Happy Hour Wrongly Accused, Netflix Inside World's Toughest Prisons, Inside Prison Show

Id: lkz0eMFpPL0

Length: 153min 28sec (9208 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 23 2020