Jimmy Boyle arrived at the Barlinnie Special Unit in 1973 with a reputation as the most dangerous man in Scotland. He had been convicted of murder in 1967 – a conviction he contested – after a childhood and adolescence in the Gorbals that had taken him through approved schools, borstals, and regular imprisonment. He had been a violent man in violent circumstances, and the Scottish prison system had responded to him, as it responded to the most troublesome prisoners of the era, with solitary confinement and force.
The Special Unit was the idea of two Scottish Office officials, Ken Murray and Ian Dunbar, who believed that maximum segregation and control was making the most damaged prisoners worse, not better. The unit, which opened in a segregated section of Barlinnie in early 1973, housed around ten prisoners at a time, chosen for their record of extreme violence in prison. The regime was radically different from standard Scottish imprisonment.
How It Worked
Prisoners in the Special Unit had individual cells they could personalise. They had access to a shared living area. They had responsibility for cooking their own food. They met regularly with staff in community meetings where both groups could raise grievances, and those meetings had genuine decision-making power over how the unit was run. There were no automatic punishments for violence: incidents were discussed, not just processed through a disciplinary system.
Most significantly, prisoners had access to art materials, and artists, writers, and academics from outside were encouraged to visit and work with them. This was not occupational therapy in the traditional prison sense. It was an attempt to give people whose entire adult lives had been structured around violence a different way of being in the world.
Jimmy Boyle
Boyle began sculpting in the unit. By the time he was released in 1982 he was an established artist with gallery exhibitions to his name. His autobiography, A Sense of Freedom, published in 1977 while he was still imprisoned, became a bestseller and was adapted for television by John Mackenzie with David Hayman as Boyle – a film that remains one of the most honest accounts of the Scottish prison system ever made.
His release, supported by the unit’s staff and by a community of artists and academics who had worked with him over nearly a decade, demonstrated that the unit’s approach had achieved what conventional imprisonment had not: not just an absence of violence, but something that looked like rehabilitation. He went on to co-found the Gateway Exchange in Edinburgh, a community arts project for people in recovery from addiction.
The Unit’s End
The Barlinnie Special Unit was closed in 1994, victim of a political climate that had shifted toward toughness on crime and away from the reforming ambitions of the 1970s. The evidence of its success – lower reoffending rates, the transformation of men who had been considered irredeemable – was available and largely ignored. Scotland has not replicated its approach systematically.
The unit produced sculpture, writing, and paintings that remain in Scottish collections. What it produced more durably was a question: if this worked, why did we stop? That question has not been satisfactorily answered.
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