It was this weapon that would later be used to kill PJ. Steele again holds the fighting knife in his right hand. He told the court in December: “I don’t remember it. All I know is that a man has possibly died at my hands.” Prison breeding ground eventually bred a better man, but it was a long hard Glasgow road for battle weary Johnnyboy In what he says is his last interview before he reclaims the life he was denied when he battled for 20 years to clear his name, Joe Steele reveals how the brutal regime of prison life and being fitted up for the murders of six members of the Doyle family did not break him.

If she says there is nowhere further to go then it becomes more serious. But I will just have to wait and see. Today Barlinnie handles 20 per cent of Scotland’s prisoners. Even visiting time is a logistical nightmare of around 7300 visitors every month, including around 1100 children. What do I remember from that first time? Dirt,” he says. “I came from a post in Bangladesh, but Barlinnie was worse for your health than Bangladesh. At least there you could do your best to survive, in Barlinnie you were subjected to the regime. It offered Victorian-age work ethics with access to education and books. The new A Hall prisoners were put to work baking and building, making shoes and mattresses, outside the quarry gave others the harsher task of breaking stone to help build B, C and D Halls.The man wrongly convicted of the Ice Cream War murders has revealed how he won his life-or-death battle with drugs. Barlinnie already had a grim reputation when D Hall’s ‘Hanging Shed’ gallows opened in the mid-1940s. The execution cell was the last place 10 prisoners saw before being hanged and their bodies placed on a mortuary slab in a chamber below. Former priest Willy Slavin, Barlinnie chaplain from 1982 to 1992, also remembers walking through the same wooden door for the first time. Inside, he says, were “disgraceful” conditions. Speaking exclusively to the Daily Record, Maureen said: “My son was murdered in cold blood and justice hasn’t been done. While most prisoners languished in miserable conditions, Barlinnie’s Special Unit took some of the most notorious and introduced them to an experimental regime of art, poetry and literature.

For Johnny, whose uncle perished in a fire in his Barlinnie cell and whose brother Joe was wrongly convicted of Glasgow’s Ice Cream War murders, it’s hard to imagine no more Bar-L. Today Barlinnie is said to be Western Europe’s biggest single dispenser of methadone, handing out over 8700 litres every year. But he remembers an Alcoholics ­Anonymous request for prisoner support groups being met by stony silence. But Steele, 33, claimed he did not recall the stabbing. He said that if he did kill PJ, it must have been self-defence. You should never stop analysing how you have ended up where you are. Give yourself credit for what you do right. Some people end up in this life through circumstances usually beyond their control. I was born into this life, but it wasn’t me, I never liked it and, really, I wasn’t able for it. Always be true to yourself. Steele, 57, said: “The brutality of life in Scotland’s hardest prisons, even years of solitary as punishment for repeatedly breaking out in protest at the wrongful conviction, wasn’t enough to break me.People coming in were used to having a shower every day, but in Barlinnie they could only shower once a week. There were pots of poo in their cells. These were young people from a different world, prison needed to go along with that.” It was a constructive meeting. Mr MacAskill was really impressed with their resolve and determination to turn something terrible into something positive, through the valuable work they are doing with community projects to help turn around lives. Inside Time reserve the right to republish comments in its newspaper or in any of its other publications, however, in these cases, comments will be anonymised. It was unpredictable, there was always a lot of stabbings. There’d be slashings with homemade shanks made from toothbrushes and running battles,” he says.