The English Prisoner


Book Description

In July 2003 young Englishman Tig Hague was on a routine business trip to Moscow when he was arrested at the airport. Within hours he was accused of a major crime. Next, he was tried and transported hundreds of miles to the remote, forsaken wastes of Mordovia.And prison camp Zone 22. Sentenced to spend the next four years there, every day was a struggle against disease, freezing temperatures, malnutrition, the unpredictable, sometimes terrifying behaviour of the camp guards and his fellow prisoners.But, most of all, it was a fight to ensure his own psychological survival. Only the thought of his girlfriend Lucy, fighting Russia's corrupt and labyrinthine legal system, kept Tig sane - and gave him a reason to see each day to its end. The English Prisoner is an extraordinary story of endurance, as one man - plucked from his normal, everyday life - is forced to reach deep inside himself to survive life in one of the bleakest outposts in the world: Russia's vast and unforgiving 'forgotten zone'.




Special Category


Book Description

A major 3-part work that is the definitive history of Irish Republican prisoners detained in England's maximum security prisons during the modern 'Troubles'. Based on private correspondence, declassified government documents, international media reports, and memoirs of key protagonists, this book tells the story of all the major riots, roof top protests, sabotage attacks and escape attempts undertaken by the IRA, as well as the little-known 'blanket protest' in several prison locations in England. Volume 2 tells the full story of the Wormwood Scrubs 'riot' of August 1979, Brixton breakout of December 1980 and the pivotal Albany 'mutiny' of May 1983, told for the firs time using fresh eye-witness accounts as well official and public sources. This ground breaking book confirms that the 'prison war' in England was a far more important IRA theatre of action than previously believed. -- Publisher description.




The English Prison Health System After a Decade of Austerity, 2010-2020


Book Description

Austerity has reconfigured and scaled back the governance and delivery of public services and negatively affected society’s most vulnerable groups. This book opens up the closed world of English prisons to examine its impact on prison health governance and healthcare delivery. It argues that austerity has been a decade-long, large-scale political experiment that has caused debt to balloon, eroded the prison health system and perpetuated a cycle of punishment resulting in sicker prisoners. In short, austerity has violated prisoners’ human rights. Drawing on interviews and data from existing longitudinal and economic analyses, the book demonstrates how austerity has resulted in high rates of recidivism, diminished what remains of the welfare state, and increased inequality and punitiveness. Despite a decade of failure, there is a marked political reluctance to dispense with austerity, and the governmental juggernaut continues to produce the same result. As the spectre of recession increases, caused in part by Brexit and COVID-19, these failures are ever more perilous. This book blends the interdisciplinary perspectives of criminology, public health, sociology, law, social policy, politics, and economics to enable greater understanding of the impact of austerity on health governance, prison healthcare, the prison workforce, and prisoners’ health and safety. It challenges current policy, practice and thinking, and is a must read for anyone who wants to reflect on how the political economic structure can affect the governance and delivery of healthcare services in marginalised settings, beyond prisons, and indeed beyond England.




My Fellow Prisoners


Book Description

The Russian oil mogul and activist offers reflections on his decades-long incarceration under Putin in this “illuminating and brave” prison memoir (The Washington Post). Mikhail Khodorkovsky was Russia’s most successful businessman—and an outspoken critic of the Kremlin. As his oil company Yukos revived the Russian oil industry, Khodorkovsky began sponsoring programs to encourage civil society and fight corruption. Then he was arrested at gunpoint. Sentenced to ten years in a Siberian penal colony on fraud and tax evasion charges in 2003, Khodorkovsky was put on trial again in 2010 and sentenced to fourteen years on new charges that contradicted the previous ones. While imprisoned, Khodorkovsky fought for the rights of his fellow prisoners, going on hunger strike four times. After he was pardoned in 2013, he vowed to continue fighting for prisoners’ rights, and this book is dedicated to that work. A moving portrait of the prisoners Khodorkovsky met, My Fellow Prisoners is an eye-opening account of Russia’s brutal prison system. “Vivid, humane and poignant” —Financial Times




Zone 22


Book Description

When Tig hague kissed goodbye to his girlfriend Lucy, he was already thinking of his return. The couple were going house-hunting, looking for their first home together. Tig was only going to be away for a few days on a routine business trip - the annual highlight of an otherwise unglamourous job working on the Russian desk of a London bank. But just hours later something went wrong at Moscow airport. Very wrong. Misunderstanding a request from customs for a backhander to speed his progress into the country, Tig was pulled to one side to have his bag searched. A deliberate inconvenience, he thought. But Tig's world was about to implode with dizzying, terrifying speed. A tiny lump of hashish, nothing more than detritus from a recent stag weekend, was discovered in the pocket of an old pair of jeans. Too small to warrant anything more than a slapped wrist back home, he hadn't even known it was there. Tig was in Moscow's notorious Piet Central jail by nightfall - and that was just a stepping stone on his way to prison camp Zone 22 in the bleak, remote wastes of Mordovia. He wouldn't be returning home for years. Zone 22is the shocking story of a young Englishman's struggle to survive the brutal, corrupt, almost medieval conditions of a prison camp in Putin's Russia - a gripping contemporary story in the tradition of Papillionand Midnight Express.




