it would be helpfull if u put up with this article...who to make postal orders out to...ie ..john himself or the govonor of the shithole..cos im gonna make one out to john ..but obviously if its meant to be made out to the govonor it just givs em another excuse to put the boot in...otherwise its a really well written/done..article...solidarity..

Postal orders should either be left blank or made out to 'The Governor'.

Postal orders should either be left blank or made out to 'The Governor'.

I wrote to john just a few weeks ago and got areply from him while he was in the castle,i know john from doing time with him and ive got more respect for john than any other con ive met,so im sending him cash in through recorded delivery,i would urge anyone if handing money in for john if possible go to there nearest jail and just give johns name and number to the monkeyss at the desk and hand over the money but make sure you get a receipt before you leave,im from liverpool so i cant do it,but if you live in scotland any jail will do even though the dirty scumbag bastards have stuck him in glenochil.I hope and pray this man gets some justice and is given the chance to live a live outside again.Good luck john your friend Alan.

Introduction to Tear Down The Walls!

Over the past 10 years or so, the British prison system has been able to claw back almost all of the concessions to humanity an earlier generation of prisoners fought tooth and nail to achieve. The State did not achieve this without resistance, and sometimes robust and significant resistance, such as the full-scale uprising at Full Sutton prison in 1997, but nonetheless it was accomplished. Resistance against tyranny is inevitable and will always endure, but certainly for the most part, throughout the British penal estate, a culture of selfish conformity has currently replaced one of solidarity and struggle.

When the wheels of repression were first set in motion, and the iron heel of the State began to be placed upon the throat of the British prison struggle, few prison ‘rebels’ had the insight and political consciousness to see what was ahead and realise just how far the system intended to go in their aim of crushing the prison struggle once and for all. It was easy to be a rebel when everyone was a rebel, but harder as the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of the State began to take their toll on solidarity by means of the ‘incentives and earned privileges scheme’. It was harder as the number of militants was reduced by naked brutality and the reintroduction of control units; when the landings of the prisons became flooded with smack; and when many one-time ‘rebels’ bailed out for an easy life on the ‘Enhanced’ wings while former comrades suffered in the blocks and units. Sometimes it is easy to be a rebel, but it is harder to be a revolutionary, and for the most part, only those with a genuine revolutionary political consciousness were able to remain true in the face of the dark winds of repression, and find the strength and courage to keep on fighting back. John Bowden is one of these.

I first met John on the exercise yard of Full Sutton maximum security prison in 1998 or 1999, and we quickly became close friends and comrades. John has a personal strength and integrity which shines like a beacon, and a deep level of intelligence and insight, qualities which have made him an accomplished prison organiser and militant, always at the forefront of resistance and struggle wherever the Prison Service ‘ghost-train’ has taken him. You always knew that John would back you up to the hilt, and that once you engaged with the enemy retreat was not an option!

Our first joint initiative was to try to get a proper campaign going to shut down the Woodhill torture unit, with a call for regular protests outside the jail and solidarity actions by prisoners. The ink was barely dry on our call to arms though when John was ghosted to Parkhurst, Britain’s ‘Alcatraz’ on the Isle of Wight. At least one protest outside Woodhill did materialise however, along with a solid prisoners work-strike at Full Sutton.

While John was in the block we corresponded regularly, and continued to swap ideas as well as the prison censor allowed. I was able to organise a number of other work-strikes, sit-outs, and protests at Full Sutton, a militant atmosphere reigned, and a full-scale uprising was only narrowly nipped in the bud. Then the TVs were brought in, and I was ghosted myself!

