Ex-solicitor says prison sorted her life out
21 December 2012
An ex-lawyer has said that prison rescued her from the greedy world of the City.

Kate Johns, a former counsel for the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, was sent down for five years in 2010 after defrauding her employer of £7 million. She told the Independent that when she was a high-flying lawyer "I wanted for nothing...I'd become a very confident, maybe arrogant, lawyer in the process". Johns claims the spendy City culture tempted her to divert millions into her friend's failing airline business, and a few £100k to herself, too.

Johns was eventually collared, but claimed it did her the power of good. She recovered from depression after a probation officer helped her have an "epiphany". Before long she was embracing prison life like a hardened lag, although she was forced to modify her beauty routine: she used "tea-bags as fake tan, permanent marker as nail varnish [and] prison porridge as a face mask".

Because you're worth it

Johns was released after serving half her sentence and now works for Hibiscus, a charity helping women caught up in the criminal justice system. But she doesn't miss City life, which she thinks would have been the end of her. "The more one gets caught up in it, the harder it is to walk away" said Johns, presumably while staining her legs in a bowl of Tetley. "If my conviction hadn't come about I'm not sure to this day whether I'd have ever walked away".