THE FASCINATING SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER Assaults. Riots. Cell fires. Medical emergencies. Understaffed wings. Suicides. Hooch. Weapons. It's all in a week's work at HMP Parkhurst. After 28 years working as a prison officer, with 22 years at HMP Parkhurst, once one of Britain's most high security prisons, David Berridge has had to deal with it all: serial killers and gangsters, terrorists and sex offenders, psychopaths and addicts. Inside Parkhurst is his raw, uncompromising look at what really goes on behind the massive walls and menacing gates. Thrown in at the deep end, David quickly had to work out how to deal with the most cunning and volatile of prisoners, and learn how to avoid their many scams. He has been assaulted and abused; he has tackled cell fires and attempted suicides, riots and dirty protests; he has helped to foil escaped plans, talked inmates down from rooftop protests, witnessed prisoners setting fire to themselves, and prevented prisoners from attempting to murder other prisoners. And now he takes us inside this secret world for the first time. With this searingly honest account he guides us around the wings, the segregation unit, the hospital and the exercise yard, and gives vivid portraits of the drug taking, the hooch making, the constant and irrepressible violence, and the extraordinary lengths our prison officers go to everyday. Divided into three parts - the first from David's early years on the wings, the second the middle of his career, and the third his disillusioned later years - David will take readers into the heart of life inside and shine a light on the escalating violence and the impact the government cuts are having on the wings. Both horrifying and hilarious, David's diaries are guaranteed to shock and entertain in equal measure.

In September 2018, Professor Sean Davison's peaceful life in the leafy suburbs of Pinelands, Cape Town is shattered. Arrested for the murder of Dr Anrich Burger, a once-fit athlete turned quadriplegic who begged Davison to assist him in ending his life in 2015, the unassuming academic and father of three now finds himself locked up in a prison cell.

Under investigation led by the Hawks, an additional two murders are added to the case for which he now faces a mandatory life prison sentence. Written in compelling detail, The Price of Mercy tracks the extraordinary journey that Davison embarks on to prepare for the gruelling legal challenge that lies ahead.

The desperate cries of many, begging for his assistance to help end their lives of suffering haunt him. Unwavering in his belief that we all have the right to die with dignity, Davison's selfless battle is made more bearable by his friendship with the late and great Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

A book that will change the way you see death.

The recent explosion in women's imprisonment in the US- 2,800 percent increase from 1970 to 2001- and around the world has received little critical analysis. Women of colour, immigrants, and indigenous women, in particular, have been targeted by 'tough on crime' policies and the global war on drugs, making them the majority inside prison walls while still the minority outside of them. The symbiotic relationship between private prison corporations and the state criminal justice system has also led to harsher sentencing and enforcement, causing prison overcrowding and creating a demand for more prison construction. This collection of essays provides a new analysis of women in prison, shifting the focus from the reasons behind women's criminal behavior to the role of the state, corporations, and the media in their imprisonment. While much analysis has focused on the rise of imprisoned men of color, scholars have neglected to look at the way race, gender, and class affect the criminalization of women. The essays engage in such controversial topics as the war on drugs, immigrant trafficking, and prisoner rights.

Although prison can present a critical opportunity to engage with offenders through interventions and programming, reoffending rates among those released from prison remain stubbornly high. Sport can be a means through which to engage with even the most challenging and complex individuals caught up in a cycle of offending and imprisonment, by offering an alternative means of excitement and risk taking to that gained through engaging in offending behaviour, or by providing an alternative social network and access to positive role models. This is the first book to explore the role of sport in prisons and its subsequent impact on rehabilitation and behavioural change. The book draws on research literature on the beneficial role of sport in community settings and on prison cultures and regimes, across disciplines including criminology, psychology, sociology and sport studies, as well as original qualitative and quantitative data gathered from research in prisons. It unpacks the meanings that prisoners and staff attach to sport participation and interventions in order to understand how to promote behavioural change through sport most effectively, while identifying and tackling the key emerging issues and challenges. Sport in Prison is essential reading for any advanced student, researcher, policy-maker or professional working in the criminal justice system with an interest in prisons, offending behaviour, rehabilitation, sport development, or the wider social significance of sport.