A few days after arriving on the wing at Long Lartin, I was astonished to see John, we couldn’t believe they’d been stupid enough to put us on the same wing! The plotting began anew! It didn’t last long though, within a few weeks we were caught up in a quite extraordinary situation, which was to see both of us ghosted, and me in the block for the rest of the year. Clearly wanting rid of us, a situation was engendered where we were locked in a cell, together with 4 others, and then accused of barricading it! Despite the fact that we could go nowhere, the whole wing was locked up and moved to another location, all staff leave was cancelled, and extra screws were brought in from other jails along with the police. Nine hours after the six of us had been locked in the 2 metre x 2 metre cell, screws in full riot gear came in with a water-cannon, and they and their dozens of colleagues beat us all the way to the block. As I was collapsing into unconsciousness on the floor of the anti-protest cell into which I’d been thrown, I could hear John being brought down shouting, “Is that the best you can do you cowards, can’t you hit me any harder than that?!”

Nearly a year later, when I was briefly out of segregation, John was put on my wing at Frankland prison near Durham. However, we barely had chance to shake hands when the screws rushed on to say that there’d been a mistake and that he was on the wrong wing. They were so desperate to accommodate him elsewhere, they put John on the ‘Enhanced’ wing! A few days later I was back down the block accused of “fermenting unrest” (sic.) and off to Wakefield!

Even when we were in different nicks though, John proved a valuable comrade and ally, and we were able to jointly organise other initiatives such as solidarity actions in support of the Turkish hunger-strikers and prisoners in the Spanish FIES isolation units. Wherever John was I always knew that he would be constantly working against the system in whatever way he could!

There is no doubt that John is a man of action, a soldier, someone who will physically stand his ground and walk the walk as well as talk the talk. But, he is also a hugely articulate writer who expresses his political ideas clearly and cogently, and is never afraid to speak his mind irrespective of the personal consequences. And John certainly has been punished for speaking out, in ways that many who have never known the tyranny of prison life may find hard to believe possible. Believe it, for there are no depths to the barbarity and inhumanity of the system and its turn-key lackeys. And believe this too: John Bowden has never been intimidated by the grinding brutality he has suffered, the long years of isolation have never caused him to surrender. He remains defiant, unvanquished, unbowed, every inch the human-being that the cowards who have beaten him and kept him chained can never aspire to be.

Leeds ABC are honoured to be able to publish this pamphlet. In Unbroken! John shares his story with us; a tale of inhumanity and resistance to that inhumanity, of a political awakening in the dark dungeons which the State prefers left unlit, and above all of solidarity and the struggle to maintain personal integrity in the face of the most terrible adversity. In Prison – A Crime Against Humanity John shows, clearly and concisely, why prisons can never be ‘reformed’ and must be destroyed absolutely.

Insights into the closed prison world of blocks and control units are rare, and in writing about this world for us, John Bowden is once again risking more than many would care to sacrifice themselves. All we can do is offer him our solidarity. Tear down the walls!

Mark Barnsley
Leeds ABC
February 2007

Forgive me, but this is the same John Bowden who in 1982 was imprisoned for luring a London park keeper into his flat, throwing him into a bath of boiling water, dismembering him alive with a saw before severing his head with a carving knife and keeping it in a fridge.

Clearly not just your regular saturday night out on the piss or a ‘stupid, drunken, murder’ for that matter. Why exactly should any support be offered to this lunatic?

SPECIAL REPORT

John Bowden was arrested in 1980 for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1992, after years of brutality and repression, he managed to escape and was on the run from the police for a year and a half. He was recaptured in March 1994 and has since been in Perth Prison in Scotland. Here he talks about various aspects of being inside, including the reasons as to why he committed murder and his subsequent politicisation.

How do you justify asking for our support, having taken a life?

The murder itself cannot be looked upon as an isolated incident, it has to be tied in with my history. Being identified as Irish I experienced racism as well as extreme poverty very early on in life. Unfortunately my instinctive rebellion against both sets of disadvantages was always blind and misdirected. I rebelled early by committing serious anti-social acts (I burnt a factory to the ground when I was nine!) and so was criminalised and incarcerated quite early on in life. I was fed into the ‘criminal justice system’ as a mere child and systematically brutalised and de-socialised to the extent where I became a complete outsider, made hard and violent by institutionalisation and predatory in my relationship to ‘straight’ society.

