With talk of overcrowding prisons, lack of prison places, growing prison population and a system in crisis, there has been one prevailing message, that prison is designed for the most violent and dangerous individuals. This is the line fed to the public. But my life tells a different story. In October 2025 I was recalled to prison by the one part of the criminal justice system that no one seems to want to shine a light on – probation. Since leaving prison my life has not been one of freedom but of dehumanisation, institutional racist victimisation and of course control.
I walked out of prison in May 2025, hoping that probation would allow me to settle in my home city of Manchester among my family after the loss of my mother. Instead they put me in a small town called Padiham near Burnley, a place historically known as one of the most racist in the country. A place of flags, crosses and growing racist tension. A place where a black man born and bred in Manchester became an alien by virtue of my black skin and unfamiliar face.
They made me a Category 3 Multi Agency Public Protection Agreement (MAPPA) nominal, which means in lay terms that I was on some kind of level with violent killers, terrorist and sex offenders. Not because I had a history of violence, sexual depravity or terrorism, but so I could be monitored, controlled and isolated.
They placed me in a house where I was given no key and where another tenant had a known history of racially aggravated violence, and to prevent me speaking out about this, they put a condition on my release licence forbidding me from creating content on social media, thus inhibiting my Article 10 rights to freedom of expression.
It is too simple to say that I was set up to fail. The truth is that I was psychologically profiled and an environment was created around me that they believed would break me or push me to reoffend. They evidently wanted me to break the licence conditions and explode on YouTube or retaliate to the endless and ever-increasing racist taunts from the angry racist in the room below mine.
I could see most of the traps so I never allowed myself to be triggered and fall into them, but when I was racially abused and threatened with a knife in the house probation had approved, I fled to a place I call my home, Manchester, where I was met with love by the members of the public they claim I pose a risk to. And because I did not tell probation where I was I was recalled to prison. It was not the reason that they wanted to recall me, but it was all they had and it was enough.
Only an inherently racist system would recall a victim of a racially motivated attack simply because he tried to find a safe place to escape to. Only a system hellbent on the destruction of black men by the use pf the psychological weapon also known as the criminal justice system could throw a man back into prison to serve another four years simply for speaking out about the irrational hate that drives their culture. Yes, this is probation, the power behind the throne of systemic institutional racism.
I want to thank you for hearing my voice because on the paper written by probation they write words like ‘We cannot defend re-releasing Mr Dowie into an unsafe environment as this will heighten the danger he poses to the public’, when it was they who put me in that environment and they have yet to define what the danger is that they claim I pose to the public.
They are lying to you. There is no effort to reduce the prison population where black and poor white people are concerned. We are fodder for the system, and they need crime on your streets so that they can justify incarcerating more and more black and poor people. My voice is not a danger to the public, but my voice is a danger to them.
Elavi Dowie
