Today Barlinnie is said to be Western Europe’s biggest single dispenser of methadone, handing out over 8700 litres every year. But he remembers an Alcoholics ­Anonymous request for prisoner support groups being met by stony silence. MacAskill spent 30 minutes talking to Maureen and her supporters. She said afterwards: “Apparently, the Solicitor General called Kenny MacAskill this morning to see if his office had received the letter I sent them. What do I remember from that first time? Dirt,” he says. “I came from a post in Bangladesh, but Barlinnie was worse for your health than Bangladesh. At least there you could do your best to survive, in Barlinnie you were subjected to the regime.

If she says there is nowhere further to go then it becomes more serious. But I will just have to wait and see. includes the alleged offences of named individuals unless it is considered to be already common public knowledgeSteele, 57, said: “The brutality of life in Scotland’s hardest prisons, even years of solitary as punishment for repeatedly breaking out in protest at the wrongful conviction, wasn’t enough to break me. While most prisoners languished in miserable conditions, Barlinnie’s Special Unit took some of the most notorious and introduced them to an experimental regime of art, poetry and literature. Johnnyboy is also the brother of Joseph Steele who along with one Thomas 'TC' Campbell was wrongly convicted of the murders of 6 of the Doyle family in the so called Glasgow ice cream wars. For Johnny, whose escape bids contributed to him being dubbed ‘one of the most punished prisoners in the history of the British penal system’, 1980s Barlinnie was a powder-keg just waiting to blow.

There’s not a single prisoner who hasn’t sat inside Barlinnie and thought about how to escape,” says Johnny, one of the few to breach its walls when he scaled a shaft then abseiled 90ft to a drying green below. “It’s part of being in there. You are always looking for a way out.” Calls for reform grew increasing loud. A wave of prison riots across the country arrived at Barlinnie in 1987, sparking Scotland’s longest prison siege. Inmates ripped apart its Victorian halls, others climbed on the roof with five staff hostages and posters claiming brutality.

Prison gets set for final stretch with its replacement to consign Bar-L to history books

But when he was finally freed in 2004, in a case that proved for the first time in Scotland that police “fitted up” Steele, instead of being able to celebrate his release, Steele hid a terrible secret. Prison breeding ground eventually bred a better man, but it was a long hard Glasgow road for battle weary Johnnyboy It offered Victorian-age work ethics with access to education and books. The new A Hall prisoners were put to work baking and building, making shoes and mattresses, outside the quarry gave others the harsher task of breaking stone to help build B, C and D Halls. John Steele was acquitted of murdering Paul “PJ” Douglass, 20, after claiming self-defence. He said PJ had a knife which he had never seen before. Johnnyboy Steele is the most punished prisoner in Scottish Penal History. He was sentenced originally to 12 years for two counts of assault and robbery.

Good morning Johnnyboy, let’s start at the beginning. Where are you from and how was your childhood? He said: “Throughout the years I’d battled the system and never gave up hope. But being taken away from my family and new baby finally broke me. To relieve the pain, I did what I’d never done before – I succumbed to drugs. Today Barlinnie is said to be Western Europe’s biggest single dispenser of methadone, handing out over 8700 litres every year. But he remembers an Alcoholics Anonymous request for prisoner support groups being met by stony silence. There were men with severe mental health problems. The medical centre seemed to hand out two paracetamols for a headache and eight for a broken leg,” adds Willy, who writes about Barlinnie in his book, Life is Not a Long Quiet River.

Some, including notorious multiple murderer Peter Manuel, never left Barlinnie’s grounds. The graves now raise the uncomfortable issue of exhuming their remains and finding a new location for burial. PJ, a promising chef chosen to cook for JK Rowling when he was 16, was killed after a fight outside a flat in East Kilbride on the day of Prince William’s wedding, April 29 last year. People coming in were used to having a shower every day, but in Barlinnie they could only shower once a week. There were pots of poo in their cells. These were young people from a different world, prison needed to go along with that.” When I walked out into the sunshine and into the arms of the people I loved on the day I was finally cleared in 2004, the relief was on their faces and they were smiling.

But Steele, 33, claimed he did not recall the stabbing. He said that if he did kill PJ, it must have been self-defence.The man wrongly convicted of the Ice Cream War murders has revealed how he won his life-or-death battle with drugs. Barlinnie already had a grim reputation when D Hall’s ‘Hanging Shed’ gallows opened in the mid-1940s. The execution cell was the last place 10 prisoners saw before being hanged and their bodies placed on a mortuary slab in a chamber below. It was a constructive meeting. Mr MacAskill was really impressed with their resolve and determination to turn something terrible into something positive, through the valuable work they are doing with community projects to help turn around lives. I loved my wife, Dolly, and my two boys so much, being taken from them after tasting what it was like to be a proper family, was the start of the darkest period in my life.