The devilish advocate

UK: The devilish advocate John Hirst taught himself law in jail, and has never lost a case against the prison service. Erwin James meets up again with the former 'lifer' who won inmates the right to vote

It began as an act of "devilment", explains John Hirst, the 55-year-old former prisoner who last week defeated the government in the European Court of Human Rights on the issue of voting rights for convicted prisoners.

I'm sharing a sofa with him in the cramped, untidy sitting room of the three-bedroom terraced house in Hull that he rents from a private landlord for £60 a week. He works casually, as a driver. His only company in the house is his dog, a lively labrador cross called Rocky - a "rescue dog" - that is clearly loathe to be out of his new owner's sight even for a moment.

"It was October 2000 and I'd been listening to the news in my cell when it came on that the Human Rights Act had been incorporated into UK law, he recalls. "I thought, 'Right!', and I went down the landing and spoke to a couple of other lifers. They were two grumpy old men who always sat at the same table during association, but I knew they had a little bit of legal knowledge. I said: 'Do you fancy setting up a union?' One said: 'They won't allow that.' I said: 'They can't stop us now, we've got the Human Rights Act.'"

In fact he ended up setting up an association, instead of a union, because, he explains, it sounded "less threatening". And here is the devilment. After searching through his library of law books, built up over the 20 years he had already spent inside, he discovered that anyone could set up an association in direct opposition to any other association that was already in existence. "It was obvious," he says, still tickled by the memory. "Prison officers had the Prison Officers' Association, the POA, so I thought, we'll have the AOP, the Association of Prisoners."

As is the way in prison, word got around fast, and soon the minimum of 10 members necessary to form an association had been recruited. After agreeing on a constitution, the members met in Hirst's cell to plan objectives. Somebody suggested pushing for better food. Somebody else proposed conjugal rights. But Hirst had a better idea. "It was when someone mentioned that we should try and lobby the House of Commons," he says. "I'd read about interest groups lobbying and pressuring politicians to change things, but I knew that, as prisoners, we weren't allowed to vote. It was obvious that politicians only take notice of people who do have the vote - that's why there's never been any real will in parliament to take prison reform seriously. I decided to find out why we weren't allowed to vote."

During his research, he read books on the British constitution and studied the suffragette movement. Eventually, he felt confident enough to mount a legal challenge to the government. It wasn't the first time that he had decided to take legal action to address his grievances in prison.

Hirst was sent to prison for life after being convicted of the manslaughter of his landlady, Bronia Burton, in 1979. She had asked Hirst to bring in some coal. Hirst felt he was being "nagged". He says this caused him to "snap" and attack Burton, hitting her several times on the head with the blunt end of an axe taken from the garden shed. After hearing all the evidence, the court found that he had acted with "diminished responsibility". He eventually received a tariff of 15 years, but served a total of 25 before being released in October last year. He believes his activities as a litigant against the Prison Service and Home Office are the main reason he had to serve the extra years.

Locked in solitary

Hirst proved to be the most prolific prisoner litigant of modern times - and, he says, like Perry Mason and Rumpole of the Bailey, he never lost a case against the Prison Service. He won the right of prisoners on segregation punishment to keep their beds in their cells during the day, and overturned the blanket ban on prisoners communicating with the media. He also, after he was kept locked in solitary for 28 days without a break, successfully sued a prison governor for "malfeasance in public office".

It took Hirst a while to settle into prison life. He quickly gained a reputation as a "difficult" prisoner who would stand up against the authorities if he felt that things were not as they should be. "I've always been someone who questions," he says.

There are clues in Hirst's early years that give some indication of the attitude he exhibited in prison. He was born in Hull in 1950. A year later, his mother gave birth to his brother, and soon afterwards his father left home. A year after that, unable to cope with the children, his mother handed him and his brother into the care of a Dr Barnardo's home in South Yorkshire. By the time he was seven, he and his brother were in their fourth foster parent placement and Hirst had a history of bed wetting and soiling. "We were all over the place," he says.

His bad behaviour caused the foster parents to send him back to the institution, but he would return intermittently for holidays. When he was 10, a primary school teacher described him as "vulnerable, easily hurt, good sense of humour, never bored or fed up, willing, with a nice social manner, very loving to animals". Yet by the time he was 13, his foster mother reported her concerns about Hirst's temperament. "John gets furious easily," she said, adding that she was "afraid of what he might do". Incidences of "pilfering" and general bad behaviour continued to be reported.

He left secondary school at 15, with no qualifications, and got a job as page boy in a city hotel. Two months later he was dismissed for "extreme impudence", after arguing about the sugar allocation for the porters. Afterwards, he embarked on a life of casual work and petty crime. "Building sites, burglary and car theft," he says. A series of prison terms, ranging from six months to five years, followed until he was 30, when he was sentenced to life. "The wetting and soiling never stopped until I went to prison," he says.

As a lifer, he was moved around the system regularly, and frequently spent periods in prison segregation units. In 1989, he attacked a prison officer. He says that on that day the officer had "offered out" (challenged to a fight) a number of prisoners. Hirst was working as a food- serving orderly, and one of the "perks" was extra milk for his cornflakes. The officer stopped the extra milk and, when Hirst argued, he says the officer offered him out. The ensuing violence left the officer in an intensive care unit for some days. Hirst was segregated immediately and later transferred to a special high security unit in Hull prison.

The unit was experimental, designed to hold at most a dozen prisoners marked down as being among the most difficult and dangerous in the system. Ironically, the unit provided prisoners with better treatment and conditions than would have been available to them otherwise.

Hirst began to read more. Stephen Shaw, now prisons ombudsman but then director of the Prison Reform Trust, visited the unit and gave Hirst a copy of a book published by the trust, Prison Rules: A Working Guide. Armed with the correct information, he successfully sued the prison governor for compensation regarding a quantity of his property that had disappeared during his earlier transfer. "The first law book I read was on administrative law," he says. "I opened it up on a chapter on power and the abuse of power. I thought: 'This is what prison is all about.' Suddenly, my brain seemed to kick into gear. I wanted more books. I had them sent in, or teachers would bring them for me. My brain was insatiable for knowledge of the law." So does he see himself as anti-authority. "Not at all," he says. "I'm just anti the abuse of authority."

As we talk, I am reminded of the time that I knew John Hirst when we were fellow prisoners on the same wing in a closed prison in 1994. I didn't know him well, but I knew of his formidable reputation for legal knowledge. Everybody on the wing knew where his cell was. He had a sign on his cell door: Prison Law Centre. Underneath, another sign proclaimed: Free Legal Advice. Every morning before breakfast he had a queue outside his cell waiting patiently to take advantage of his legal skills and his straining shelves of law books.

Legal eagle

Hirst did not discriminate. Even prison officers were known to open his door occasionally during "bang up" to ask for advice on problems affecting them inside or outside the prison, and the self-taught legal eagle was always happy to assist - although not all prison officials were impressed. A psychologist reported that he "showed no remorse for the people he had litigated against".

His first success in the property case marked the beginning of a preoccupation with the law and prison conditions that has left modern law books littered with dozens of references to his cases: Hirst v (numerous prison governors), Hirst v Secretary of State for the Home Department; and, in relation to last week's ECHR judgment, Hirst v UK.

When I get up to leave, the dog bounds into action, yelping and excited for some exercise. "Shut up, Rocky," Hirst says gently, stroking and hugging the animal. "Silly dog." I ask him about his plans for the future. "I'm going to keep on fighting," he says. Any regrets? "No," he says, and then thinks for a second and adds: "Well, just one. If I could go back to the night of the offence and change it, I would."

By Erwin James posted 15 October 05

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