‘I feel most alive when I’m in prison’

Alexander McLean isn’t just binding up the broken-hearted inside African prisons. He has also been setting some of the captives free. Sam Hailes hears the full story

The sight that greeted an 18-year-old Alexander McLean as he walked into a Ugandan hospital is almost too horrendous to imagine: a man was lying on the floor by the toilet. He was naked and lying in a pool of urine. The flesh on his bottom and back was rotten down to the bone. He was decomposing while he was still alive, a nurse had told him: ‘We think he’s in a diabetic coma. We don’t know his name, we’re waiting for him to die. He doesn’t get care because he doesn’t have any money,’ She said.”

Six days later, the man passed away. A hospital porter arrived, pushing a trolley with a dead woman on top of it. McLean, now 34 years old, remembers: “He put the man on top of the woman and said they’re both going to a mass grave with everyone else who had no one to bury them. It was really a turning point in my life. I realised that there are people in our world whose lives have no value and who live and die like dogs. I remember calling my mum that evening and crying for him.”