Have a few drinks and drive home at your peril. Many people in Hong Kong do not consider drink-driving a serious offence, but when John Hoskison did it, he was given 18 months in three of the most dangerous prisons in Britain to think about his mistake. After reading this account of his ordeal, one suspects he is unlikely to make the same mistake again. Prisons are not the same the world over. When drug smuggler Billy Hayes, whose case was made famous by the film Midnight Express, found himself in a stinking hole in Turkey, no doubt he could but dream of being behind bars in his native United States. But whether one ends up in a Turkish hell-hole, or among the 8,500 or so inmates in Hong Kong currently protesting about the excessive violence of the prison officers, or the 60,000-odd in Britain as Hoskison did, the shock and loss can be devastating. All the more so when, as a non-violent first offender, Hoskison could have expected a reasonably cushy stint in an open prison. Bureaucracy condemned him to harsher treatment. Had he not mown down and killed a cyclist, he would have spent his months - he served half of his three-year sentence - from October 1995 on the golf course, earning his crust as a professional golfer. The only course he experienced inside, however, was a long-distance learning introduction to journalism. This helped him paint a deeply personal, often moving and always compelling account of life among the thugs and murderers of Britain's high-security jails, written in part, he says, to counter holiday camp-like impressions drawn by the press. For someone more used to guiding golf balls than a pen, Hoskison is remarkably successful in describing both the demons summoned by that dreadful accident - demons hardly softened by the almost divine forgiveness of the victim's wife - and the demons who become his jailers and cellmates. There is his cellmate Pete 'the Psycho', transferred from Broadmoor - a prison for the criminally insane - who is inside for stabbing a policeman with a syringe he claimed contained the HIV virus; Jimmy the junkie and drug dealer and his cronies who vomit up bags of smuggled smack; and the black gangs who rule with violence and intimidation. Some of the guards, it seems, are almost as bad. But there are also the 'good guys', relatively speaking: Steve the armed robber who offers protection in return for a golf lesson, Chris the gym instructor who presents a friendly face, and lifer Mike who runs a project to try to stop wayward kids ending up like him. Ironically, this project, conceived and run almost entirely by inmates, appears one of the few success stories of the prison regime, bringing together inmates and troubled teenagers who can confront their pasts and futures respectively. Thanks to a bit of savvy and a few good friends, Hoskison gets through his ordeal relatively unscathed, at least physically. He does not suffer vicious beatings or gang rape, but his time is harrowing: the constant tension and threats, the endless noise, and of course, the numbing incarceration. He is often on the brink, but asks not that we feel sorry for him - he almost welcomed his plight as a way of paying for his sin. Rather, he wants us to understand what loss of liberty means, how the authorities have lost control and how political policies have created one of the most successful training programmes in the country - fine-tuning the skills of criminals instead of rehabilitating them, and turning them into junkies to boot. Hoskison tells how the system effectively condones the use of heroin in prison - most drugs are smuggled in not by inmates and their visitors, but by guards - how they are run not by the governors but by the inmates, and how Home Office budgetary constraint leaves no room for education, virtually guaranteeing repeat offences and leaving society outside the high walls failed by a misguided political desire to clamp down inside them. Not that the first-time author gets on his soap box. He usually makes his point by relating his personal frustrations and the situations of others inside. Heroin, he says, is used to overcome boredom. He avoided it, but the reader understands how he could have been tempted. Petty criminals mix with hardened crooks and lifers, learning useful new tricks for when they get out to a world with less opportunity than when they came in. While accepting the need for a punitive element to justice, Hoskison laments the ridiculous Catch-22 situation. What got him through was the love of his young son and girlfriend. Most inmates, he says, have no family support, and therefore no chance. If you are inclined to think 'so what?', partly because it is not going to happen to you, then you may just be enlightened by Hoskison's story. Inside: One Man's Experience of Prison by John Hoskison John Murray, $270