In May of this year, one of Britain’s most wanted criminals, a man called Ronald Biggs, returned to Britain after thirty years of exile in Brazil. Now aged seventy-one, he was arrested on arrival and taken straight to prison. Biggs was one of the men behind the “Great Train Robbery” of 1963, whose daring astonished the country and netted the robbers about $60 million in today’s money. Biggs was caught and imprisoned, but he managed to escape to Brazil, a country with which Britain does not have an extradition treaty. He decided to return after so long a period of exile because he was ill and impoverished (he had lived for years by granting interviews to British publications). He appeared to have calculated that the medical treatment in a British prison would be superior to that given to an indigent person of foreign extraction in Brazil.

On the day of his arrival back in Britain, a newspaper known nationally for the robustness of its views asked me whether I was prepared, as a doctor who worked part-time in a prison, to write an article to suggest that Biggs should be denied medical treatment while he was a prisoner. After all, he was a professional thief who had evaded, defied, and humiliated the British criminal justice system for many years; he had contributed no taxes to the exchequer, far from it, and now that he had returned home his incarceration would cost the British taxpayer a veritable mint of