'I was seen as the lowest of the low... but this is how I survived life inside prison for a rape I didn't do'

Not long into his life sentence, a prison officer poked his head around the door of Andy Malkinson's cell at HMP Frankland and asked him to be who he was not: a guilty man.

The category A prison in County Durham is full of some of the country's most serious criminals, and as far as the 'screws' were concerned he was one of them, responsible for a shockingly violent rape.

"He leaned on my cell door and tried to engage me with a faux chatty demeanour. He said 'even if you haven't done it you are better off doing the courses otherwise they'll never let you out'," Andy explained, during a candid interview with the M.E.N.

These courses, under the controversial Sexual Offences Treatment Program which was replaced in 2017 after an official report revealed it left sex offenders more likely to commit further crimes, were meetings where serious sex offenders went ostensibly to admit horrific sex crimes, for group therapy and to lay bare their darkest thoughts and perversions. It was regarded as a pathway to extra privileges, redemption and, eventually, freedom.

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"I'd seen people coming out of there with their heads absolutely wrecked because they are pulling each other to pieces in there describing what they had done and what went wrong, paedophiles and people who had done rapes," said Andy.

"The idea the screw was suggesting, it was so absurd I could not even consider it."

That is the story of Andy Malkinson's 17 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit, the horrific strangulation and rape of a young woman near he M61 motorway in Little Hulton, Salford, in July 2003.

A crime we now know was at the hands of another man.

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