Michael Bunting on the power of The Written Word

Six years after accomplishing his dream of becoming a police officer, Michael Bunting was in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.  Hard-hitting and at times heart-breaking, A Fair Cop is Bunting’s graphic account of his life behind bars in one of England’s hardest prisons. In this piece, he recounts the power of the written word and how it got him through this devastating time.

I was about two days into my prison sentence for common assault at Armley Prison in Leeds when I knew that I was going to have to exercise my mind in a way that I’d never done before in order to survive. The relentless coercion and gratuitous violence from other inmates had taken me to a place I never thought I’d be. After a suicide attempt that was rather too close for comfort, I knew that the only way to get through my time was to take control of the psychological pain that had gripped me so hard. My dream career in the police service was over and my nightmare of being a prisoner had begun.

I had never been a big reader, but the one and only book I was allowed in prison, Tony Adams’ autobiography, became my best friend (my only friend, in fact) and I treasured every word on each page. It was my only escape from the abuse, the threats and the violence I endured for much of my sentence.

A chance meeting with the Prison Chaplain resulted in me receiving Daily Strength, a collection of Bible excerpts in a handy pocket-sized booklet that would follow me everywhere I went for the rest of my sentence. It was the influence of the words in Daily Strength combined with the desperation caused by my incarceration that resulted in the first words of my book being written on old envelopes and toilet paper in my cell. I had always maintained my innocence and for the first time in a two-year judicial process, I was able to say things that I wanted to without a barrister or investigating officer trying to make something out of my words. The freedom I got from this was infectious and I would find myself looking forward to every session of writing I’d get in my cell. It would temporarily erase the pain caused by my conviction, something that I, and many others, saw as a miscarriage of justice of gargantuan proportion.

Writing had become my second friend. The discovery of the power that putting pen to paper gave me at the age of 26 in such frightful and unforeseen circumstances meant that my first attempt at suicide was to be my last. My early relationship with writing, far from being an arduous and thankless task reported by lots of unpublished writers, was a harmonious therapy that contributed to my rescue from the demons that had taken hold of my mind in the early part of my sentence.

People often ask me whether I found God in prison. The meeting with the chaplain and the perpetual reading of Daily Strength means the answer to this question is probably yes. However, I also found the power of the written word which led to the publication of A Fair Cop. This has undoubtedly taken me far away from the desperation I once felt to places that without discovering the pleasures of writing, I could only ever have dreamt of finding.

Michael Bunting — 14th June 2009

Author of A Fair Cop.