Noel Razor Smith was born in London on Christmas Eve 1960.

By the time he was fourteen, a naughty, spirited boy was set upon a violent criminal career. Even his mum was calling him by his street name Razor. In adulthood he graduated from theft to car crime, grievous bodily harm, armed bank robbery and prison escape. He has spent more than half his adult life behind bars. The standard reasons apply: a neglectful upbringing, the failure of school and the influence of the wrong mates. But he says a turning point came when the police fitted him up for a catalogue of crimes he did not commit and, in the course of that, violently assaulted him. Treated like a criminal, I decided to become one. he says. He describes how exciting, what a high it was to conduct a bank robbery. It was literally sensational. Noel was caused to rethink his life by news received in prison in 2001. His son aged nineteen had died in mysterious circumstances (it was an open verdict) soon after being released from Feltham Young Offenders Prison. I knew I had become a horrible, horrible person he says. He managed, after many applications, to get into HMP Grendon, known for its very rigorous rehabilitation processes. In that regime lasting five years the golden rule was honesty. He was required to listen to the stories of others, including rapists and child abusers, people he would otherwise have been viciously assaulting in mainstream prison whenever he got the chance. No interruption and no aggression was permitted in these sessions and Noel had to tell his own story too, in all detail. It worked. After a spell in an open prison, work in the community and home leave once a month Noel was released on licence from his life sentence last year. He now makes honest money as a journalist, author and editor of Inside Time, the national prisoners newspaper. He knows he can be recalled to prison at any time. All of this and much more Noel told a meeting of a new student society, the Howard League for Penal Reform, at the university last week. A squat, black suited, shaven headed figure, Noel lives up to his billing. There is a certain filmic glamour surrounding big-time crime. Would over one hundred students have turned out to hear the story of a reformed shoplifter, I wondered. But Noel told his story quietly, without embellishment or drama, without self-pity or self-justification. Here was a man who had taken hold of his life. The audience was at first stunned, then animated. The questions started. Have you been tempted back to crime? Hes had offers of jobs but turned them down. Can rehabilitation work for all prisoners? Is community service any use? What about restorative justice? Noel is generally in favour of these enlightened approaches but thinks too often they go off at half-cock. Of the prison system he says What would you say to a hospital system that admitted patients with sprained ankles and discharged them with bubonic plague? He warns any Psychology students thinking of prison work to get some life

experience first. I cant resist asking him-though I guessed the answer-whether any prison chaplains had been any help. You better be joking, he says I am the original anti-Christ, me. I walk down the hill afterwards with a student who says at least prison worked for Noel in the end. Thats true. HMP Grendon and, you might say, his son redeemed him tragically. But you also have to say only he could do the heavy lifting. Hes a serious man now.We should listen to him. It was good that the students did. Michael Golby Quaker Chaplain, Exeter University