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This remarkable memoir will be a poignant and vindicating read for any reader of this journal, detailing as it does Jacob Dunne's brave, dangerous journey from impulsivity, low self-esteem, and ignorance to self-awareness, insight, and social activism via a fourteen-month stint in a UK young offenders' prison, HMP Glen Parva, for killing twenty-eight-year-old James Hodgkinson with one tragic punch to the side of the head.
His conviction for manslaughter was not the beginning of nineteen-year old Jacob Dunne's redemption. Nor was his time in prison, where he barely sniffed the notion of rehabilitation. He went into prison a teenage, petty drug dealer, whose confidence grew with every fight he won in the gang-soaked Meadows Estate of Nottingham and a decade later, he is married, a dedicated father-of-two with a first-class degree in criminology and a restorative justice practitioner, author, and podcaster. His transformation began, instead, by a restorative justice process requested by the parents of James, the man he had killed that fateful night.
Some months into the process they asked him: “What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” Jacob Dunne, at this point in his life, had been branded autistic and ADHD by a school system which had left him to rot once he started acting out in his early teens. He had not got a single GCSE out of twelve years of state-sponsored schooling and, like everyone else he hung out with from his estate, he had felt dispossessed and angry while living on benefits, dealing hash, playing video games, and looking only as far forwards as his next night out high on cocaine, booze, and fighting. When this question arrived from the parents after he had served his jail time and was now meeting weekly with his probation officer, Wendy, it really gave him pause. It forced him to consider his future and to ask himself: how am I going to honour the life of the young man I have taken by doing something worthwhile with my own?
The question power