Despite their very different histories, societies, political and legal systems, Russia and the UK stand out as favouring a punitive approach to young law breakers, imprisoning many more children than any other European countries. The book is based on the author's primary research in Russia in which she visited a dozen closed institutions from St Petersburg to Krasnoyarsk and on similar research in England and Northern Ireland. The result is a unique study of how attitudes to youth crime and criminal justice, the political environment and the relationship between state and society have interacted to influence the treatment of young offenders. McAuley's account of the twists and turns in policy towards youth illuminate the extraordinary history of Russia in the twentieth century and the making of social policy in Russia today. It is also the first study to compare the UK (excluding Scotland because of its separate juvenile justice system) with Russia, a comparison which highlights the factors responsible for the making of 'punitive' policy in the two societies. McAuley places the Russian and UK policies in a European context, aiming to reveal how other European countries manage to put so many fewer children behind bars.

As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. Doing Time in the Depression tells the story of the 1930s as seen from the cell blocks and cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing numbers of working people from around the country and around the worldooverwhelmingly poor, disproportionately non-white, and displaced by economic crisis. Ethan Blue paints a vivid portrait of everyday life inside Texas and California's penal systems. Each element of prison lifeo from numbing boredom to hard labour, from meagre pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violenceodemonstrated a contest between keepers and the kept. From the moment they arrived to the day they would leave, inmates struggled over the meanings of race and manhood, power and poverty, and of the state itself. In this richly layered account, Blue compellingly argues that punishment in California and Texas played a critical role in producing a distinctive set of class, race, and gender identities in the 1930s, some of which reinforced the social hierarchies and ideologies of New Deal America, and others of which undercut and troubled the established social order. He reveals the underside of the modern state in two very different prison systems, and the making of grim institutions whose power would only grow across the century. Ethan Blue is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Western Australia.

Prison Nation charts the injustices of prison privatization, race and the justice system, the quixotic drug war and the rarely discussed prison AIDS crisis. With fascinating narratives, shocking tales and small stories of hope, this collection paints a picture of a world many Americans know little or nothing about.

A two-person memoir that explores education, prison, possibility, and which children our world nurtures and which it shuns. At the books core are two stories that speak up for human imagination, spirit, and the power of art. "A boy with no one to listen becomes a man in prison for life and discovers his mind can be free. A woman enters prison to teach and becomes his first listener. And so begins a twenty-five year friendship between two gifted writers and poets. The result is By Heart a book that will anger you, give you hope, and break your heart." - Gloria Steinem Judith Tannenbaum and Spoon Jackson met at San Quentin State Prison in 1985. For over two decades they have conferred, corresponded and sometimes collaborated, producing very different bodies of work resting on the same understanding: that human beings have one foot in darkness, the other in light. In this beautifully crafted exploration, part memoir, part essay, Tannenbaum and Jackson consider art, education, prison, possibility, and which children our world nurtures and which it shuns. At the book's core are two stories that speak for human imagination, spirit, and expression. Judith Tannenbaum is a nationally respected educator, speaker, and author. Among her books are the memoir, Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin; two books for teachers: Teeth, Wiggly as Earthquakes: Writing Poetry in the Primary Grades and (with Valerie Chow Bush) Jump Write In! Creative Writing Exercises for Diverse Communities, Grades 6-12; and six poetry collections. She currently serves as training coordinator with WritersCorps in San Francisco. Born into a family of fifteen boys in Barstow, California, Spoon Jackson was sentenced to Life Without Possibility of Parole when he was twenty years old. Spoon discovered himself as a writer at San Quentin; played Pozzo in the prison's 1988 production of Waiting for Godot; and has written, published, and received awards for plays, poetry, novels, fairy tales, short stories, essays, and memoir during the more than thirty years he has been behind bars. His poems are collected in Longer Ago.

John Irwin writes about prisons from an unusual academic perspective. Before receiving a Ph.D. in sociology, he served five years in a California state penitentiary for armed robbery. This is his sixth book on imprisonment a " an ethnography of prisoners who have served more than twenty years in a California correctional institution. The purpose of the book is to take issue with the conventional wisdom on homicide, societya (TM)s purposes of imprisonment, and offendersa (TM) reformability. Through the lifersa (TM) stories, he reveals what happens to prisoners serving very long sentences in correctional facilities and what this should tell us about effective sentencing policy.

