Nottingham’s Jacob Dunne, who killed another young man with a single punch in a 2011 brawl, is now running a campaign to prevent youth violence and reform the justice system after coming face-to-face with his victim’s parents.
James Hodgkinson died after Jacob hit him outside Yates’s on Old Market Square. He admitted manslaughter and served 14 months of a 30-month jail sentence. The case made headlines across Britain after Jacob met James’s parents on his release and apologised to them. They have since backed his efforts to turn his life around and are supporting his campaign for change.
In the second of a three-part series of guest columns written for Notts TV, Jacob, now studying criminology at Nottingham Trent University, explains how in order to start to turn his life around, he first needed to unpick how things had spiralled out of control.
Read part one: I killed someone with one punch: How did it come to this?
remember I“I got a phone call from a friend saying his house had been raided.
He was kind of saying it could be to do with that night, although he wasn’t even sure what it was about.
I thought there was a chance I could be next, so I started asking around, but no-one seemed to know what was going on.
A few hours later I got a call at my mum’s house phone from a police officer.
He said ‘we’re following up on an investigation and I was wondering if you could come down to the police station to answer a few questions’.
I was met at the Bridewell in town by two detectives. That’s when I found out.
They said ‘we are arresting you on the suspicion of the murder of James Hodgkinson’.
I thought ‘surely not?’ – I was confused because they said his name and I didn’t know who he was. I was just in shock. But then they shut me in a cell for about three hours.
For those three hours, I was trying to make sense of everything, I was trying to go back to the night and remember what had happened. I can only remember bits and bobs, and I was thinking ‘is this it for me?’ The inside of a cell – is this my life now?’
That was the first time I realised I wanted better for my life.
You can’t explain the emotions – you’re hearing ‘murder’.
I’m scared, I’m angry at myself, confused. Back then, and the way I was, I wasn’t really thinking of his family and who had been harmed. It was one big blur. It’s a mixture of every emotion you can think of – except happiness.
Most people would think that an experience like that will break you – but you can’t afford that. I was almost having a panic attack, but I’m saying to myself ‘you need to get your head together’.
I was eventually charged with manslaughter after a number people including some of the friends I was with at the time gave statements. I decided to plead guilty as soon as I could. They gave me bail until my sentencing, I surrendered my passport, and I was on a tag.
I would rather have just gone to prison. I was waiting for two months – knowing I was going to prison. I was arguing with my mum because she was asking me if I was covering for anyone else.
My solicitor told me to expect anything between three and six years – I expected to get five or six.
In the dock at Nottingham Crown Court I was in a daze. The victim’s family was there, looking at me – and I couldn’t look at them. That was the first time I felt guilty for what I’d done. They took me down to the cells, and I didn’t even really understand how long I’d got. I was thinking ‘is this really happening?’.
My solicitor said ‘you’ve got thirty months – two and a half years’.
There is a cliché about prison – ‘that first day when they close that door’ but it wasn’t really like that for me.
I was first at Nottingham Prison – it was November 4 and there were fireworks going off outside my window. It was like they were celebrating I was gone. I think I went in to a kind of survival mode, it was a bit like thinking ‘no point feeling sorry for yourself?’. Then I thought ‘what’s the point in being like this’.
I was in Nottingham for a week, then I went to Glen Parva, a prison for younger offenders, near Leicester.
This is where I had that kind of ‘moment’. I went on to the induction wing. It’s pretty grim, and you are thinking ‘this isn’t going to be like Nottingham’.
I looked at my first meal there – a scoop of coleslaw and a cold jacket potato and I thought ‘this is day one’. Later on, the chicken every Sunday still had feathers in it.
The prison cell was awful. I sat on my chair and my heart started to race. I started to breathe heavily. I was basically having a panic attack.
I had a moment – some people say ‘I don’t know how I would handle it’. To that I say ‘you don’t have a choice’.
You can’t fight against it. You do everything you can to make your experience as tolerable as possible.
No-one really cared how you feel. None of the prisoners, none of the officers – and that’s all there is in there – prisoners and officers. The prisoners don’t say ‘do you think about the family?’, they don’t say ‘you need to turn your life around’. All they really say is ‘oh my god I can’t believe some of your friends ‘snitched’ on you’.
There’s no-one there saying you need to change your life. I went on an alcohol-related violence course – which was quite good. It made you think about how you were behaving.
