John Kane has convictions for robbery, assault and kidnap, and became one of York's biggest drug dealers. But what set him off on his life of crime - and what has now made him reform? Mike Laycock reports.

He says it all began by nicking sweets from his local shop in Walmgate, York, when he was about eight years old and in a family facing domestic difficulties.

He remembers going to the magistrates court, and sitting on a bench with his feet not even touching the ground. He eventually ended up going to an approved school. "That was the last time I saw my family for about three years," he says.

"I learnt to be hard. You had to be hard to survive. It was a training school for pickpocketing and shoplifting."

When he returned to York, his criminal activities racked up a gear, and he started stealing pushbikes and motorbikes, and assaulted the head teacher at his school in the Groves. "They couldn't control me. I became uncontrollable."

He says he ended up in Borstal, where he learnt more skills helping him to extend his career in crime. On one occasion, he "slashed" a bully's face with a razor. On release, he moved into burglary and later robbery.

There were more spells in prison, followed by more crime, followed by more prison. "It was like a merry-go-round," he says. But it was far from merry for the countless victims who paid the price for John's inability to stay away from crime, and for society's inability to steer him away from it. With a short temper, he got convictions for assault and affray. Then he became involved in dealing in heroin, a "big dealer, providing a deals-on-wheels service", according to the judge who jailed him for ten years in 1998.

But now, at 55, and after serving his latest stretch, John Kane says he has decided that enough is enough and he wants to go straight - and this time he really means it.

He said several factors had led to his change of heart. "Several people died in a year, including my brother and two aunts, and I thought: What am I doing with my life? Where am I going? I'm 55, and people my age are dying. It really hit me.

"At the same time, I started having panic attacks, for which I was given beta-blockers, and for the first time I felt vulnerable. My marriage was breaking up as well.

"And then I went to a prison, called Kirklevington Grange, near Yarm, which was different to any prison I had been at before. You had to get up in front of everybody and talk about yourself and your crimes. There was counselling and everybody had a personal officer. My attitude started to change.

"They had a scheme where you would go out into schools in Middlesbrough with the police and talk to half a dozen kids who had got into trouble." He spelled out what life could be like in prison, that it "wasn't all colour telly. I told them about the brutalities of prison life, how there could be feelings of loneliness and you could be bullied and attacked." He hopes he may have helped deter some youngsters from setting out on criminal lives like his. He says he would love to do something similar in York to help stop kids here getting into the spiral of crime that he descended into.

He also went out from the prison to work for a plumbing, glazing and glass merchants, winning a reference that said: "During John's time with us, we found him to be reliable and adaptable, hard-working and very capable of working on his own initiative and without supervision, or as part of a team." And he worked hard to gain certificates in a range of skills from fork-lift truck operation to bricklaying.

Now he says he wants to put some of those skills to use by earning an honest crust in York.

But will someone give him the chance to prove himself?

Updated: 10:28 Tuesday, July 15, 2003