Marc Conway was regarded as a model IPP prisoner. Perhaps the model IPP prisoner. He received an indeterminate imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence at 30 for armed robbery. Before that, he had committed a long list of crimes including driving without a licence, selling class A drugs and firearm offences. He had spent eight years in jail. Now, here he was, a free man, studying with students from the University of Cambridge, working for the Prison Reform Trust and delivering speeches to the great and the good.
The date was 29 November 2019. The occasion was the fifth-anniversary celebration of an educational project in which Cambridge students and prisoners learned together. Conway, who had taken part in the project, had been asked to give a speech at Fishmongers’ Hall, a Grade II* listed building in the City of London. “It was a lovely sunny day. You never get that weather in November in London,” he says. “We had food, we was laughing, we was joking, we was patting each other on the back. I was getting a bit nervous, because I’d only been out a year and I was still new to public speaking.”