The writer Norman Mailer has drawn some interesting and profoundly accurate parallels between the condition of ‘state raised convicts’ (people who had literally grown up in penal institutions) and that of the rebellious slaves sold into the gladiator schools of ancient Rome. Both groups suffered extreme dehumanisation and were turned into killers - the gladiators so that they would kill each other for the entertainment of the rich; the state raised convicts so that they would represent the ultimate social folk devil from which ‘normal’ society must be protected and carefully policed against.

By the time I had reached my early twenties I had already spent the bulk of my time locked away in various prison-type institutions and had accumulated a long criminal record, composed mostly of violent offences, which were becoming increasingly more violent. There was therefore a certain inevitability about my arrest for murder in 1980 and subsequent imprisonment for life. Within a year of being sentenced I was involved in a highly publicised hostage taking incident at Parkhurst Prison when an assistant governor was seized in protest over the murder of a prisoner in the hospital wing. I was sentenced to an additional ten years imprisonment, on top of life, and buried in solitary confinement for over four years. At that point my life was effectively over, and yet in a very real sense it was only just beginning. Somehow in the midst of all that hopelessness, pain and repression I actually began to discover my true humanity and experienced a process of deep politicisation which drew me closer to my fellow prisoners and oppressed people everywhere. From a brutalised and anti social criminal I metamorphasised into a totally committed revolutionary.

My politicisation happened while I was being held in solitary confinement and I suppose it had the intensity of a religious conversion almost. I was held in solitary for over four consecutive years at one point and so read and thought a great deal, and began to make connections between the struggle that I’d been fighting all of my life, albeit in an individualistic and self-destructive way, and the far wider struggles of oppressed people everywhere. I was also radicalised by my direct experience of struggle in prison essentially because in its treatment of rebellious prisoners, the state always reveals its true nature which of course is pure fascism. Revolutionary politics helped me to properly contextualise my struggle in prison and also to sustain and inspire me when I experienced repression of the most brutal and soul-destroying sort.

...Malcolm X once described prisons as universities of revolution. I discovered myself in prison and also a sort of freedom that I had never before known - my body might have been imprisoned but my mind and spirit became completely liberated...

What’s it like being in prison?

The pain of my recapture and the soul-destroying reality of being back in prison wounded me terribly and at one point caused me to contemplate offering up my life in one final struggle against the system - but then you made contact and I felt as if I still had some link with the outside.

Life here is much the same; I eat, I exercise, I sleep. Someone once described prisons as huge human battery farms, designed simply to warehouse people and maintain their biological existence. We’re fed (badly), clothed and housed in tiny boxes devoid of even the most basic human comforts. Though physically sustained men are spiritually crushed and driven insane almost routinely.

One day there will be a ‘carnival of the oppressed’ (my favourite description of revolution) and these bastards will be held accountable for their actions.

During summer prison becomes even harder to endure and accept and right now my longing for freedom is so painfully overwhelming and desperate. I want to be away from this awful place and free to wander with the sun on my face and the sounds and colours of summer all around me.

There are moments here, especially in the early mornings when I first awake and struggle to make the psychological adjustment from dreams of freedom to the hard edged reality of captivity, when I feel totally overwhelmed by depression and deep deep sadness. It sometimes requires a real Herculean effort of will power just to climb upright each morning and endure yet another soul-destroying day in this place, another day filled with dead time and frustrated desires, with such a desperate craving for freedom. Prison is a veritable evil exactly because it is so deliberately designed and structured to destroy the human spirit. I feel that psychological and emotional violence very keenly.

The experience of such extreme oppression, however, will never break or diminish me because in a sense I’ve been held captive all my life and so have grown hardened to their efforts of breaking me. Being imprisoned wounds and injures me but never will it touch my essential core, that vital source of strength and resistance. Despite all the pain and hardship of prison, I do somehow manage to survive with dignity and integrity and even humour.

...no matter how overwhelmingly bad the odds, retain a powerful hope and belief in the possibility of struggle and a far better world as a result of it...

