The sun is shining through the bars of my window on what must be a glorious summer day I've been incarcerated in a cell five paces by three for twelve & a half hours & will not be let out again until midday; eighteen & a half hours of solitary confinement There is a child of seventeen in the cell below me who has been charged with shoplifting
- his first offence not even convicted
- & he is being locked up for eighteen & a half hours unable to speak to anyone This is Great Britain in the twenty-first century not Turkey not Nigeria not Kosovo but Britain On Thursday 19 July 2001 after a perjury trial lasting seven weeks Jeffrey Archer was sentenced to four years in jail He was to spend the first twenty-two days & fourteen hours in HMP Belmarsh a double A-Category high-security prison in South London which houses some of Britain's most violent criminals Hell the first volume in Archer's The Prison Diaries is the author's daily record of the time he spent there