Life on the lam
A Kiwi recidivist tells his story of crime, hard time and daring escapes with realism and a hint of relish.
If 10 aliases, a fulsome 16-page criminal report dating from 1972 and a total of 38 years in prison after 155 convictions can qualify anyone to
write a biography, then Arthur William Taylor – an enfant terrible of our criminal justice system – meets the brief.
Taylor was released from prison on parole in 2019. He had been serving a sentence of 17 years and six months for kidnapping, escaping and possession of drugs and explosives. Two years later, life is much quieter for Taylor. The sound of clanking cell doors and the banshee wail of police sirens has been replaced, he reveals in Prison Break: The extraordinary life and crimes of NZ’s most infamous escapee, by the bleating of new lambs and the sylvan semi-rural surrounds of a small Dunedin house.
Definitely a man of many parts is Taylor, a quality reflected in the pages of a biography that I imagine will be eagerly read in police stations, legal chambers and government departments throughout the land. Taylor has participated in the criminal justice system since 1972, but usually in entirely the wrong way.
“We all have choices in our life and we are responsible for them,’’ he writes reflectively in the book in which Taylor the hardened, recidivist criminal becomes an older, wiser more philosophical man.
Then there’s Taylor the battler for justice, the fearless bush lawyer who has often become a gadfly in the slow-moving flank of New Zealand’s ponderous justice system, fighting injustices ranging from perjury to the banning of cigarettes in prison. The former young resident of a brutalising boys’ home, Taylor writes
Taylor has participated in the criminal justice system since 1972, but usually in entirely the wrong way.
about his experiences with painful realism. You meet the cellmate, the loving father and the criminal whose path you would not wish to cross. Then enters the author, who dissects a life best described as colourful with enough relish and eloquence to make this guilty little secret of a book so eminently readable.
For the record, the innocent bleating of new lambs is often accompanied by the soft crunch of gravel as a patrolling police car circles by. The past, it seems, never vanishes, even from the hardest of individuals. l