Smart Decarceration is a forward-thinking, practical volume that provides innovative concepts and concrete strategies for ushering in an era of decarceration - a proactive and effective undoing of the era of mass incarceration. The text grapples with tough questions and takes up the challenge of transforming America's approach to criminal justice in the 21st century. This timely work consists of chapters written from multiple perspectives and disciplines including advocates, researchers, academics, practitioners, and persons with incarceration histories who are now leaders in the movement. The primary purpose of this book is to inform both academic and public understanding - to place the challenge of smart decarceration at the center of the current national discourse, taking into account the realities of the current sociopolitical context - and to propose beginning action steps. This is achieved by first outlining and addressing questions such as: What if incarceration were not an option for most?; Whose voices are essential in this era of decarceration?; What is the state of evidence for solutions?; How do we generate and adopt empirically driven reforms?; How do we redefine and rethink justice in the United States? Smart Decarceration offers a way forward in building a field for decarceration through provocative but reasoned challenges to existing approaches to criminal justice reforms, lively focus on potential solutions, and action steps for reform.

The Routledge Handbook of Industry and Development is a global overview of industrialisation. Each chapter will provide readers with contemporary insights into this this essential aspect of economic development. Industrialisation has been at the forefront of discussion on economic development since the earliest days of development economics. But over the last fifty years, the manufacturing sectors of different countries and regions have grown at strikingly different rates. In 1960 developing countries took a very small share of global manufacturing production. Today the position had changed radically with fast growth of manufacturing in many parts of what was originally the developing world, particularly in China and the rest of East Asia. On the other hand, countries in Africa and parts of Latin America have been largely left behind by this process of industrialisation. This volume aims to illuminate this uneven development and takes stock of the current issues that hinder and support industrialisation in low and middle income economies. This Handbook is a collection of chapters on different aspects of industrialisation experience in a range of countries. Key themes include, the role of manufacturing in growth, the nature of structural change at different stages of development, the role of manufacturing in employment creation, alternative options for trade and industrial policy, the key role of technology and technical change, and the impact of globalisation and the spread of global value chains and foreign direct investment on prospects for industrialisation. Several chapters discuss individual country experiences with examples from India, Mexico, South Africa and Tanzania, as well as an overview of African industrialisation. This authoritative Handbook will be a key reference source for those studying or wishing to understand contemporary economic development. Offering inspiration and direction for future research

A critical investigation into the use of psychotropic drugs to pacify and control inmates and other captives in the vast U.S. prison, military, and welfare systems For at least four decades, U.S. prisons and jails have aggressively turned to psychotropic drugs-antidepressants, antipsychotics, sedatives, and tranquilizers-to silence inmates, whether or not they have been diagnosed with mental illnesses. In Silent Cells, Anthony Ryan Hatch demonstrates that the pervasive use of psychotropic drugs has not only defined and enabled mass incarceration but has also become central to other forms of captivity, including foster homes, military and immigrant detention centers, and nursing homes. Silent Cells shows how, in shockingly large numbers, federal, state, and local governments and government-authorized private agencies pacify people with drugs, uncovering patterns of institutional violence that threaten basic human and civil rights. Drawing on publicly available records, Hatch unearths the coercive ways that psychotropics serve to manufacture compliance and docility, practices hidden behind layers of state secrecy, medical complicity, and corporate profiteering. Psychotropics, Hatch shows, are integral to "technocorrectional" policies devised to minimize public costs and increase the private profitability of mass captivity while guaranteeing public safety and national security. This broad indictment of psychotropics is therefore animated by a radical counterfactual question: would incarceration on the scale practiced in the United States even be possible without psychotropics?

Why do people fall in love with criminals? From thieves to perpetrators of violent crimes – they can still become the love of someone’s life. Carla van der Spuy interviews people who found love despite andbecause of the presence of prison bars, as well as experts such as forensic psychologists, and investigates what drives such relationships.

Jailbirds and Stool Pigeons is a study of human weakness. Featuring true crime stories of the Pacific Northwest from the 1880s to 1935, this book is full of flawed characters. Tom McCarty, mentor to Butch Cassidy and Matt Warner, led his clan into a life of crime showing no remorse for crimes they committed. Charles McDonald and George Frankhauser robbed a train but fielded to the pleasures of the flesh-then they were doomed. The Folsom thirteen killed to be free from prison, but they could never escape their guilt. Frank 'Frigidaire' Grigware fell prey to an easy money scheme and ended up in jail, but not for long. These are just some of the lives that were touched by the events chronicled in this book.

This treatment program targets the criminal, behavioral, and mental health problems of inmates in segregated housing that prevents them from living prosocially and productively within the general prison population. The program makes use of a bi-adaptive psychoeducational and cognitive-behavioral treatment model to increase inmates' understanding about the psychological and criminal antecedents that contributed to their current placement, and to teach them the skills necessary for managing these problem areas. This flexible intervention assists inmates with significant problem behaviors by reducing psychological impairment and improving their ability to cope with prison life. This book includes a program introduction and guide for clinicians, the inmate workbook, and accompanying eResources to assist clinicians in both successful program implementation and evaluation of treatment outcomes. Designed to account for the safety and physical limitations that make the delivery of needed mental and behavioral health services difficult, this guide is essential reading for practitioners working with high-needs, high-risk inmate populations.

Through the author's experiences, investigations and discussions with artists, art therapists and inmates from around the world, Art and Art Therapy with the Imprisoned: Re-Creating Identity comprehensively explores the efficacy, methods, and outcomes of art and art therapy within correctional settings. The text begins with a theoretical and historical overview of art in prisons as a precursor to exploring the benefits of art therapy, followed by a deeper exploration of art therapy as a primary focus for wellness and mental health inside penitentiaries. Relying on several theoretical perspectives, results of empirical research studies, and case vignettes and illustrations gleaned from over 25 years of clinical and programmatic experience, this book argues why art therapy is so beneficial within prisons. This comprehensive guide is essential reading for professionals in the field, as well as students of sociology, criminology, art theory, art therapy, and psychology who wish to explore the benefits of art therapy with inmate populations.

This treatment program targets the criminal, behavioral, and mental health problems of inmates in segregated housing that prevents them from living prosocially and productively within the general prison population. The program makes use of a bi-adaptive psychoeducational and cognitive-behavioral treatment model to increase inmates' understanding about the psychological and criminal antecedents that contributed to their current placement, and to teach them the skills necessary for managing these problem areas. This flexible intervention assists inmates with significant problem behaviors by reducing psychological impairment and improving their ability to cope with prison life. This book includes a program introduction and guide for clinicians, the inmate workbook, and accompanying eResources to assist clinicians in both successful program implementation and evaluation of treatment outcomes. Designed to account for the safety and physical limitations that make the delivery of needed mental and behavioral health services difficult, this guide is essential reading for practitioners working with high-needs, high-risk inmate populations.

INSIDE THE FORBIDDING STONE WALLS OF NEW ZEALANDS MOST INFAMOUS GAOL. Grim, Victorian, notorious, for 150 years Mount Eden Prison held both New Zealand's political prisoners and its most notorious criminals. Te Kooti, Rua Kenana, John A. Lee, George Wilder, Tim Shadbolt and Sandra Coney all spent time in its dank cells. Its interior has been the scene of mass riots, daring escapes and hangings. Highly regarded historian Mark Derby tells the prison's inside story with verve and compassion. .

A look at the contemporary crisis in U.S. jails with recommendations for improving and protecting the dignity of inmates Twelve million Americans go through the U.S. jail system on an annual basis. Jails, which differ significantly from prisons, are designed to house inmates for short amounts of time, and are often occupied by large populations of legally innocent people waiting for a trial. Jails often have deplorable sanitary conditions, and there are countless records of inmates being brutalized by staff and other inmates while in custody. Local municipalities use jails to institutionalize those whom they perceive to be a threat, so hundreds of thousands of inmates suffer from mental illness. People abandoned by families or lacking health insurance, or those who cannot afford bail, often cycle in and out of jails. In America's Jails, Derek Jeffreys draws on sociology, philosophy, history, and his personal experience volunteering in jails and prisons to provide an understanding of the jail experience from the inmates' perspective, focusing on the stigma that surrounds incarceration. Using his research at Cook County Jail, the nation's largest single-site jail, Jeffreys attests that jail inmates possess an inherent dignity that should govern how we treat them. Ultimately, fundamental changes in the U.S. jail system are necessary and America's Jails provides specific policy recommendations for changing its poor conditions. Highlighting the experiences of inmates themselves, America's Jails aims to shift public perception and understanding of jail inmates to center their inherent dignity and help eliminate the stigma attached to their incarceration.

The United States arrests, punishes, and locks up far more people-both juveniles and adults-than any other democratic country in the world. Indeed, despite the fact that the U.S holds 5 percent of the world's population, it contains 25 percent of its prisoners. These individuals not only constitute a disproportionately large group, but also suffer decreased employment opportunities and housing discrimination after their release, making a return to prison all the more likely. Headlines of articles in US media allude to "Prison Without Punishment" in Germany and "Radical Humaneness" in Norway, but why are prison conditions in those countries so notably less bleak than those here? And when recidivism rates are lower in countries with these kinder, gentler prisons than in America, why do prisons here remain so harsh? In Unusually Cruel, Mark Morje Howard argues that the United States' prison system is exceptional-in a truly shameful way. Due to its exceptional nature, most scholars have focused on the internal dynamics that have produced the US' unusually large and severe prison system. Howard conducts a comparative analysis as a corrective to this myopia, demonstrating just how far the US lies outside of the norm of established democracies in this regard. He uses a new methodology in order to put American incarceration rates in perspective. The book compares data from 21 countries-all advanced industrialized societies, liberal democracies, and OECD members-ultimately showing that the US holds more than three times the number of incarcerated people of its closest competitor, New Zealand. This method reveals interesting findings, including that, although the female incarceration rate is only a fraction of the male incarceration in America, the US imprisons more than five times as many women as any other comparable country. And strikingly, while crime rates are roughly equal among countries in the western world, the US incarceration rate is seven times the average rate of European countries. Howard shows that in every measure of punitiveness-including policing, sentencing, prison conditions, and rehabilitation-US policies are harsher, producing worse individual outcomes and lower public safety, than those of any comparable country. The book does not merely paint a grim picture, however. Unusually Cruel also identifies solutions that are less punishing and more productive, arguing that, by learning from models that have worked elsewhere, the US can get out of its criminal justice quagmire.

Private prisons have become an integral part of the penal system in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. There already are over 100 such prisons in these countries, and with the number of prisoners continuing to increase rapidly, the trend toward privatization seems irreversible. In this context, Richard Harding addresses the following issues: the contributions, positive or negative, that private prisons make to providing custody for offenders; whether or not private prisons stimulate improvement within the public prison system; and the difficulties with the regulation and accountability of private prisons.

This book sets out to explore the contribution of private prisons to custodial practices, standards, and objectives. Many experts believe that, properly regulated and fully accountable, private prisons could lead to improvement within the public prison system, which has long been degenerate and demoralized. Harding sees the total prison system as a single entity, with two components: public and private. He relies upon extensive fieldwork and draws upon published literature as well as in-house documentation, discussions with public and private authorities, and a range of government documents.

Key issues covered in Private Prisons and Public Accountability are: overcrowding, program delivery, prisoners' rights, quality of staff, and financial control. This volume will be a significant addition to the criminal justice literature, but it will also appeal to sociologists, policymakers, and scholars interested in the privatization of various institutions in our society.

A common perception of coaching is that it is a high value service for highly paid executives But what if you offered it to some of the most marginalized people in our society - women in prison? With more potential in any one of our prisons than in any Oxbridge college, discover how coaching can unlock clients, whatever their context. Clare McGregor celebrates the amazing resilience of the human spirit and her book will challenge a lot of your preconceptions about prisons and prisoners. Willingness to take risks and learn from mistakes helped coaching adapt and thrive, even behind bars. The process and questions for a prisoner are the same as for any client: Who are you? What do you want to change? How are you holding yourself back? Equally importantly, the book asks: What does it take to work in this challenging environment? Dozens of fascinating stories bring reality to life: that coaching changes lives as readily in a prison as in a boardroom. All coaches have something to learn from this book that they can immediately use in their own practice. "Remarkable book" "Dark humour" The Times "This remarkable book tracks McGregor's work giving life coaching to women in HMP Styal. Focusing not on what offences have been committed but practical and tough solutions to help 'clients' achieve inner strength, Clare McGregor has changed the lives of women and staff at HMP Styal, largely with nothing more than a prisoner number, a bicycle and optimism. Clare is a star and the outcomes are stellar. To understand the reference, read the book - it will change your life and the lives of others - inside and out." Professor Felicity Gerry QC "I rarely suggest that a book should be required reading on coach training courses, but I have no hesitation in doing so in this case." David Clutterbuck, Professor and Co-founder European Mentoring & Coaching Council "This is a great book; it oozes humanity on every page. It is a challenging read - people not acquainted with the realities of crime and punishment will learn a lot about both from the powerful case studies and from the author's personal reflections. Those well acquainted with crime and punishment, through their work, will be challenged to rethink what they do and how they do it. Clare McGregor tells us that humans come up with better solutions by 'being curious (rather) than furious' (p6) but I think I disagree; it is the combination of both insatiable curiosity and consuming fury at human suffering and injustice that makes her and her book so special. As one woman she has coached puts it: 'you ask all the right questions'. Readers of this book should be prepared to be challenged (like anyone else Clare coaches) to come up with their own answers; but the author certainly helps us along the way." Fergus McNeill, Professor of Criminology and Social Work, University of Glasgow, UK "A stark and thought provoking read, that totally makes sense! Having witnessed first-hand the importance of coaching, assisting and empowering a person who may have made a few ill-judged choices in life, to turn a bad situation good; I applaud the author for keeping it real, whilst demonstrating the true value of coaching." James Timpson OBE, Chief Executive of Timpson and Chair of the Prison Reform Trust Clare McGregor founded Coaching Inside And Out in 2010, a charity coaching men, women and young people on both sides of the prison gate. Clare is a creative coach, writer and speaker with over 25 years' experience working with leaders, running businesses and developing services for those dealt the toughest hands in life.

