It is with great sadness The Prison Phoenix Trust has learnt of the death of its long-time patron Erwin James. He was a wise, compassionate and intelligent man, who overcame great challenges in childhood to become an inspirational writer and advocate for people in prison.

Director of The Prison Phoenix Trust Selina Sasse said:

“Like many PPT friends, I was deeply moved to hear Erwin talk, particularly how tragic his childhood was and how his young adult life had unravelled. He did so much in his life to help others and we were fortunate that he chose to include our work. His death was very sudden and out of the blue. We are deeply saddened and shocked.” 

Erwin told his extraordinary life story in 3 memoirs, A Life Inside, The Home Stretch, and Redeemable. Born in Somerset in 1957, he lost his mother at the age of seven and his father turned to alcohol and violence. By the age of 10, Erwin was sleeping rough and committing crimes to survive. 

He went to prison in 1984 with a life sentence. While he could read, he wasn’t educated, but he quickly began making the most of his time and took all the courses he could to develop himself. While in HMP Nottingham, he attended his first yoga class. He later told us:

“The best sleep I ever had in prison was after that first yoga class. Just because my breathing was regulated, my movements were regulated. Because in prison you live inside your head, but your thoughts are always racing. They’re always racing then they slow, then they race and then they slow, because your anxiety’s peaking, then you hear the keys jangling because the officer’s going to come and open the door, and then you get a bit anxious, then the door opens and you’ve got to go out and face the landing.

“And the yoga thing, just for that hour, allowed total peace to descend. Internal peace. I got into the habit of doing it in my cell. You’d be doing yoga, and you could hear people screaming in the cell two doors down, people shouting threats out of the windows and near the wings, but there you were in this little peaceful cocoon of gentle movements and feeling good about yourself. Feeling good about being alive.”

It was also during his prison sentence, Erwin began to write and grew to be a fine journalist and author. As well as his memoirs, from 2000 he wrote a regular column for the Guardian newspaper, “A Life Inside”, the first in the world written by a serving prisoner. The weekly snapshots of prison life offered readers insight into the extraordinary – and everyday –  realities of people living and working in prison. On his release he made a life as a writer and journalist, editing Inside Time from 2016 to 2023.

His love of yoga and meditation continued and he remained a champion of the work of The Prison Phoenix Trust, presenting a Radio 4 Appeal, programmes for National Prison Radio, and sharing his experiences of prison yoga a various events.  He said:

“Prison’s a very depressing place, and sometimes people make it, sometimes people don’t. I’m grateful I was one of the ones who made it. But without people like the Prison Phoenix Trust coming in, open hearted, open handed, to give us something, without that, we’d have had much less of a chance of becoming who we should be.”

Read Erwin James’s obituary in Inside Time