The Longest Injustice: The Strange Story of Alex Alexandrowicz

179 Pages·1998·15.291 MB·English

by  Alex Alexandrowicz, David Wilson

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The Longest Injustice
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Alex Alexandrowicz spent 22 years in prison protest- s
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ing his innoc ence — the result of a plea bargain which In The Strange Story
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went wrong and turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare. u of
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ic Alex Alexandrowicz
The book includes extracts from his ‘Prison Chronicles’ e
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a record of those experiences and his fight for justice. h
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For most of his time as a discretionary life sentenced r
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prisoner, Alex was a Category-A high security inmate, g
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often in solitary confinement. His chronicles vividly S
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portray these times as well as the difficulties faced o
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by people in British prisons who maintain their Alex’s story was brought o
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allow — indeed, as David Wilson explains, it penalises with the publication of e
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them. Dear Fiona by Fiona Ful- A
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Alex spent time in some of Britain’s most notori ous 2012) which tells of his n
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David Wilson is Professor of Criminology and the a selection of his poems. x
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Director of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Bir-
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mingham City University. A former prison governor, o
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he is editor of the Howard Journal and a well-known i
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author, broadcaster and presenter for TV and radio, &
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Cover illustration by Peter Cameron n
www.WatersidePress.co.uk
Alex Alexandrowicz and David Wilson
WATERSIDE PRESS
Putting justice into words WATERSIDE PRESS