But it’s hard to be effective in a prison environment, they talk to you about how to challenge your decision making and what thinking patterns and beliefs are getting you in trouble. Then you just go back to the wing full of people with the attitudes you are being asked to give up.
Prison is a political football, no-one wants to spend money on it
That was the right kind of approach, but it needs to be tackled in a different way. It’s almost public attitude as well – prison is a political football, no-one wants to spend money on it.
Michael Gove, the justice minister, has power to change policy within courts, within prisons, but then if the Government has a cabinet re-shuffle it all changes. For meaningful change to take place it needs to happen almost separately from the political system.
As long as prisons are effectively run by politicians then the whole issue is forever politicised. The rhetoric remains, ‘we’re going to get tough on crime’, because no-one thinks they will get votes by saying we’re going to spend money on improving education and rehabilitation in prison.
To keep one person in jail costs £40,000, a year in taxpayers’ cash – people see that as a waste of their money. But 67 per cent of people under 18 who go into detention will be convicted of another crime within a year of release – that’s what I call a waste of money.
I was offered the opportunity to do some basic maths and English while in prison. But I didn’t feel as if education would help me, after my experiences of education in school I didn’t think it would benefit me. Once I’d finished the course there was no sense it was leading to anything.
Overall I feel the whole time spent in prison was a waste of time. Why? Because I didn’t gain anything from it, academically or practically. The only thing that did happen was my negative attitudes were strengthened. I had no faith in eduction at the time – so why would I get faith in it by going to prison?
Another hard thing to cope with inside is when you are no longer able to help your family on the outside. You have relatives on the phone telling you other relatives aren’t coping. I had to hear my mum had lost her job and I felt it was because of what I’d done.
The result was I became angrier. I became more bitter, and I still hadn’t taken responsibility for what was happening around me.
Picutre: HMP Glen Parva, Leicester (Google)
Prison doesn’t break you. It made me more resilient and more hateful of the system I felt I had been fighting against since day one. In a way you actually become more insensitive to other people. The whole process only reinforces the way you hide your vulnerabilities. You can’t show any signs of weakness – the environment in which people can reflect and discuss their emotions and feelings just isn’t there.
The consequence of this is an attitude of ‘just getting on’ with your sentence.
This is extremely important – you need a place where people can reflect on what’s happened, accept your mistakes and start to change your life for the better.
People will say ‘you need to go on an anger management course’. But they forget that many people who are in prisons are partly there because they’ve had traumatic upbringings which they have never been able to deal with or accept.
In school you get sent out of class or excluded. No-one really works out why you are behaving the way you are behaving. As an adult you get sent away to prison – and by that point the ‘why’ has become too complex.
Sometimes the prisoner themselves won’t know exactly ‘why’ they are there
Sometimes the prisoner themselves won’t know exactly ‘why’ they are there. Because of how intense the environment is in prison, it is difficult to understand or reflect on everything that has happened to you.
‘Why are you in here?’ is one of the stupidest things you can ask a prisoner. It’s too simplistic. They might say ‘because I hit someone’. But there are so many other reasons.
In prison a lot of the time you are working towards the same mess that you left behind instead of trying to create a better future for when you get out.
It’s not necessarily through a lack of willingness on behalf of the prisoner. There’s no emphasis on what you can do and what you are capable of doing with the rest of your life. There’s no optimism. Once you get to prison it’s like you have been written off. And people wonder why so many people end up going back.
So what happened to me? Why am I ‘an exception’?
On release, my probation officer contacted me and said the victim’s parents had asked to meet me. They said they needed answers and I was the only person who could provide them.
It was then that I realised it wasn’t about me any more. For the first time I didn’t feel like I was the victim in all of this.
In a sense I became less selfish. There wasn’t anyone I’d met in my life before who was able to make me think ‘why?’.
It started through letters to and from James’s parents. By the time I finally met them for the first time, I’d actually already taken my GCSEs, completed an access course, and got a place at university.
The impact of building a dialogue with them was almost instant and will last for the rest of my life. It keeps me going when I’m struggling or when I think I can’t do something. It was my way of proving I’m sorry – rather than just saying it.
I still remember when I finally sat down with them to talk about what happened.
David, James’s dad, spoke first. And for the first time I got to hear them explain face-to-face the impact of what I’d done.
Read the third and final part of Jacob’s story on nottstv.com on Wednesday, May 4.