I’m fortunate that I have apolitical perspective on prisons and so can universalise my struggle and relate it to the struggle of oppressed people everywhere. That awareness does provide a real source of strength and hope in this situation. In prison, especially you learn to understand the importance of collective struggle and mutual support and there really is no way that I could endure and survive this experience merely as an individual prisoner, depending on my own individual dreams and hopes.

How important is it to write to prisoners?

Prison, more than anything, is designed to isolate and alienate people from any source of support on the outside, and it is exactly that sensation of isolation that often destroys prisoner activists and political prisoners especially. There is no greater feeling of demoralisation than that created by the feeling that one is completely alone and isolated here, because no matter how strong or committed one is we all still need to feel that we are part of a much wider struggle with comrades supporting and assisting us even if they are not physically present. If I know that people on the outside recognise and support my struggle here in prison then I can endure and continue to resist infinitely even if buried in the deepest solitary confinement unit. Your own expressions of solidarity are a constant inspiration and source of so much that makes life bearable at the moment. A single letter is always sufficient to restore my belief in struggling on and reaching beyond all that presently exists to oppress and crush me.
WRITING TO PRISONERS

Prison life is extremely boring, so letters are generally the highlight of the day. Don’t be afraid of talking about your life, about things you are doing - it all helps to relieve the tedium that is prison. Just be careful that anything you write will not get the prisoner or anyone else into trouble - as always, use your head.

If you are writing to people from political movements (eg. poll tax prisoners, anti-CJA), keep them involved in the struggle. Discuss ideas, strategies (general, not specific actions!), theory, but again be careful, as ‘political’ prisoners often get singled out for harassment.

Most prisons do not allow letters in without a return address. Letters do sometimes get stopped, read, ‘diverted’, ‘lost’ so its often worth sending the first letter via recorded delivery to make sure that it gets opened in the prisoners presence.

Most prisoners are not the ‘mad beasts’ portrayed by the tabloids, they are ordinary people, and the only way they are going to know you support them is if you tell them, so GET WRITING...

So where do you get your "facts" from Concerned? What utter crap. And what the fuck would your "support" for this man amount to anyway? John Bowden is worth ten of wankers like you.

Ex-Con, what is your version of what Bowden did?

In 1980 John Bowden (22), then a heavy-drinking petty criminal who had already spent most of his life in various different types of penal institutions, killed Donald Ryan in the Camberwell flat belonging to Shirley Brindle (34). Bowden had been drinking at the flat, together with Michael Ward (27), David Beyley (48), Brindle and Ryan. In addition to drinking, they had been playing cards. They had also been making sandwiches with a joint of meat, which they cut with an electric carving knife.

In the course of this heavy drinking session an argument started between Bowden and Ryan Ryan pulled a knife, but Bowden grabbed the electric carving knife and cut Ryan across the hand severely injuring his fingers. Ryan was obviously in some distress, but his hand was bandaged with a cloth and they carried on drinking and playing cards. Eventually Bowden said he would take Ryan to the hospital, saying that first he would just dress the wound in the bathroom upstairs, but thinking that Ryan would later seek revenge, Bowden killed him, He then, together with the others, chopped up the corpse, and cut off the head. Various parts of Ryan's dismembered body were dumped around the area, but the head, which the gang viewed as harder to get rid of, was kept for several days in Bowden's fridge.

Eventually, the gang were arrested and the 3 men were given life sentences. Shirley Brindle was convicted of helping to dispose of the body. All the defendents had criminal convictions, as did Donald Ryan, who was a convicted child sex-offender.

John Bowden was represented at the trial by Michael Mansfield QC.

I don't know what John Bowden done nigh on 30 years ago but I have met him in gaol and I agree with Alan. John is the staunchest con I have ever met always sticking up for his fellow cons and even peple he does not know. For that matter he is a right nice bloke too. Drink can do terrible things to a person as can beatings and stuff when your a kid and in those kids homes and that everyon is trying to be the hardest basterd too. I'm sure John regrets what he done all those years ago. He is not being kept in gaol for that anymore he's there for his politics and for sticking up for others. Good luck John.