Veteran journalist and Dorset resident Kate Adie is talking about how she escaped from the police after being arrested whilst reporting from India.

The former BBC chief news correspondent said ‘things got out of hand during a major commotion’.

She said the security was ‘a bit sloppy’ adding: “Once we were stuffed in this room, I thought ‘This is not on, you see.’ “It didn’t take long to realise it wasn’t going to take a Houdini to get out, so I quietly left.

“There was no paperwork done so no-one ever found out,” Kate laughs.

“I thought I’d be far less trouble to them if I got out.”

But it was her experience of being arrested while studying in Germany that had the biggest effect on her.

Kate recalls that several hundred students got arrested in the 1960s after getting caught up in demonstrations taking place.

Although Kate says it was ‘all rather exciting’, being shut in a room with 17 people had a profound impact.

She said: “It taught me that once the door had closed, it wasn’t possible to say, ‘look here, this isn’t on in any way, I’m a foreigner and you have no right to do this.’ “I was just caught up, which I was – just caught up in it.

“I learnt that no-one would listen. There was no-one to come to listen and you were stuffed.

“It was a lesson and you got a taste, only a taste, of how some people may feel when they end up inside.”

She added: “It was sort of as if you had dropped off a cliff slightly. I was very young at the time and it was very interesting. That was significant for me.”

And rather frightening, I suggest. Kate agrees.

She is a patron of Footprints, a charity which helps to mentor and befriend men and women who are leaving prison in the Dorset, Somerset and Hampshire area to help reduce the risk of re-offending.

The volunteers provide help, advice and support as former prisoners start their re-settlement.

Kate recently hosted a ‘question time’ event at Portland YOI, talking about the experiences and reflections of a group of mixed faith leaders who took part in a recent lock-in to raise funds for Footprints.

Challenging and changing people’s perceptions of prison and prisoners is clearly a cause very close to Kate’s heart.

She said it must be a ‘terrifying moment’ for those leaving prison when the gate opens and closes.

She said: “They don’t go out to a world that’s welcoming or expecting to help them. It’s a very bleak moment for a lot of them. I’ve seen it a number of times when I’ve been covering big stories.

“You realise there’s a strange moment when the door opens and shuts and you have a plastic bag and you’re standing there.

“It must be, I’m assuming, although others would know better, a terrifying moment.”

She added: “That’s where we try and come in. In prisons we start talking to people about what they can do with their lives, saying to people ‘How about sorting things out. What can we do?’ “Then we keep in touch afterwards, so a week in when life’s really got very tough, there’s someone they can contact, someone who can give them some advice, some help.”

Kate said she had been into a number of prisons across her 40 years in journalism including in Africa and the US and said the US state penitentiaries in particular were ‘immense and frightening places with a hard atmosphere.’ She said: “It does make you think about what’s the point of it. Does it do any good? Why do we lock people away?”

She added: “My feeling is when you look at the cost of it, my goodness me, what we could do with the money.

“And we are merely locking someone up and when they come out it may not have done them any good.”

So what would Kate like to see change in the future?

“I think for a start perhaps we shouldn’t lock people up in quite the way we do – in the sense of putting them rather expensively in a kind of isolation,” she said.

Kate said that most prisoners needed complex support and that would cost money.

She said: “We should use the money that we spend on locking people up to improve people’s education.

“The number of prisoners who can’t read and write – it’s frightening.”

She added: “You just think ‘why doesn’t someone help them?

“They are sitting in a prison. It’s an arena where you could teach someone to read without interruptions.

“You wonder why there isn’t a national system. It’s heartbreaking in a way.”

Kate would like to see a change in attitude to the word ‘prisoner’.

And the first step to reducing societal stigma about prisoners, she says, is to say, ‘these are human beings and they don’t look different’.”

When she was covering murder trials, people used to ask her what the defendants looked like.

It was an ‘extraordinary view’ Kate said, but one that was very common.

She said: “We have to bridge these gaps and just say we are talking about human beings.”

l Footprints is in need of volunteer mentors and ‘befrienders’ to join its team. For more information visit footprintsproject.org.uk