Jon Grimwood - Pashazade

Not the stupidity of the convicts who ended up there but of the architects, philanthropists and politicians of Washington State. Men who wanted their names immortalized in a correctional glass cathedral that turned out, in practice, to function as little more than an ice house.

Two riots in three winters went some way towards convincing the governor that the design was not as humane as he'd been led to believe. But since five identical penitentiaries had already been built in other states to the same plan, and all had been unsuccessful, this didn't come as a surprise to his critics.

By 1930, nearly sixty years later, all were ruins except Huntsville. In 1979 Huntsville was finally decommissioned. And then, in the final year of the twentieth century , Californian therapist Dr Anthony Millbank published his revolutionary work on lux therapy.

Crime, said Dr Millbank, wasn't merely a matter of incorrect socialization, food allergy or genetic malfunction, which in animals was called bad blood. Therefore social therapy, healthy meals and carefully selected drugs were not the complete answer.

Most crime was urban. What most urban dwellers lacked was natural light. It was therefore obvious that light-deprivation was a contributory factor in crime. Since most of middle America believed that original sin rather than genetics, allergies or lack of breastfeeding led to crime, they paid little attention to the latest addition to the list of contributory causes. Though a teenage serial killer who drained, labelled and later drank the chilled blood of his victims mixed with Stolichnaya gained brief notoriety by claiming his murderous tendencies were caused by an aversion to food, shopping malls and daylight.

But Dr Millbank persisted, helped both by appearances on Oprah and data-showing that the gene cFos (a marker for the human internal clock) peaked only once — under artificial light, at dawn, but expressed at dawn and dusk in natural light.

There was, in Dr Millbank's opinion, a distinct and irrefutable correlation between artificial light and crime.

The gradual shifts in light-intensity and wavelength that caused humans to adjust peacefully to the transition between night and day were missing in urban society. And basic research showed that under the artificial conditions imposed by electric light, even lab rats and gerbils became restless and unsettled.

How much better, then, for naturally unsettled people — like prisoners — to benefit from lux therapy rather than live under a regime governed by harmful artificial light ...

No state in the US would fund a new penitentiary based on the ideas of Dr Millbank so he applied for a private licence and founded his own prison, buying Huntsville cheap from the city of Seattle which was delighted to offload its responsibility for a decaying Victorian masterpiece.

Dr Millbank's price was that five miles of forest and scrub around Huntsville should officially be declared a dark-sky preserve, with light-pollution strictly controlled within this perimeter. Heating was installed, lifts, carpets ... a gym, a weights room, an Olympic-size swimming pool.

Huntsville wasn't just unique in being run according to the theories of Dr Anthony Millbank. It was the only penitentiary in the US allowed to charge its inmates hotel fees. To be incarcerated at Huntsville cost money: about the same as sending a child to a good Ivy League University. Everyone loved the place, except the police. The state saved money on prisoners, those incarcerated mixed with a better class of criminal and there was none of the gang violence endemic in most other American prisons.

The kind of people who belonged in gangs couldn 't afford the fees. It wasn't that the inmates were all white, all Anglo-Saxon or all Protestant. From the very start, right from the turn of the century, there was a rich mix of embezzlers, capi di capi and drug barons of every ethnic origin. The only thing they had in common was that they were all very definitely not poor.

Justifying the existence of Huntsville, however, proved a politician's nightmare. Democrats hated the prison's elitist credentials, Republicans loathed the softness of its regime: but when a senator from one party was caught bribing a congressman from another, Huntsville was where both elected to serve their sentences.

Statistics put inmate violence at almost zero and for once they were accurate. Violence happened, but not often, and violence between prisoners and staff was literally unknown. Which was why ZeeZee Welham's unprovoked attack on the elderly, white-haired Dr Millbank sent shock waves through every elegant Huntsville walkway.

Merely punching any member of staff would have been horrifying enough. But to grip Dr Millbank himself by his scraggy throat and drag him across his own desk to plant a blow that split his lip as if it had been a ripe plum was beyond belief. So far beyond belief that Dr Millbank announced on the spot that what ZeeZee needed was not punishment but psychiatric help. His words left a fine spray of blood across his attacker's tangled beard and broad chest, but even then he handed ZeeZee a Kleenex from a box by his desk.

It made ZeeZee want to punch him all over again.

All of which explained how ZeeZee found himself in the passenger seat of a Lincoln Continental coming off the 522 onto Interstate 5, with Lake Washington on one side and Puget Sound on the other, on his way to psychiatric assessment at a hospital in Takona.

The man driving him to Mount Olive Hospital was Clem Burke, a bull from a downstate prison who was undergoing compulsory rehabilitation at Huntsville after taking a nightstick to the skull of an inmate at his old jail. Making Clem Burke work as a warder at Huntsville was probably constitutionally illegal: he certainly regarded it as cruel and unusual.

'You know what I'd do with you?'

ZeeZee looked across as Clem swung the heavy Lincoln out into the fast lane and overtook an old Beetle, nudging so close the VW got almost buffeted off the freeway.

'Let me guess ...'

'Nah,' said Clem. 'Don't bother. You couldn't begin to imagine. ' He shifted down a gear and slid past a truck on its nearside, angrily flicking it the finger when the Mack hit its brakes and flashed its lights.

'This Shitville do-gooding crap. It's just toss. You don't just hit the Governor and get away with it.' The Lincoln lurched forward, closing up a gap before anyone could pull into it.

'Rehabilitation not working, then?' ZeeZee asked innocently.

He enjoyed watching the veins stand out on Clem's fat neck and his face turn an even deeper shade of purple.

'Solitary,' snarled Clem. 'That's what you need. Stripped naked in a sweatbox; till you as pink and pretty as a baby. Then I'd give your ass to some Boss Nigra ... That's what. That's the way any real prison would do it.'

A real prison probably would, too. But then, someone was paying ZeeZee's fees precisely to ensure stuff like that didn't happen. And ZeeZee had a pretty good idea where that money came from. A Chinese woman who knew who really put a .22 through the back of Micky O'Brian's head and watched him crumple as the sub-sonic slug ricocheted around the inside of his skull, scrambling what was left of Micky's brains after a $15,000-a-month crack habit had magimixed its share. And Hu San wasn't someone ZeeZee wanted to upset. Not now, not ever ...

Mentioning her name in public would have been a quicker way of committing suicide than standing up in court to claim he'd killed Micky, he'd meant to kill Micky and, given half a chance, he'd kill Micky again. And which way should he go for the electric chair?