Erwin James, known as Jim, was a patron of the Footprints Project , a mentoring service for former offenders in Hampshire and Dorset, of which I was a trustee.
Thanks to Jim’s Guardian column A Life Inside, he became the most articulate voice of serving prisoners. This Runyonesque notebook detailed his fellow inmates Baby-face Turtle, Felix the gambler and Rinty from Dundee with a compassion and humour that became educational for us all.
His book Redeemable (2016) was an ex-prisoner classic to be ranked alongside Jimmy Boyle’s A Sense of Freedom and Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy. He did not flinch from the horrors of what he had done, but wrote with a developing empathy over his years inside with extraordinary poignancy.
