Mister

What is prison really like? Is it a rest home or a savage, barbaric institution where violence reigns supreme? And what of the warders? The ‘Misters’ of the title As Robert Allerton (co-author of THE COURAGE OF HIS CONVICTIONS) writes in his introduction: ‘MISTER is a story about men and prisons, a story that has often been told in biographies and less ambitious books with varying degrees of dishonesty and humbug. In recent years there has been a spate of such books, from both sides of the bars, all claiming to be dispassionate accounts, many of them concocted by men with only the briefest knowledge of prisons and the mentalities that govern them. Novel writers who insist on taking their readers into prison rarely go there themselves, but among the exceptions stands Michael Burgess, who qualifies, after some years as a prison officer.’ His central character is Prison Officer Paul Brandon, a tough but thoughtful man, caught up in the usual institutional web of buck-passing and lies. What happens to Brandon, his fellow warders and their charges, will shock many and create disbelief in the minds of others. This can't be so; it can't happen. But it can and does. MISTER is documentary fiction, and the knowledge apparent on every page is gathered from the author's own experience. He has no message to put about, perhaps he is cynical, like Brandon. But he has written a novel, short and sharp like a punch in the stomach, which gives a unique account of the matter-of-fact inhumanity practised and condoned in prison by men towards their fellow beings.