It is set to be replaced with a £100million ‘super jail’, but for over a hundred years, Glasgow’s big hoose housed some of the city’s most notorious criminals.
Barlinnie was built on vacant farmland in Glasgow’s Riddrie as a way of dealing with the intense overcrowding that was developing as a problem in the Scottish prison system.
It was designed by Major General Thomas Bernard Collinson, a Scottish prison architect, to hold around 1,000 male prisoners.
Inmates would pass the time with hard labour while also having access to a library.
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Notable inmates over the years include political activist Tommy Sheridan, footballer Duncan Ferguson, gangster Paul Ferris, and Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.
From 1973 till 1994, Barlinnie’s "Special Unit" focused on rehabilitating the country’s most hardened criminals. The biggest success story is that of reformed Glasgow gangster Jimmy Boyle.
The ruthless Gorbals moneylender was incarcerated for the murder of fellow gangland member William ‘Babs’ Rooney, which he always denied committing. But while in the Bar-L’s special unit, he wrote an autobiography A Sense of Freedom, and upon his release in 1980, he became a respected writer and sculptor.
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Hangings took place in Barlinnie from 1947 until the abolition of capital punishment in the UK in 1969.
One of the 10 hangings at the prison included the notorious serial killer Peter Manuel, who was convicted of seven murders in Lanarkshire in the 1950s. He was the second last prisoner to die on Barlinnie’s gallows.
Today the prison holds well over its capacity and has been the subject of controversy due to its persistent overcrowding. In 2020 it was confirmed that the prison is to be replaced with a new site in the Germiston area, and there have been calls by politicians to preserve the historical buildings and turn Barlinnie into a tourist attraction.
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