Noel’s story
Michael Golby reflects on a life turned around
Kenneth Clarke, secretary for justice, wants to see a decrease in the prison population. He knows that short term sentences are a revolving door to more crime and too short for effective rehabilitation. But he must carry the climate of opinion with him. Statistics are important but real life stories are much more compelling. One such story was told at Exeter University last month.
Noel ‘Razor’ Smith was born in London on Christmas Eve 1960. By the time he was fourteen, a naughty, spirited boy was set upon a violent criminal career. Even his mum was calling him by his street name ‘Razor’. In adulthood he graduated from theft to car crime, grievous bodily harm, armed bank robbery and prison escape. He has spent more than half his adult life behind bars.
The standard reasons apply: a neglectful upbringing, the failure of school and the influence of the wrong mates. But he says a turning point came when the police ‘fitted him up’ for a catalogue of crimes he did not commit and, in the course of that, violently assaulted him. ‘Treated like a criminal, I decided to become one,’ he says. He describes how exciting, and what a high it was to conduct a bank robbery. It was literally sensational.
Noel was caused to rethink his life by news received in prison in 2001. His son, aged nineteen, had died in mysterious circumstances (it was an open verdict) soon after being released from Feltham Young Offenders Prison. ‘I knew I had become a horrible, horrible person’ he says. He managed, after many applications, to get into HMP Grendon, known for its very rigorous rehabilitation processes.
In that regime, lasting five years, the golden rule was honesty. He was required to listen to the stories of others, including rapists and child abusers, people he would otherwise have been viciously assaulting in mainstream prison whenever he got the chance. No interruption and no aggression was permitted in these sessions and Noel had to tell his own story too, in all detail.
It worked. After a spell in an open prison, work in the community and home leave, Noel was released on licence from his life sentence last year. He now ‘makes honest money’ as a journalist, author and editor of Inside Time, the national prisoners’ newspaper. He knows he can be recalled to prison at any time.
Noel told Exeter students all of this and much more last month. A squat, black-suited, shaven-headed figure, Noel lives up to his billing. There is a certain ‘filmic’ glamour surrounding big-time crime. Would over one hundred students have turned out to hear the story of a reformed shoplifter, I wondered. But Noel told his story quietly, without embellishment or drama, without self-pity or self-justification. Here was a man who had taken hold of his life.
In questions and answers, Noel says he favours alternatives to prison, but says they too often go off at half cock. Of the prison system he says ‘What would you say to a hospital system that admitted patients with sprained ankles and discharged them with bubonic plague?’ I can’t resist asking him – though I guessed the answer – whether any prison chaplains had ever been of any help. ‘You better be joking’, he says. ‘I am the original anti-Christ, me’.
I think to myself: ‘Well something of the spirit moved in Noel’, whatever he says. All power to Kenneth Clarke and all those working for penal reform.
