Bad Boy Turns Good

Christian Conversion Changed Larry's Life...

Larry Harvey’s audience is dressed in regulation prison green overalls and they are bored.

This is the reception area for young offenders and no-one is excited at having to listen to the burly 48-year-old chaplain.

“I’ve been in prison myself,” Larry tells them. “I’ve been to juvenile court for stealing cars – crashed into a wall once and went straight through the windscreen. At 14 I was smoking weed and doing amphetamines.”

Some of the young lads sit up and listen: this is not what they expect to hear from a prison chaplain. But then Larry Harvey, ex-demolition worker, boxer, and, let’s be honest, bad boy Gypsy, is far from ‘average’ in anything he does.

“In our prisons, Gypsies and Travellers are the smallest ethnic group in terms of numbers,” Larry tells TT later. “Most stay well clear of trouble, but for some reason I was different.”

The Bristol boy was born into an English Romany Gypsy family. His Dad, Joe Harvey, known as Chromium Joe because of his chrome-covered lorries, ran a scrap yard not far from Pucklechurch.

Larry worked in the family business and took up boxing, but he couldn’t keep out of trouble’s way. He ran away from home, lived in a squat and became involved in organised crime and fighting: “I must have had over 150 pub fights.”

The young offender was sent to a government ‘boot camp’ for a ‘short sharp shock’. “That meant a shave, a shower and the toilet in two minutes flat. And if you didn’t you do it you got a kicking from the staff.”

But it wasn’t the punishing regime that turned life round for Larry Harvey, a father of five who now goes to theological college and who, today, stands in front of a bunch prison boys telling them: “You got your youth: now have some respect for yourselves.”

Larry takes up the story. “After I got married and started a family, my daughter fell ill.” She would recover after 30 hours of surgery, but not before Larry had fallen to his knees. “I saw this big cross: I begged for her to be saved. And she was.”

That was in 1999. Larry became a Christian and turned his life round. Now he devotes himself to the welfare of the young men who, as he once did, find themselves on the wrong side of the prison gates.

Larry Harvey is deputy head chaplain at HM Prison Ashfield.