stephen-richards-author

My experience of what can happen and what actually happens is a world apart, so stop worrying!

Live it already, write about it from the point of view of already having it, and be so happy and grateful at its impending arrival.

I was lifted from the darkness I endured into the person I am today.

If you aspire to be a sparrow you will never be an eagle!

For that thought to be strong, however, it must be free of doubt, for doubt weakens the will, weakens the response of the universe, and slows the manifestation of desire.

Sometimes your wish can become chaos ... be careful what you wish for!

If you have no friends, invent one!

There are now babies being born in our hospitals with crack or heroin habits, come on, fuck, no one would have dreamt such a horrible thing would happen to a newborn babies in Scotland. I didn__ think the sons and daughters, mothers and fathers of Scotland would have been messed up in such a nasty circle of misery, depression, violence, suicides and prisons because of drugs.

On the morning of Wednesday 13 March 1996, Thomas West Hamilton shattered the peaceful country town of Dunblane, Stirlingshire, with a fusillade of gunfire that reverberated round the world.

TC Campbell doesn__ need any introduction, the man is a legend in the prison community and outside when this very strong-minded man was trying to prove his innocence for the six murders he had been convicted for. TC went on a fifty-day hunger strike, he ended up in hospital. This man was willing to die to prove his innocence, if he never done his famous hunger strike he probably would have never go the MPS in government to sit up and take note.

Mags seemed to attract trouble wherever she went. The Raploch Estate in Stirling was a nice backdrop, a middleclass place to live and bring up your kids until the scourge of drugs took a grip of its sons and daughters, like any other quiet township. The more the people needed drugs, the rougher and more violent the place became.

I will not go into detail but the screw put up a little bit of a resistance, fair play to him, but we were so desperate for the drugs in her medical bag that nothing was going to stop us getting at them. That is what happened, we got the bag of drugs from her hand. I can tell you, we were like two tramps round a bag of chips in a bin.

The last person to be hanged in Glasgow at the age of 31 was a beast by the name of Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel, he swung from the gallows in Barlinnie Prison on 11 July 1958.

At one point the worst thing to happen was the odd stabbing or slashing, the violence that we live with nowadays used to only be seen in Hollywood gangster movies such as Gangs of New York, Menace to Society and Boys and the Hood. Even when we were reading about the crack hitting London, no one in Scotland would have thought in their wildest dreams that it would have taken off in our cities, towns and now even highland villages.

Before Mags became a household name across Scotland, it was during the mid Nineties when she became an avid anti-paedophile campaigner against paedophiles on the Raploch Estate, attracting media attention, even appearing on Robert Kilroy-Silk__ morning TV show. At the height of her anti-paedophilic crusade, she led a howling mob of protesters to a hostel near her home where a known paedophile was staying.

No one was expecting the six-man team of elite SAS officers to storm the prison, but that is exactly what they did do. Hurling stun grenade and tear gas canisters, they entered the jail through a skylight before freeing the terrified prison warder.

When Barlinnie__ Prison doctor, Dr Danson, came to see Dingus, he turned in disgust at the state Dingus was left to lie in. Doctor Danson refused to treat him as he knew Dingus__ injuries were life threatening, he told the top warden that Dingus would need to be rushed to Glasgow Royal Infirmary for emergency surgery. The screws in the seg block refused to listen to the doctor, they pushed and manhandled their own doctor out of Dingus__ cell and threatened him with a severe beating if he made anything public about Dingus__ injuries.

I was reading that there are children at the age of twelve and thirteen selling their bodies at dinnertimes for as little as £5 when they should be at school. Now if that is not a problem, I don__ know what is. The drug problem has got way too far out of hand.