When PETER HITCHENS spent four days banged-up with ex-cons for a documentary he genuinely feared for his safety and came close to a ‘furious, desperate meltdown’. And that was before word got round about his uncompromising views on crime and punishment

Surrounded by yelling mouths and scowling, hostile faces, I felt deft fingers reach into my trouser pocket from behind and remove my reading glasses. My hands were full with the few possessions I’d been allowed to take into jail and I was too slow to react, so I couldn’t stop them in time.

But that was too much. I had resolved to let this nasty moment, my entry into prison, wash over me. In my free life, I have been insulted by experts and I went through a pretty spartan boarding school experience when I was small, so I am hard to wound or to surprise. But without the glasses I could not even read and the only solace I really cared about would be taken from me.

So I turned, faced the mob and demanded them back. To my amazement, it worked. Someone handed them to me. But by now the attack had changed direction. I still don’t know what they were yelling but I am pretty sure it was something like ‘paedo!’ or ‘nonce!’ – prison words for a convicted child molester. People like me – old, podgy, middle class, physically soft – if they arrive in prison, are immediately suspected of such crimes.

‘Real prisoners laugh bitterly at outsiders who believe if they stick to the straight and narrow they will never end up inside,’ writes PETER HITCHENS

My weak, defensive posture as I walked or stood distinguished me from the tensed up hard men for whom this was something like normal life. I had ‘easy victim’ written all over me. Large tattooed prisoners with scowling faces pretended to mop the floor in front of me, purely so that they could also pretend I was messing up their work, and so swear and snarl at me.

When I was finally guided into the relative safety of my cell (my cell!, what a phrase to have to write or say), I was pursued by more angry faces, weirdly thrusting a banana at my face and demanding that I ate it.

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I had no idea what this was supposed to mean and thought I might as well give in to get them to leave me alone. I was, beyond denial, afraid. This was supposed to be make-believe. Channel 4 had asked me and others to experience something as close to real prison as possible, and I had assumed that it would be bad. But I had not expected it to be so real.

The event must have been staged in some way, but those taking part had swung into it with more enthusiasm than I liked the look of.

I was pretty sure they were doing for the cameras what they had done before in real life, and some of them were enjoying it too much.

I had no idea how far it might go, if it would get out of control. We all know how mobs, even small ones, can develop a will of their own.

The world’s most famous prison experiment, the Milgram study in the US in 1961, has shown that people can become astonishingly callous if they feel it right and safe to do so.

Obscene mockery never stopped in all the days I was in prison. I will leave it to your imagination, except for the moment when the others in the shower very deliberately dropped a bar of soap on the floor and urged me to pick it up. But that was obviously a joke.

Much of the rest of the experience was not a joke at all.

When you watch the programme you will quickly be swept up into a world of anger, filthy language, disgusting hiding places for contraband goods and sudden explosions of violence. My cellmate Tom fiercely told me I should not have surrendered to the banana provocation, though he never explained why. My humiliation was a blow to him as he had, in a way, become responsible for my welfare. If I was hurt or humbled it would reflect on him from now on, as he was the stronger, younger person in the cell.

I have for many years held to the old warning, ‘Call no man happy until he is dead’. No man can be sure what will happen to him in his last years when he hopes for a little serenity. False accusations and miscarriages of justice happen.

People write to me about how injustices have happened to them, and who am I to say they are not telling the truth? The ghastly thing about such letters is that there is usually no practical way of reopening the matter. It has just happened, that is all. They want me to know.

The only case of injustice I have ever successfully challenged involved a man long dead, and took years and the intervention of two very powerful people to resolve. Even then, some of those responsible have still to admit they got it wrong, or undo all the harm they did. It’s also true that everyone who drives a car is at risk of the single fatal mistake which might put them in jail after a lifetime of blameless behaviour.

Real prisoners laugh bitterly at outsiders who believe if they stick to the straight and narrow they will never end up inside.

So I kept reminding myself all this could be real. Later in my stay I would often be miserable, several times physically afraid, and on one occasion so hemmed in by hostility and confinement that I came close to a furious, desperate meltdown.

‘The event must have been staged in some way, but those taking part had swung into it with more enthusiasm than I liked the look of,’ writes PETER HITCHENS

I am sure the intentionally grim and oppressive architecture of the Victorian penitentiary helped to bring me low. Looking through the bars at my only view, a 19th Century brick chimney and a patch of blue sky, did little to cheer me up.

