Today, Barlinnie handles 20 per cent of Scotland’s prisoners. Even visiting time is a logistical nightmare of around 7300 visitors every month, including around 1100 children. Calls for reform grew increasing loud. A wave of prison riots across the country arrived at Barlinnie in 1987, sparking Scotland’s longest prison siege. Inmates ripped apart its Victorian halls, others climbed on the roof with five staff hostages and posters claiming brutality. The fighting knife was also found at the scene but Steele claimed PJ had it and he’d never seen before. Prison breeding ground eventually bred a better man, but it was a long hard Glasgow road for battle weary Johnnyboy

Good morning Johnnyboy, let’s start at the beginning. Where are you from and how was your childhood? But Steele, 33, claimed he did not recall the stabbing. He said that if he did kill PJ, it must have been self-defence. It was this weapon that would later be used to kill PJ. Steele again holds the fighting knife in his right hand. MacAskill spent 30 minutes talking to Maureen and her supporters. She said afterwards: “Apparently, the Solicitor General called Kenny MacAskill this morning to see if his office had received the letter I sent them. Speaking exclusively to the Daily Record, Maureen said: “My son was murdered in cold blood and justice hasn’t been done.I was born and grew up in the East end of Glasgow. A very industrial area with lots of factories and businesses. We all had coal fires and were living in relative poverty compared to today, but my early childhood is full of happy memories. My dad was in prison for bank robbery and me and the rest of the family were living with my grandmother, who was blind. We had great neighbours and my mum’s brothers were all musicians. We used to have evenings of music and laughter; it was a good life. And then my dad got out of prison, and everything changed. You should never stop analysing how you have ended up where you are. Give yourself credit for what you do right. Some people end up in this life through circumstances usually beyond their control. I was born into this life, but it wasn’t me, I never liked it and, really, I wasn’t able for it. Always be true to yourself. The man wrongly convicted of the Ice Cream War murders has revealed how he won his life-or-death battle with drugs.

It’s from the Glasgow coat-of-arms, it has a picture of a bird, a tree, a bell, and a fish. We learnt the rhyme at school, ‘the bird that never flew, the tree that never grew, the bell that never rung, and the fish that never swum’. It’s pretty derogatory really.

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With the end in sight, it’s been suggested Barlinnie could be reborn as social housing or upmarket flats; a world away from rows of 6ft by 11ft cells and slopping out. I loved my wife, Dolly, and my two boys so much, being taken from them after tasting what it was like to be a proper family, was the start of the darkest period in my life.

Johnnyboy is also the brother of Joseph Steele who along with one Thomas 'TC' Campbell was wrongly convicted of the murders of 6 of the Doyle family in the so called Glasgow ice cream wars. For Johnny, whose uncle perished in a fire in his Barlinnie cell and whose brother Joe was wrongly convicted of Glasgow’s Ice Cream War murders, it’s hard to imagine no more Bar-L.

For Johnny, whose escape bids contributed to him being dubbed ‘one of the most punished prisoners in the history of the British penal system’, 1980s Barlinnie was a powder-keg just waiting to blow. It was a constructive meeting. Mr MacAskill was really impressed with their resolve and determination to turn something terrible into something positive, through the valuable work they are doing with community projects to help turn around lives. But when he was finally freed in 2004, in a case that proved for the first time in Scotland that police “fitted up” Steele, instead of being able to celebrate his release, Steele hid a terrible secret. A GRIEVING mother claims this picture is proof that the thug cleared of murdering her son is a liar – and must be put on trial again.

Today Barlinnie is said to be Western Europe’s biggest single dispenser of methadone, handing out over 8700 litres every year. But he remembers an Alcoholics Anonymous request for prisoner support groups being met by stony silence.

Steele along with his brother Jim and Archie Stein escaped from Barlinnie citing at the subsequent trial that they did not escape they fled the harsh and brutal regime enforced in Peterhead at the time, where they were due to return. Barlinnie already had a grim reputation when D Hall’s ‘Hanging Shed’ gallows opened in the mid-1940s. The execution cell was the last place 10 prisoners saw before being hanged and their bodies placed on a mortuary slab in a chamber below. Former priest Willy Slavin, Barlinnie chaplain from 1982 to 1992, also remembers walking through the same wooden door for the first time. Inside, he says, were “disgraceful” conditions.