Although my experiences of life inside – playing guitar in rock bands to entertain the inmates – were voluntary, I like to think I learned something.

It is sobering to look into the human face of the section of the population that bears the brunt of society's callousness.

If we're to believe him, David Blunkett, whose prison-themed reality TV series starts this week, found his spell in the slammer a transformative one.

The former home secretary spent ten days behind bars with young offenders filming Banged Up with Blunkett.

I've always been sceptical of claims that prison is a holiday camp where the inmates enjoy lives of luxury.

The suicide rates tend to suggest that prison is no Pontins. Blunkett didn't find it so.

He said: "Schools should take children to prisons and, with the help of inmates, they can discover how ghastly it is."

The institution I performed at, Rudgate, was an 'open' prison where the inmates were given a certain degree of trust.

There were many older men – lifers at the end of their sentences.
One man offered to help me unload the gear from the car, and immediately began asking me for drugs.

But all I could offer by way of transcendence was our brand of psychedelic indie rock.

Music can break down barriers, but it can also remind us of our differences. Much of what we played will have sounded alien to men who wouldn't have been exposed to any new music since the 1960s, and we struggled.

I had more luck with my other appearance at Rudgate, this time with a country rock band of which I was the youngest member.

With its evocation of everyday, blue-collar life, country music is well suited to the prison audience.

It's not surprising that the genre enjoys a special relationship with the incarcerated, thanks to Johnny Cash's legendary appearances at San Quentin. (The cheer of recognition from Cash's San Quentin audience during Folsom Prison Blues that greets the line: 'I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die' is one of the great spine-tingling moments in rock.)

What country music lacks in youthful swagger it makes up for in grizzled, hard-earned wisdom. It knows a thing or two about regret and the hope of redemption.

And so, it seems, does the reformed David Blunkett, who suggests that Labour could have done more to rehabilitate offenders.

"I want tough sentences for heinous crimes, but also really intensive community restorative justice," he said.

"We did do the first and we didn't do enough of the second."
His spell inside seems to have done him good. In the nicest possible way, perhaps we should send politicians to jail more often.
awolstenholme
@ywng.co.uk