Personal Blogging

I came to a divergence in the path - and I chose the wrong way forward.

When I began this blog I took the decision to make it personal. How else could I show prisoners, including myself, as three dimensional beings unless I shared my personal journey? And so you had an eclectic mix of blogs, the highs, the lows, and sheer inanity that is daily prison life. It was a journey that you shared.

And then came release. Four years ago today: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/22/ben-gunn-prison-blogging ...how time flies. And the blog changed. My fault for listening to advice! It was strongly impressed on me that the wider world wouldn’t be as quick to embrace me. Most pertinently, I was advised to manage my image, to show only my most professional face. I’m not known for taking advice, yet this seemed very sensible stuff.

The problem with this approach is that I feel it is slightly dishonest, as if I have shut a door in the face of readers who have shared this journey. Release and trying to forge a life are as inherently part of the journey as prison. To confine myself to trying to appear professional at all times seems deceitful.

And so I have decided to return to the eclecticism I used to enjoy, and I suspect you did as well.

Who's Blogging Now?

The header of my being the first, or only, prison blogger was always a stretch. I believe that Jonathan King was the first blogger - though on a website rather than a blog as such - and there have been other prisoners who have popped up in a sporadic fashion for brief periods. Perhaps a more precise description would have been that I was the only regular prison blogger who examined the broader experience of imprisonment and not just ran a personal campaign or diary.

In those terms, I stood alone. As to the quality of these various insertions to the blogosphere, I leave that to others to judge. What concerns me now is that there is no longer a prison blogger. I am now a blogger about prison, not from it, and our polity demands that the debate is enlivened and enriched by a prisoner-blogger.

This isn't to say that it is easy, there are personal and environmental barriers to overcome. Some of these are ones that all bloggers face, such as being able to both write and then write interesting material. Still, I seem to have got away with it!