Prison is lonely. Not without a sense of irony, I remember sitting in my cell with hundreds of people within a few dozen yards of me – and yet I had seldom felt more alone. Instead of a name, I had been given a number to use when required to interact with the institution for anything of any tangible significance. I had essentially been stripped of individuality. My peers and I were a mass of criminals and no sense of what might lie beyond the walls could be found by staring at the many nameless reflections I co-inhabited with. But I wasn’t, and am never going to be, a totality of my offences. Nor would my neighbour – or his! This conflict of knowing you should be more is painful when you struggle to see how.

So, how do we find humanity in a place like this? To know that you are not alone, to know that someone else feels like you, is a basis on which you can begin to imagine yourself somewhere else. For me, this came in the form of the Rock Show on National Prison Radio (NPR). Through so many different stages of my life, the one constant has been my passion for metal. It was a ‘normal’, pro-social point of connection with people – the sort of thing most people would talk about with their friends. But discussing the latest band seemed to mean more to me at times when I could find very few reasons to keep trying. Writing in to the Rock Show, knowing there were other people going through the relative ups and downs that I was, and having a platform in which to explore those things was – sometimes – the only thing I could look forward to.

The weekly show runs for two hours a time and was repeated on a Saturday evening. The other 164 hours felt like an eternity. I was stuck in my cell and my head for most of that. A conversation began between a guy on the other side of the country and myself. It took months to finish. We were suggesting our favourite drummer. Obviously, this didn't matter. Obviously, we had long sentences to serve, people we had hurt and families we had left behind … and obviously I was right.