A PRISONER has publicly condemned fellow inmates for their “constant bleating” about human rights.

Stephen Hardy, who confesses to having spent extended periods of time at Her Majesty’s pleasure, won £25 for “star letter of the month” in a prisoners’ newspaper with his withering attack on the petty complaints made by his fellow convicts.

The letters page of Inside Time, produced by the offenders’ charity, New Bridge, is a popular forum for prisoners to air their grievances, many of which hinge on human rights issues. But Hardy reminisces about the “good old days” in prisons when “you had no rights apart from a surname and a number”. He points out that prison is a means of punishment and insists that prisoners should pay the price for their crimes.

He writes: “Whenever I’ve gone out and robbed somebody I didn’t read my victims the human rights charter. It was entirely my choice and I’ve got to pay the price. In case prisoners are scratching their heads wondering where I’m coming from, the operative word is ‘responsibility’.

“So far as human rights are concerned, stick ’em.”

Another letter in this month’s edition relates to the way in which an inmate tried to use human rights laws to stop prison officers opening letters from his lawyers. But Hardy continues: “Every prison I’ve been in (and it’s a fair few), all I ever seem to hear is this constant bleating about ‘my human rights’, be it due to the food being either too hot or too cold, an officer didn’t refer to me as ‘Mr’ or whatever other petty complaints yet another mundane day of incarceration can throw up.

“This is now becoming far more commonplace than the other weary old chestnut, ‘I didn’t do it’. Prisoners tend to conveniently forget why they are locked up and forget too the rights of the victims they created.”

The writer, who is serving his sentence at the medium-security Albany prison in the Isle of Wight, adds: “In the ‘good old days’ in prison you had no rights apart from a surname and a number. If the food was bad (and trust me it was) or there was some other problem about which we had no rights, then we had a riot — no paperwork, no request/complaints — just a good, old-fashioned punch-up followed on frequent occasions by a good kicking.”

John Bowers, the commissioning editor at Inside Time, said: “You can’t get a more contentious view than this from a prisoner. It is really the last thing you would expect coming from a prisoner. It will lead to a debate, that’s for sure.

“This letter will be read, it will be hotly disputed and I expect several irate letters from other prisoners saying, ‘What the hell is this Stephen Hardy on about?’ Every prisoner who reads it will either think it’s a load of old rubbish or may even think he’s got a point.”

Mark Leech, editor of The Prisons Handbook, said: “I find it ironic that Mr Hardy is pooh-poohing human rights by writing a letter to a newspaper — something inmates can only do because they have used human rights arguments to win that right. There was a time when inmates were banned from writing about their prison conditions.

“I wonder if he’ll send his £25 prize to Victim Support?”

Hardy ends his letter by insisting: “I’ll do my bird (again) and if I return to prison in the next decade perhaps we’ll have plasma screen TVs, access to the internet and all manner of privileges; after all, we wouldn’t want our human rights infringed by denying us access to everything we desire in order to be ‘treated like human beings’ would we?”

The newspaper also includes an article by Jonathan King, the pop impresario who served three years of a seven year sentence for sex offences, bemoaning the fact that when he arrived at Belmarsh in 2001, there was no in-cell television or electricity.

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