The Longest Injustice
The Strange Story
of
Alex Alexandrowicz
Alex Alexandrowicz spent 22 years in some of Britain's most notorious gaols
much of this time as a Category A high security prisoner. The Longest Injustice
includes his own Prison Chronicles-a first hand account in which he explains
why he believes he was wrongly convicted (a matter currently with the Criminal
Cases Review Commission) and vividly recreates his experiences of the early
years following his arrest. Institutionalised by the system and apprehensive of
the outside world he now lives alone in Milton Keynes where he continues the
long fight to clear his name from a flat which has grown to resemble a prison cell.
David Wilson is Professor of Criminal Justice and Course Director for the MA in
Criminal Justice, Policy and Practice at the University of Central England in
Birmingham. He is the former Head of Prison Officer and Operational Training
for HM Prii;;on Service, a post from which he resigned in 1997. At the time he was
described by The Obseroer as the 'highest high flyer' in the Prison Service. He is a
regular commentator on penal and criminal justice matters, including as co
presenter of the BBC 1 TV series Crime Squad. He also presented Channel 4'i ;; Hard
Cell and is the editor of the Haward Journal. His previous books include The Prison
Governor: Theory and Practice (1997) and What Everyone in Britain Should Knaw
About Crime and Punishment (1998).
The Longest Injustice
The Strange Story of Alex Alexandrowicz
by Alex Alexandrowicz and David Wilson
ISBN 978-1-872870-45-8 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-908162-27-4 (Adobe PDF ebook)
Published 1999 by
Waterside Press Telephone [phone]
Sherfield Gables E-mail [email protected]
Sherfield on Loddon Online catalogue WatersidePress.co.uk
Hook, Hampshire
United Kingdom RG27 0JG
Reprinted 2012
Main UK distributor Gardners Books, 1 Whittle Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex,
BN23 6QH. Tel: [phone]; [email protected]; www.gardners.com
Copyright © 1999 Prison Chronicles: Alex Alexandrowicz. Introduction and After
the Chronicles: David Wilson. All intellectual property and associated rights are
hereby asserted and reserved by the authors in full compliance with UK, Euro-
pean and international law. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced,
stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,
including in hard copy or via the internet, without the prior written permission
of the publishers to whom all such rights have been assigned worldwide.
Cover design © 2012 Waterside Press. Original design by John Good Holbrook
Ltd, Coventry using an original illustration by Peter Cameron
Peter Cameron started painting whilst serving a ten and a half year prison sen-
tence and came to terms with his imprisonment by making it the subject of his
art. He is one of the ‘Waterside 23’ whose stories are told in Going Straight: After
Crime and Punishment compiled by Angela Devlin and Bob Turney, Waterside
Press 1999. Peter Cameron is now a freelance artist.
Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book can be
obtained from the British Library.
e-book The Longest Injustice is available as an ebook and also to subscribers of
Myilibrary and Dawsonera.
Printed by Lightning Source.
The Strange Story of Alex Alexandrowicz iii
The Longest Injustice
The Strange Story
of
Alex Alexandrowicz
Alex Alexandrowicz
David Wilson
~ WATERSIDE PRESS
iv The Longest Injustice
This book is dedicated to all those who didn't make it
and especially to all victims of British justice.
The Strange Story of Alex Alexandrowicz v
The Longest Injustice
CONTENTS
Introduction
David Wilson 7
Prison Chronicles
Prisoner 789959 Alex Alexandrowicz1 17
After the Chronicles End
David Wilson 113
CHAPTER
1 A Descriptive Outline 123
2 Innocence and HMP Grendon 139
3 The Law and Lifers, Release and the
Criminal Cases Review Commission 155
A Guide to Further Reading 172
Cases Cited in the Text 173
Index 173
1 Alex's real name is Anthony Alexandrowicz, but he is known to everyone as
Alex-an abbreviation of his surname.
vl The Longest Injustice
Acknowledgements for Alex Alexandrowicz
John Ashton, Bill Jarvis, Bill McCoid, Joan Bronnimman, Alis Joyner,
Maurice Chamberlain, Kevin Fegan, Melanie Fegan, Gillian Price, Robin
Thomber, Andy Holt, Rose Pearce, Penny Fitzgerald, Steven Coogan,
Kate Holdom, Radio Lancaster University, Irene Schimeld, Margaret
Gateley, Richard Varley, Elspeth Varley, Andy Hood, Laurie and Jackie,
Mike Spencer, Sue Oliver, Chris Kine, Janet Bowers, Alan Last, Andy
Holt, Tessa O'Neil, Jeremy Corbin, Crowie, Dick Meadows, Fiona
Fullerton, Edward Fitzgerald, Judi Kemish, Peter Beaumont, Nusse and
Children, Geoff Hammond, Phil Hartwell, Steve Lamer, Steve Lannigan,
Sean Kinsella, Noel Gibson, Estella Ramos, Carlos Ramos, Paul Hill,
Dave Rose, Andrew McKenzie, SO Gray, Dave Small, John Stead, John
Beebe, Vivien Heilbron QC, Scott Dunsford, Dave King, Darren Foster,
Lilian Temple, Phil Peratin and Debbie for putting up with me as she
does.
Also, Dr Eric Cullen, my best friend.
Acknowledgements for David Wilson
Eric Cullen, Mike Sheldrick, Bryan Gibson, Stephen Shaw, Anne
Maquire, Doug Sharp, and Barbara McCalla who typed the manuscript
with her customary speed and efficiency.
The Longest Injustice 7
Introduction
David Wilson
On Thursday 7 October 1971 sometime after nine o'clock Catherine
Masterson climbed the stairs of her house in A venham Lane in Preston,
and went to bed. Later she was joined by her daughter Caroline who got
into bed with her mother, perhaps for warmth and comfort, and
eventually both fell asleep. A few hours later at about half past two in
the morning they realised that someone else was in the bedroom, and
that he had a knife. Catherine and Caroline were lucky. Despite the
intruder carrying a weapon, their screams were loud and constant
enough to scare him away. Both were badly shaken by this frightening
episode, but Catherine's minor injuries from the intruder's attempts to
stab her did not prevent her from being released from the Preston Royal
Infirmary the following day.
When she got home she noticed that some of the clothes that she
had hung out to dry in the backyard had been slashed and tom, and she
drew the detective from the Lancashire Constabulary's attention to
these thinking that they might be useful as evidence. She could not
give much of a description of the intruder, except that he had been
dressed only in his underpants and a T-shirt, but her daughter Caroline
remembered that he 'looked about 30, was tall, medium build, with
very black hair, which was curly'.
• • •
This is the story of Anthony Alexandrovich-known universally as
'Alex'-and his 29-year fight against his confession and conviction as a
seventeen-year-old for the aggravated burglary of the Masterson's
house, wounding with intent to do GBH to Catherine Masterson, and
assault occasioning ABH against Caroline Masterson. Twenty-two of
these years were spent in prison where Alex was a discretionary life
sentenced prisoner, and where he steadfastly maintained his innocence.
He continues to do so after release, and at the time of writing is taking
his case through the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC),
which was set up in 1995 to investigate alleged miscarriages of justice.
It is no longer shocking to think that our criminal justice system
the 'best in the World'-produces miscarriages. We've got used to the
fact that evidence can be fabricated, confessions forged, and that our
police can be as corrupt as anyone else's can. And as the Birmingham Six
beget the Guildford Four, who in tum beget the Bridgewater Four,
a Introduction
Stefan Kiszko, the Tottenham Three, and the countless others who by
now rarely make it into our newspapers and our consciousness, the case
of Alex appears just another story in the sea of stories about the failures
of criminal justice. Yet it is much more than this, not just because Alex's
story is so awful and compelling-he seems to have come straight out of
a Kafka novel-but rather because justice has still not been done. There
has been no happy ending; no apology for the lost years; ro
compensation for a life that has been spent in prisons the length and
breadth of England; no end to the probation officers, and the threat of
being returned to prison-a life licence, after all, lasts for life; and
above all no sense of putting the past behind. That is where Alex
lives-in the past, because it is there that the wrong was done, and so
he cannot face the future until that wrong is made right. Released in
July 1993, an extraordinary long time to have served for offences of the
kind in question, and more than double the average length of time
served by someone convicted of murder, Alex remains imprisoned. He is
not imprisoned by prison officers and prison governors, or even
politicians. He is imprisoned by injustice, and this book is an attempt
to make right that injustice.
The first half of the book is made up of Alex's own attempt to put
his story down m paper. It is called Prison Chronicles and deals with
some aspects of Alex's case, and is largely set in the prisons he
encountered during the early years of his sentence. As such the
chronicles provide a fascinating glimpse of the origins and realities of
the 'dispersal system' which had been set up after the 1966
Mountbatten Report, which had investigated prison security following
the escapes of some of the Great Train Robbers, and the spy George
Blake. Mountbatten had recommended that all potential escapers
should be housed together in a special prison that was to be constructed
m the Isle of Wight, and which was to be named Vectis. Ultimately
this recommendation was not accepted, and instead a policy of
dispersing the more difficult prisoners within six or seven prisons was
adopted. These prisons became known as 'dispersals'.
Mountbatten had more luck with his recommendation that a 11
prisoners should be given one of four security classifications. These
classifications are A, B, C, and D. The lowest security classification is
Category D, and this applies to prisoners who can reasonably be trusted
in open conditions. Category A, the highest security category, is
reserved for those prisoners whose escape would be highly dangerous to
the public or the police or the security of the state, no matter how
unlikely that escape might be, and for whom the aim must be to make
escape impossible. Alex, barely 18, was one of the youngest Category A
prisoners, and he describes the reality of living with this classification