Kenneth Roy
Why Megrahi is still alive

Some years ago, I took a party of young people on a guided tour of Barlinnie. A party sounds not quite right. It was no party. Let's call it a group. Nothing – least of all my gentle words of counsel beforehand – could have prepared this lot for exposure to a Scottish prison.
     As we entered one of the Victorian halls, the uniformed inmates were being released from lock-up for their usual early lunch. It resembled nothing so much as a warehouse – a warehouse for society's drifters and misfits. The visitors peered into one of the vacated cells and withdrew in horror, shocked by the size of the living space shared by two, sometimes three, men. It is impossible to comprehend the squalid claustrophobia of these hell-holes without feeling and smelling them. Slopping out was still being practised – subsequently abolished at Barlinnie though still not in the Scottish prison system as a whole. The senses were repelled by the imagined reality of such an existence.
     We stepped across the road to a house which, though bleak, was more civilised in its proportions and quieter in atmosphere. In the reception area, a prisoner was on his hands and knees scrubbing the floor. It was explained that this was the sex offenders' wing.
     We were escorted to a games room and waited there without a word, the bright young things reduced to a numbed silence. After a while, three prisoners joined us. We were invited to ask questions. There were only two questions in the group's mind, 'What are you in for and how long?', but they were never asked. The youngest of the inmates talked brightly of a girlfriend in Stirling, the existence of this parallel humanity raising further questions, also unaddressed. Instead we discussed prison conditions. 'The halls are Lebanon,' said a defeated middle-aged man, 'but this is Paris'. It was his only contribution to the meeting. Unlike most of the utterances I have listened to in my professional life, it was one I shall never forget.
     On the way out, a prison officer said that long sentences in this wing were the norm and, in his view, essential. I asked him why. 'Because,' he said, 'it's at least 18 months before anybody in here acknowledges what he's done, even to himself.'

Every time I have gone to prison – with the young people to Barlinnie; much earlier when I lectured at Saughton; earlier still when my parents dragged me along to Polmont borstal for one of their idealistic theatrical enterprises – I have thought of it as a form of death. In a dark way it amuses me when the latest inspector of prisons emerges, blinking and half-haunted, from his initial tour of inspection to declare that what he has just observed is unacceptable. The new one, a decent-sounding military chap, has been complaining of the grotesque overcrowding. But they all do, and nothing ever changes.
     The press, meanwhile, peddle the illusion that prison is a holiday camp complete with Sky TV – 'a bit of a skoosh' as our otherwise rational justice secretary once ill-advisedly put it. And occasionally I have to read, and adjudicate, papers written by young people rather like those who went to Barlinnie that day, arguing for a tougher regime and longer sentences. The stereotypes are ludicrous, but so ingrained are they in popular consciousness that it is difficult to shift them.
     When the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing – a phrase with more regard for accuracy than the 'Lockerbie bomber' – was released last August, my conception of prison as a form of death acquired a nightmarish new dimension. What if – yes, let's imagine – what if you had to die in prison? What if the form of death became death itself? And, to give this speculation a still sharper edge, what if you were dying in prison an innocent man? Two people who have followed every twist and turn of this case, who have studied it in the greatest depth, are Robert Black QC and Jim Swire. They insist that Mr Megrahi is innocent. They are convinced of it. In their position – Professor Black as the architect of the trial at Camp Zeist, Dr Swire as the father of Flora, one of the victims – they ought to be listened to with respect.
     Let us accept, then, if only for a moment, that Bob and Jim are correct and that Mr Megrahi is an innocent man. How must it have felt to be in Greenock prison both innocent and dying as well as thousands of miles from home? Mr Megrahi himself said that incarceration was hastening his end. You would not require a degree in the psychology of terminal illness to believe him. In his circumstances, he might have longed for death as a release, not only from the ravages of cancer, but from the torture of wrongful imprisonment. But then, unexpectedly, he was liberated as an act of compassion and sent home to die. It was always very likely that, given both incentive and stimulus, there would be some amelioration of his condition, a slightly longer life expectancy. The proper question to have asked six months ago was not whether Mr Megrahi had three months to live, but whether he had three months to live in a Scottish prison.
     There is 'outrage' at his continuing survival. I will not name those who are outraged: they are the usual suspects. If only their outrage was directed at the state of Scotland's disgusting prisons, they might yet do some good in the world.

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