In the original dust jacket. Blue cloth binding with silver title on the spine. Damp marked.

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In November 1999, at Cambridge Crown Court, Ruth Wyner and her co-defendant John Brock were found guilty under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Their “crime”, as charity workers devoted to running the Wintercomfort hostel for Cambridge’s homeless population, was in the eyes of the police to have made insufficient efforts to prevent drug dealing on the premises. Such injustice was astonishing enough, but an even greater shock was the sentence: five years, no less, and the following day Ruth Wyner found herself in Holloway Prison. “From the Inside” is Ruth Wyner’s account of her time in a women’s prison, first at Holloway and then at Highpoint Prison in Norfolk. She had to serve seven months before the appeal hearing that quashed her sentence – though not her conviction – by which time the “Cambridge Two” campaign had attracted high-profile support from Joan Baez to Tom Stoppard and Jo Brand. It is not only the first full account in years of what life is like in one of Britain’s women’s prisons – and therefore of sociological interest; it is also the frank and moving story of how one woman – even with the benefits of a loving family, education and mental stability denied to her infinitely more vulnerable fellow inmates – struggled to cope with the unhealthy, dehumanising, incessantly noisy and nerve-jangling daily life of a women’s jail.

Review: A very good book and as the title says very interesting! This is not a book full of laughs and hearty laughter, but then again the story is not so I suppose that’s the way it should be! I pray that Ruth Wyner will get rid of the bitterness she has against the world…anyone reading this book will know what I am talking about!!

Ruth Avril Wyner was born in London on 1 April 1950 to Anna (née Nagley), a mosaic artist, and Percy Wyner, a cloth merchant. She was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School. After leaving school, she spent time in a North Devon ashram and edited an alternative magazine started by John Hopkins. She moved to Norwich and started work as a journalist in 1970 at the Eastern Daily News. Whilst in Norwich, she met Gordon Bell to whom she got married in 1978. He was the lead guitarist of a band she had joined called Crazy Lizard. They had two children together, Joel and Rachel. Whilst Wyner was in Norwich, her younger brother killed himself by jumping from a window at a London homeless hostel. This event led her to become increasingly involved in charity work, helping homeless people. From 1979, she worked at St Martin’s Housing Trust as a part-time night shelter worker before becoming a manager and finally the deputy director of the charity. She was sacked for gross misconduct in 1993 based on claims that she was not intervening to stop residents from using cannabis. She denied this and took St Martin’s to an employment tribunal, however the tribunal found in favour of her employer.Nonetheless, Wyner had gained a prominent reputation amongst local homeless charities by this point so, after establishing the Herring Housing Trust in Great Yarmouth and working there as a coordinator, she was headhunted in 1995 to become the director of the Wintercomfort charity in Cambridge.In 1998, she was arrested in her office at Wintercomfort, leading to her conviction and imprisonment in 1999. After leaving prison in July 2000, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She later became a tai chi instructor and joined the Cambridge Group Therapy Centre as a therapist, becoming clinical lead between 2011 and 2018.  Wyner died on 29 December 2024.