FORMER INMATE STEPHEN JACKLEY ON BRITAIN’S FRACTURED JUSTICE SYSTEM
Having spent time in 12 different prisons around the country in the space of six years, Stephen Jackley has first-hand experience of incarceration. A firs-tyear university student studying geography and sociology, who loved travelling, he was 21 when he was given a 13-year sentence in 2008 for armed robbery and related offences.
Dubbed a modern-day Robin Hood, he held up banks, building societies and bookmakers with the idealistic intention of donating the takings to charity and people in need –even signing stolen notes with the outlaw’s initials.
“I started robbing when I was around 19. At the time, I saw those organisations as icons of injustice and inequality, and my idea was to be like aRobin Hood type, where I’d get access to that finance and redistribute it to the people in need. That was the rationale behind it,” he tells us. “I had set myself this target of £100,000. There were gaps in between the two years when I didn’t carry out any raids, but then I went back. At one stage, I didn’t want to continue as I didn’t get a thrill from it, but the ultimate objective pulled me back in.”
Stephen –who had been using imitation firearms, hammers and knives, as well as disguises, for his crime spree around Worcester, Herefordshire and Devon – misguidedly thought that a real gun would be more effective, so he went over to America to buy one. “The idea with the gun was to use it to convince people that it was real and get access to a safe, not to shoot anyone,” he explains. His plan was foiled when the shop owner, a former law enforcement officer, became suspicious. “The owner of the store recognised that my ID was fake and called the police,” he recalls. Stephen was arrested in May 2008 and spent ten months in a US prison, before being deported back to the UK the following year. “The Americans subjected me to heightened security,” he says of his imprisonment Stateside.
“They thought I was an escape risk, so they put me in the hole [solitary confinement]. The conditions weren’t good.” On his return to England, he was sent to HMP Garth after being convicted for 22 offences, including armed robbery, attempted robbery, and firearms possession. He pleaded guilty to 18 charges. “Garth had the worst effect on me. The conditions, bullying and haphazard regime just stoked bitterness, negative emotions and even suicidal thoughts,” he says.
ON THE MOVE
Over the following years, Stephen was moved around 11 other centres, including the high-security HMP Gloucester; Parkhurst, known as “the Alcatraz of England”; Wandsworth, where Daniel Khalife recently escaped from, and open prison Standford Hill. “It was a bit of both –the prisons’ decisions and mine,” he says of the many transfers. �
