description: 'The sun is shining through the bars of my window on what must be a glorious summer day. I've been incarcerated in a cell five paces by three for twelve and a half hours, and will not be let out again until midday; eighteen and a half hours of solitary confinement. There is a child of seventeen in the cell below me who has been charged with shoplifting - his first offence, not even convicted - and he is being locked up for eighteen and a half hours, unable to speak to anyone. This is Great Britain in the twenty-first century, not Turkey, not Nigeria, not Kosovo, but Britain.'On Thursday 19 July 2001, after a perjury trial lasting seven weeks, Jeffrey Archer was sentenced to four years in jail. He was to spend the first twenty-two days and fourteen hours in HMP Belmarsh, a double A-Category high-security prison in South London, which houses some of Britain's most violent criminals.This is the author's daily record of the time he spent there.
title: Belmarsh: Hell
titlecomplete: Belmarsh: Hell (A Prison Diary #1)
characters: Jeffrey Archer
genres: Biography, Mystery, Thriller, Memoir, Nonfiction, Autobiography, Biography Memoir, Crime, Audiobook, True Crime
ratings_count: 5856
places: London, England
series: A Prison Diary