In Inside, Jane Kelly vividly describes her daily life as a woman working inside Wormwood Scrubs, one of London’s toughest men’s prisons. She reveals the terrible world of prison which is based on containment rather than reform and results in a cataclysmic waste of human talent.
She also writes about her nights spent reporting for tabloid papers from inside the equally closed and nihilistic world of celebrity parties. She ran these two lives together for a year, with some flair until the prison authorities discovered she was a journalist.
This memoir covers her struggle to leave journalism where opinion is still freely given and provocative ideas are currency, to become a teacher, when she entered a culture befuddled and gagged by political correctness.
After winning Cosmopolitan Magazine’s Young Journalist award, Jane Kelly arrived in London from the Midlands. She wrote for magazines including Company, Time Out, and The Spectator, whilst working as an auxiliary nurse in Lambeth. In 1983 she won a top prize in the Catherine Pakenham Award for women journalists and began working regularly for the Telegraph. Later she gained a staff job at the Mail on Sunday and Today. From 1989 – 2004 she was a staff writer on the Daily Mail.
In 2005 her biography of actor Colin Farrell was published.