Unusual son of Lewis who championed penal reform

So it may come as a surprise to many that Scotland’s most notable penal reformer of the late 20th century, Ken Murray, was a son of Lewis and the driving force behind the Special Unit at Barlinnie Prison, a radical experiment in prison policy which grew out of the death penalty’s abolition.

The 50th anniversary of the Special Unit’s founding has been commemorated (a little late) by publication of a book of essays* and it has also featured in recent television programmes. The name of Ken Murray is synonymous with the Unit and closely aligned with that of its most famous inmate, Jimmy Boyle.

On his father’s side, Ken was from Brevig and he spent his early years there. The family moved to Inverness and he completed his education at Inverness Technical College but never lost his connections with the island. I have no doubt his gentle humanity and basic values were connected to these roots.

Unusually, he was not just a theorist about prisons and punishment but also a practitioner, who spent 28 years in the prison service. At an early stage of his career, he was persuaded that there must be better ways of treating violent offenders than through punitive incarceration.

His decision to join the service in his late 20s was taken for pragmatic reasons; in the north of Scotland, the two careers offering jobs with houses were in the Forestry Commission and the prison service. Penal history in the UK would have been significantly different if his choice had gone the other way.

The Special Unit came into existence because, in the early 1970s, the Scottish prison service had suffered a series of riots and was struggling to contain a small number of exceptionally difficult prisoners. A civil servant, Alex Stephen, and Murray proposed a diametrically different approach which would separate a small number of violent prisoners serving life sentences from the mainstream community.

The former women's wing at Barlinnie became the unlikely home of this experiment, which was based on treating both staff and prisoners as part of a community in which all had a voice in making decisions. The creative potential of prisoners was explored and facilities made available. Ken Murray firmly believed that such an environment was liberating not only for offenders but also for prison staff.

The triumphant message of the Special Unit and the philosophy it represented was summed up in the story of its most celebrated inmate, Jimmy Boyle. Tagged as Scotland's most feared murderer of his generation and brutalised by the traditional prison system, he metamorphosed through the Special Unit into a high-profile paragon of creativity and liberal humanity.

Boyle never stinted in his recognition of Murray as the man who made that possible. They first met in 1973 when Boyle was transferred from the "cages" at Porterfield prison, more appropriate to the containment of wild animals than to any civilised penal system, to the new unit at Barlinnie. The Porterfield governor had opined that Boyle was likely "at any time to attack and kill anybody with whom he is liable to come in contact".

Against official advice, Murray accepted Boyle into the unit, and one of his first acts was to give him a parcel to open. Boyle later recalled: "Murray gave me a pair of scissors to cut the string. There I was awaiting trial for six attempted murders of prison staff and being given a weapon by one of their colleagues. It was mind-blowing."

Ken Murray was on tenterhooks awaiting Boyle's reaction, but his gamble paid off. He had recognised Boyle's intelligence and leadership qualities; by convincing him that the unit was different, he could start to win the trust of other prisoners.

The Boyle saga grew into a parable beyond the dreams of those who had long supported a redemptive penal system. Inevitably, there was another school of thought which held that the experiment was a namby-pamby waste of time and taxpayers' money. The more Boyle and other success stories from within the Special Unit challenged such orthodoxies, the more strident became the calls for its closure.

Ken Murray repeatedly found himself in the middle. Eventually, the system ran out of tolerance for this most untypical of prison officers, and in 1980 he was transferred as governor to the low-security Low Moss prison for young offenders. The Special Unit finally closed in 1994.

In retirement, Ken Murray channelled his social radicalism through the Labour Party and became a leading figure in Strathclyde Regional Council with responsibility for some of the most challenging branches of the social services remit - addiction, homelessness, ex-prisoners.

However, he had no illusions about the party's capacity for illiberalism on penal policy and always pointed out that it was a decent, humane Tory, the late Alick Buchanan-Smith – a man well known in Harris - who had enough political courage at the Scottish Office in the early 1970s to back the creation of the Special Unit; in contrast to the harder line favoured by some Labour politicians whom Murray dealt with over the years.

I have contributed a chapter to the book on how the Scottish media dealt with the Special Unit and it certainly wasn’t their finest hour. The great weight of popular coverage treated it, at best, as an aberration to be viewed with suspicion and, at worst, a challenge to the deep-rooted assumption that prisons should be places of retribution rather than rehabilitation.

Yet there was one episode which pointed in another direction and had never happened before in the history of British prisons. Once the Unit settled down, the press were invited in to talk freely to prisoners and staff. It was a huge success and the Unit got the only day of entirely favourable publicity in its existence. The experiment was not repeated.

Ken Murray died in 2007. He deserves to be remembered, not least on his native island.

“The Barlinnie Special Unit – Art, Punishment & Innovation”, edited by Dr Kirstin Anderson, is published by Waterside Press.