I set this down to explain how seriously I took the idea that we were trying to recreate real prison life, as nearly as possible, which you will see in the programme. Of course I was free to leave, though I had signed various pledges to accept my voluntary incarceration as long as it lasted.

When the TV people asked me to spend several days in a real, decommissioned jail, alongside about 30 real ex-prisoners, other minor celebrities and a few former prison officers, this was clearly not supposed to be light entertainment.

Plainly, it could not be like real prison. The Government would never allow such a thing and it would be far too dangerous, thanks to the raging violence and uncontrolled drug abuse in real jails.

But I made a mental vow to try as hard as I could to join in the spirit of the thing. For that reason, though you are free to doubt me, I spent much of my time in Shrewsbury jail feeling real discomfort, real nervousness and confusion and on occasions real fear. I suppose I had my emotions turned up especially high, as I had done on some (unintentionally) dangerous foreign assignments in my past. It seemed it was a genuine effort to conduct an important social experiment.

It would expose people like me –who presume they will not go to prison – to the things no outside visitor could ever see or feel.

The TV people wanted to make sure I was properly prepared for it. Could I endure being locked in a small room that I couldn’t get out of, often for hours on end? Could I share such a room with a total stranger who was himself a former prisoner with a serious criminal record? That may sound funny, though it sometimes wasn’t. I took the whole thing seriously.

I believe in Murphy’s First Law of Disaster, that ‘if something can go wrong, it will go wrong’. I was not completely mistaken and several times was genuinely worried for my physical safety, which I do not think was unjustified or stage- managed by the film-makers.

I am 71. It is 55 years since I hit anyone (quite hard and in self-defence, please note) and quite a while since anyone has hit me. I can defend myself well enough from sneers levelled at me over a dinner table, but not from the quick and savage blows of real violence.

True, the TV people had promised to protect me from trouble, to keep a careful watch at all times, and that they would do all they could to avoid violence. But I also knew that things might, even so, turn nasty.

‘I made a mental vow to try as hard as I could to join in the spirit of the thing,’ writes PETER HITCHENS

I could probably assume that the ex-prisoners would never have heard of me (I think I was right about that, as I had to explain so many times who I was and what I do for a living). But I also knew that word would get out about my conservative penal opinions.

I knew that my private school voice and la-di-da accent would be provocations in themselves to many people – as they have been late at night on public transport.

So the moment of entry was a careful, deliberate ritual in which I surrendered most of myself, for the sake of the experiment. I went through a proper prison reception procedure, as per regulations. The same questions, the same loss of my possessions and money, the same stripping off of respectable clothes, the same peering up my backside as I squatted on the concrete floor, the same dismal degrading transformation as I was handed prison socks, prison underpants (apparently dating from the First World War), and then the stained grey shapeless tracksuit and canvas shoes which from now on marked me down to anyone who saw me as a powerless, subordinate, shepherded, unfree person not to be trusted.

I was conscious of this almost the whole time, but never more so than when attractive, smiley young women from the TV company appeared at long intervals to interview me about my days in custody.

Sure, it was all make-believe, but the humiliation of being garbed in this fashion in their presence, powerless and compelled to be obedient, and the way the young women would tell me it was time to go back to ‘my cell’, were intimations of how demeaning the real thing must be, which I will not forget.

I was issued with an ugly badge, with my mugshot and the word ‘PRISONER’ in angry red on it, and told I must wear it round my neck at all times. This was especially hateful to me as I have for years furiously resisted the introduction of identity cards and surveillance.

‘I spent much of my time in Shrewsbury jail feeling real discomfort, real nervousness and confusion and on occasions real fear,’ writes PETER HITCHENS

In my view such things turn the wearer into a sort of submissive serf. Free man requires the government to identify itself to him, not the other way round. And it is exactly because I hated it so much that I took great trouble to obey the order throughout my time there.

In reality, I would have had to do so. I was asked to study documents (the prison rules and then an idealistic document about co-operating with the authorities) and allowed ages to do so, as if, like so many prisoners, I could barely read.

I rapidly got used to the fact that from now I could be made to wait ages for everything and could not protest or complain.

I had given those in charge the power to waste my time, just as I should have done if I had committed a crime and been convicted.

And they would waste my time. There are few better ways to show someone he is powerless than by wasting his time. And so it began.

• Channel 4’s Banged Up starts on Tuesday, October 31.

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