They say the purpose of prison is to rehabilitate.
I don't think it actually does that. It didn't rehabilitate me.
In the end, to change, I had to help myself.
Prison should be about punishment and rehabilitation.
My own honest opinion right now is I don't think it's doing either.
The first time I went to prison was when I was 15.
After that I went into prison a few more times.
Some of them were sentences and some of them were remanded,
and some of them were police stations, so I was in and out of there a lot.
I was in prison myself. I was there on a 10 year sentence.
I've been involved in robberies,
I've been involved in assaults, police...
I've been involved in burglaries, gang fights - quite a lot of stuff.
People were saying to me, 'Ah Junior, you're invincible, you're untouchable,
the police will never get their hands on you' and of course I was listening to that.
I ended up making some silly mistakes.
I didn't really think about getting caught by the police,
but when I actually did it was like, I don't know, say a holiday,
a little time off road and then I would be back.
When I landed in that situation, and a judge gives you 12 years, which is double figures,
I was just like messed up.
My first sentence I didn't know what to expect,
so I just went in there with my guard up and attacked everything.
My first sentence was hard 'cos I spent one hour a day out of my cell
because I was on basic, so 23 hour bang up was what I was doing.
You don't have no birthdays in prison.
The thing that got to me about prison was the routine.
You don't have no Christmas in prison.
It was basically the same thing, day in day out.
You don't have no family time with your girl or your wife or your child in prison.
I'm not really good with routines, I like to do a lot of different things.
There isn't much to do. I mean, you can watch TV or whatever,
but how many days can you just sit there?
From going in prison you can learn a lot of things and one of those is obviously about learning more crime
because there's a lot of different criminals in there.
You're in an environment which is full of negativity,
either from other people or ... it's just awful, it's awful in there.
I went into prison when I was 15 which stopped me from doing my GCSE's.
So, prison didn't really help with my education.
You have to look out for education for yourself.
It's a bit of a lottery as well, which prison you go to.
Some prisons have real strong educational facilities there
and others don't have hardly anything.
I got involved with St. Giles on my last prison sentence.
I met Junior who was able to tell me about a lot of different things.
He understood where I was coming from, my background and situation
due to him having the same background as well.
My parole came up and I gave it a lot of thought
whether I was ready to come out.
I still felt there was a bit more work that I could have done,
but then St. Giles Trust offered me a job,
and I was like, 'Okay, this is the logical step out now'.
It's a bit like taking out that shirt out of that washing machine,
it's got all these creases in it and you've got to iron out those creases one by one.
That's what I had to do.
I had to look for something to focus on.
Something to put my energy into instead of being bad,
I had to look towards something that I was always involved in which was music.
There are so many young people that I work with that are talented,
they shouldn't be in prison, they should not be in there.
At the same extent, can their crimes really go without punishment?
I think prison was the right way to deal with me. Actually, I don't know, I don't know ...
'cos you see, I haven't got a lot of answers to tell you the truth?
I can't answer to a lot of things. I just know what I've been through
and what worked for me and prison in a way helped ... and stopped me.