Dinner with Dave

Dave's favourite restaurant is Denny's. It's an American diner and institution, where you get no-nonsense, down-to-earth food. Dave has country-fried steak and eggs, hash browns and toast. I notice it doesn't serve alcohol.

"I used to be a mean drunk," says Dave, "I went to bars and picked fights." Not any more. Every now and again he gets a craving but he's given up drinking and thumping.

Out of the last 25 years, Dave has spent 15 in prison. He's be in and out, in and out, in and out.

Now Dave is the Producer of The Prison Show and he takes it very seriously. He's committed and organised. He sets up guests, sometimes records interviews and goes behind the mic for a studio chat. As well as this voluntary work, he has a full-time salaried job, a car and a wallet-full of credit cards. He's proud of what he's achieved but he's still on parole.

Dave looks tough so I'm caught off-guard when he gets emotional over a straightforward question. "When you were inside," I ask, "did you ever get a shout-out on The Prison Show?"

"No one ever called in to give me a call-out," says Dave. "I'd lay up in my little bunk with my headphones on and listen to all the people calling in to The Prison Show and they became my family. It was really neat to hear them say to other inmates: 'We love you. We miss you We won't be able to come to see you, but just know that you're in our thoughts'. And I'd get all choked up." And he gets all choked up again. Right there. In Denny's.

"If your love-ones care enough about you to call out on the radio, telling you how much they love you, that's just awesome man, and I don't care how 'big and bad' a convict you are, you're going sit there and cry about it". He laughs. He's hiding those tears behind his glasses and below his stetson well, but his voice is the giveway. It cracks again.

Here in Denny's, over my Santa Fe Skillet, I press him on the difficult editorial issues that go with a prison show like his being on the public airwaves. When it comes to making sure that victims are not offended, Dave says, "We're not making excuses for the crimes that have been commited, but we're trying to be an advocate for prisoners. Their punishment is to be sentenced, not to be punished whilst they're inside. Not to be beaten, raped, or die from the heat or cold in the prison."

What about codes? Does Dave worry about information being passed across the air? "We have a dump button. When families come on and don't talk about family related things we get them off the air. We had a guy come on talking about air-conditioning one night. What's he doing?! We got him off the air. We were suspicious. We're not here to tell inmates how to escape."

It's really important to Dave that nothing like that damages the relationship that The Prison Show has established with those working in law enforcement. They need some of those authority figures to come onto the show to talk about treatment programmes, prison regime issues or to answer questions about a particular criminal justice issue. Even more fundamentally they need to stay on the air, and that requires a smooth, mature and non-adversarial relationship between the two camps.