A Prisoner of Birth


Book Description

International bestseller and master storyteller Jeffrey Archer returns with a tale of fate and fortune, redemption and revenge with A Prisoner of Birth. Danny Cartwright and Spencer Craig never should have met. One evening, Danny, an East End cockney who works as a garage mechanic, takes his fianceé up to the West End to celebrate their engagement. He crosses the path of Spencer Craig, a West End barrister posed to be the youngest Queen's Counsel of his generation. A few hours later Danny is arrested for murder and later is sentenced to twenty-two years in prison, thanks to irrefutable testimony from Spencer, the prosecution's main witness. Danny spends the next few years in a high-security prison while Spencer Craig's career as a lawyer goes straight up. All the while Danny plans to escape and wreak his revenge. Thus begins Jeffrey Archer's poignant novel of deception, hatred and vengeance, in which only one of them can finally triumph while the other will spend the rest of his days in jail. But which one will triumph? This suspenseful novel takes the listener through so many twists and turns that no one will guess the ending, even the most ardent of Archer's many, many fans.




The Prisoner Society


Book Description

While the use of imprisonment continues to rise in developed nations, we have little sociological knowledge of the prison's inner world. Based on extensive fieldwork in a medium-security prison, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison provides an in-depth analysis of the prison's social anatomy. It explains how power is exercised by the institution, individualizing the prisoner community and demanding particular forms of compliance and engagement. Drawing on prisoners' life stories, it supplies a detailed typology of adaptive styles, showing how different prisoners experience and respond to the new range of penal practices and frustrations. It then explains how the prisoner society - its norms, hierarchy and social relationships - is shaped both by these conditions of confinement and by the different backgrounds, values and identities that prisoners bring into the prison environment. Through this analysis, this meticulously researched book aims to revive and update the dormant tradition of prison ethnography. It provides an empirical snapshot of a modern prison, documenting the aims and techniques of contemporary imprisonment and illuminating the social structures and behaviours that they generate. Through a penetrating account of power relations throughout the institution, the author documents the pains of modern imprisonment, the new techniques of survival, and the prison's distinctive forms of trade, friendship and everyday culture.




A Bit of a Stretch


Book Description

'Shocking, scathing, entertaining.' Guardian 'Incredibly compelling.' The Times 'Heart-breaking.' Sunday Times Where can a tin of tuna buy you clean clothes? Where is it easier to get 'spice' than paracetamol? Where does self-harm barely raise an eyebrow? Welcome to Her Majesty's Prison Service. Like most people, documentary-maker Chris Atkins didn't spend much time thinking about prisons. But after becoming embroiled in a dodgy scheme to fund his latest film, he was sent down for five years. His new home would be HMP Wandsworth, one of the largest and most dysfunctional prisons in Europe. With a cast of characters ranging from wily drug dealers to senior officials bent on endless reform, this powerful memoir uncovers the horrifying reality behind the locked gates. Filled with dark humour and shocking stories, A Bit of a Stretch reveals why our creaking prison system is sorely costing us all - and why you should care.




Nazi Prisons in the British Isles


Book Description

With firsthand sources and archeological research, this study explores life inside Nazi prisons during the occupation of the Channel Islands. Through most of the Second World War, Nazis occupied the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey, two British Crown dependencies in the English Channel. With extensive research, archeologist Gilly Carr has uncovered the enduring legacies of this occupation. In Nazi Prisons in Britain, she shines a light on the lives of citizen resisters who became political prisoners on their own soil. Carr explores political prisoner consciousness and solidarity through the letters of the “Jersey 21” and the diaries of Frank Falla, Guernsey’s best-known resister. Drawing on memoirs, poetry, graffiti, official archives, and material culture—as well as the words of war criminals, traitors, surrealist artists, and many others—she reveals what life was like inside these brutal Nazi prisons.




The Prisoner


Book Description

An international literary sensation, this chilling thriller “exposes. . . a world so dark that readers will come away terrified” (Wall Street Journal, India). An American journalist has been kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan, days before the American president is due to visit. Those responsible have promised to execute him on video on Christmas Day. With no other leads, Constantine D’Souza, a Christian police officer, must get his former colleague Akbar Khan, a rogue cop imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, to help track down the journalist. But to do so, he has to navigate the streets of Karachi, where police corruption is a way of life and political motives are never what they seem. Caught between the United Front—the militant ruling party—and the Pakistani Intelligence Agencies, D’Souza is in a race against time to save a man’s life and the honor of the nation. Modeled on true events, The Prisoner is a fast-paced thriller that brings the byzantine politics and the moral ambiguities of justice in Pakistan to life. With a gritty authenticity based on personal experience, Omar Hamid reveals a society where corruption and extremism are commonplace, and the line between the good guys and the bad guys is never as clear as we would like. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.