This distinctive and engaging book proposes an imaginative criminology, focusing on how spaces of transgression are lived, portrayed and imagined. These include spaces of control or confinement, including prison and borders, and spaces of resistance. Examples range from camps where asylum seekers and migrants are confined, to the exploration of deviant identities and the imagined spaces of surveillance and control in young adult fiction. Drawing on oral history, fictive portrayals, walking methodologies, and ethnographic and arts-based research, the book pays attention to issues of gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, mobility and nationality as they intersect with lived and imagined space.

The U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay has become the symbol of an unprecedented detention system of global reach and immense power. Since the 9/11 attacks, the news has on an almost daily basis headlined stories of prisoners held indefinitely at Guantanamo without charge or trial, many of whom have been interrogated in violation of restrictions on torture and other abuse. These individuals, once labeled "enemy combatants" to eliminate legal restrictions on their treatment, have in numerous instances been subject to lawless renditions between prisons around the world. The lines between law enforcement and military action; crime and war; and the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of power have become dangerously blurred, and it is time to unpack the evolution and trajectory of these detentions to devise policies that restore the rule of law and due process. Obama's Guantanamo: Stories from an Enduring Prison describes President Obama's failure to close America's enduring offshore detention center, as he had promised to do within his first year in office, and the costs of that failure for those imprisoned there. Like its predecessor, Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law, Obama's Guantanamo consists of accounts from lawyers who have not only represented detainees, but also served as their main connection to the outside world. Their stories provide us with an accessible explanation of the forces at work in the detentions and place detainees' stories in the larger context of America's submission to fearmongering. These stories demonstrate all that is wrong with the prison and the importance of maintaining a commitment to human rights even in times of insecurity.

WINNER OF THE CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 2017 'In its tragic absurdity, Close But No Cigar reads like a Graham Greene story, with a cast of characters to make Hemingway proud' Daily Telegraph For over a decade Stephen Purvis had been a pillar of Havana's expat community, one of many foreign businessmen investing in Cuba's crawl from Cold War communism towards modernity. But for reasons unknown to him he was also under State Security's microscope. One morning during the height of President Raul Castro's purges in 2012, while his family slept, the unmarked Ladas of State Security arrived at his home and he was taken away into the absurd and brutal world of Cuban justice. In this engrossing memoir, Purvis recounts his fifteen-month ordeal. Accused at first of selling state secrets, he is taken to the notorious interrogation centre Villa Marista, where he endures brutal conditions designed by the KGB and Stasi to break the bodies and minds of spies and political prisoners, and resists the paranoia and incompetence of his jailers. Later, held in a maximum-security prison, he finds himself surrounded by a motley crew of convicts: people-smugglers and drug-runners together with a handful of confused businessmen also awaiting formal charges. From his arrest to his farcical secret trial and sudden release, Purvis exposes the madness of modern Cuba with wit, grit and a sharp eye for character. As tourists flock to Havana to marvel at a city frozen in time, he shows that despite reforms and international reconciliation the Castro regime remains a corrupt, dictatorial relic. Close But No Cigar is part thriller, part comedy and part morality tale, but most of all a true story that takes the reader into a dark side of a sunny place that remains an enigma.