The Status Game

The Status Game — Summary

A man who didn't want to leave prison

Ben Gunn spent thirty years behind bars. He killed at fourteen: on a school playing field, he beat to death a younger boy who had discovered his secret. Then came prison, solitary confinement, the hunger strike when he went forty-three days without food and felt his eyeballs drying out. And then came something nobody expected. When freedom was finally offered to him, Ben said no.

There was no one outside. Inside, he was somebody. In prison he earned a degree in politics and history, a master's in peace and reconciliation, and started a PhD. He became general secretary of the Association of Prisoners, wrote appeals for his fellow inmates, and was known as a man you didn't want to cross. Even the parole board called him "a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad." Then he fell in love with Alex, a visiting teacher who painted him a picture of an idyllic future: a cottage in the Cotswolds, a fire in winter, a cat. Ben told her: "I want to stay."

"He was someone in prison," Alex said. Ben put it this way: "I'd go from being a medium fish in a small pond to being just another ex-con." Alex eventually coaxed him into writing a blog. PrisonerBen gathered more than twenty thousand readers and earned a nomination for a prestigious prize in 2011. A new game had opened up, one where he could finally be somebody on the outside too. When he was released in 2012, aged forty-seven, a prison officer warned him: "You're going to lose what status you have in here." He was right. Ben sat on the floor for two weeks, rocking back and forth. "I knew who I was and what I wanted to be. Now I'm completely lost."