‘This book will help give confidence and practical help to those who dare to be different and will also inform anyone working or volunteering in the criminal justice system… read it and learn from the battle-weary Sarah so that her scars have not been in vain’– Independent Monitor.
‘A must read for everyone involved in the Criminal Justice System… I was very impressed with the amount of research carried out in writing the book, which is written in a clear and concise style, concentrating mainly on the necessary facts… it will open up your mind… and give you a much greater understanding of how the prison system deals with one area of diversity that has been neglected for far too long’— Inside Time (read the full review).
‘An important contribution to current debates on the treatment of transgender prisoners’— Mia Harris, Oxford University.
‘I was heartbroken. It felt like a bereavement. The young man I had come to love as a son had disappeared overnight, and been replaced by a girl who was not my daughter, but, I felt, a stranger’— Pam Stockwell (From the Foreword)

Sarah Jane Baker is a talented musician, poet and author who has served 25 years of a life sentence for the attempted murder of another prisoner. The winner of countless awards and a qualified counsellor, she is (as Alan Baker before her transition) the author of Life Imprisonment: An Unofficial Guide (Waterside Press, 2013).

Pam Stockwell is a mother of three, grandmother of four and formerly a teacher of French. Early in the 1990s she ran into a former pupil (a ‘lovable rogue’) in trouble who needed a character reference for court. She provided one, attended with him and offered moral support. He was spared a custodial sentence and subsequently stayed out of trouble. Later it occurred to her that there must be many youngsters in a similar situation, who had not had the advantages her own children had enjoyed, and became a Voluntary Associate with an organization whose members, in those days, worked alongside probation officers. This led to her writing to and sometimes visiting ‘clients’ in various prisons. One of these was HM Prison Full Sutton, a maximum security prison near York, where Alan Baker was serving a discretionary life sentence, but who received no visits or letters. After first writing she visited him. Originally hostile, by the end of the visit, he had decided that she had not, as he suspected, been sent to ‘spy’ on him, and agreed that she should visit him again. So began a roller-coaster friendship that has lasted over 25 years. Pam considers that Alan-now Sarah-has made her see life from a different perspective and enriched it with a special kind of love, pride, joy, anguish, hope and despair.