I was twelve when Naumann's Law was passed. New Democratic Alliance Prime Minister Jeff Greening had just secured a historic fifth term at Number 10 in an election that boasted, at the time, the lowest voting turn-out in British political history, with something in the region of 30% of the population actually making it to the ballots. It was five years after British servicemen first joined US troops in America's campaign against North Korea: an episode officially dubbed a Police Action. Behind closed doors, we called it a war.

I grew up, like the rest of my generation, in an environment in which violence and crime were commonplace. Deadbolts, alarms, invisible electric fencing, marking out the boundaries between our safe little self-contained worlds and the hostile, dangerous one outside. My schoolbag contained the regulation Personal Attack Siren and two cans of pepper spray.

We had been born into troubled times. We were trained to survive them.

The institution of Naumann's Law was an obvious solution. Violent crime was on the rise for something like the twenty-first year in a row. Prisons groaned and strained against the pent-up pressure of the criminals they contained. Any attempt to re-habilitate and release ex-convicts into society, it seemed, only ended in repeat offences. The country cried out for tougher sentences for criminals, but lacked the resources to meet the demands.

Medical progress had ground to a stuttering halt. Animal rights activists campaigned outside laboratories and sent razorblades and letter bombs to scientists known to be, or even suspected of being, involved in animal testing. The UK produced, pro capita, the fewest scientist of any country in the developed world.

At dinner parties and in wine bars, people offered up their own solutions. Why not use violent criminals for pharmaceutical and medical experimentation? And someone - somewhere in the upper echelons of decision-makers - heard these words and thought: yes, why not?

A nation sick of violence and protest and disease backed the scheme whole-heartedly: in place of laboratory animals, violent criminals were to become scientific test subjects for the duration of their sentences - a law which applied only to murderers, whether convicted before or after the law was passed.

And it worked.

With a fresh supply of new and improved, and most importantly of all, approved, guinea pigs on which to test their new procedures, pills and injections, British scientists fast became the forerunners of modern medicine. Only seven years had passed since the nationwide introduction of Naumann's Law, and most forms of cancer had been practically eliminated. A vaccine against AIDS, it was rumoured, was on the horizon.

Crime rates had declined, the prospect of experimentation providing an effective deterrent where our forefathers' various policies of incarceration and extermination had failed.

Prison overcrowding had ceased to be a problem. The reduced crime quota, combined with a certain degree of 'wastage' during the testing process, resulted in fewer convicts behind bars, living off the state, than had been known for over half a century.

Lobbyists and protestors had finally stopped lobbying and protesting. No one attacked scientists or demonstrated outside laboratories any more. People, it seemed, got a lot more sentimental over kittens and chimps than they did over convicted killers.

The world's eyes turned to our little island and for a while, it appeared, we had found the perfect system. Overseas, in Europe and the States, governments talked of following our lead.

But it had worked too well. Suddenly, unforeseeably, there were no longer sufficient murderers on which to experiment. Twelve years after the introduction of Naumann's Law, scientists outnumbered their test subjects by a ratio of four to one.

Crisis: just inches from new medical breakthroughs, scientists were forced to down tools. In spite of the government funnelling huge sums of money into the Police Force in an attempt to ensure that no crime went unsolved and unpunished, the ever-dwindling numbers of killers that filtered into the nationwide testing stations could not meet the needs of our prolific new medical pioneers.

The next step was probably inevitable: the extension of the law to other forms of criminals. At first at least, it was only applied to terrorists and sex offenders. I'm not sure when this ceased to be the case. Government spokespeople used their words wisely and economically, and the few official statements that were made at the time tended to be sparse and ambiguous.

Slowly, smoothly, insidiously, more and more offences were amalgamated. Attempted Murder, Armed Robbery, Armed Assault, Aggravated Assault, GBH, ABH, Manslaughter'¦

By my twenty-sixth birthday, no convicted criminal was exempt from the testing programmes. Whether you were serving twenty years for raping two children, or six months for dodging your taxes, you were equally likely to find yourself at the sharp end of a scientist's scalpel. While the lengths of prison sentences remained unchanged, whether or not they were outlived was another matter.

Everyone seemed okay with this. Everyone seemed happy or, at least, not unhappy, so nobody did anything about it. Petitions and picket lines were pretty much a thing of the past by now. No voices were raised in outcry.

Ex-cons, those who survived their sentences, were disenfranchised following the passing of a law called Article 271b. Once again, no one spoke out.

Until, that is, a newspaper article went to print almost two years later.

I had worked in journalism since I was seventeen, initially following dog shows and parish events for a local paper while I completed my studies, and working my way up from there. I left university at twenty-two with a B.A. in journalism and sociology under my arm, and walked straight into a nice comfortable job writing for The National Witness.

I'd had misgivings about the Prisoner Testing Programmes since I was old enough to truly understand the concept. It hadn't seemed so bad when it had at least appeared to be working, and it certainly seemed to make a kind of sense. But over the past couple of years, the medical advances had ground to something of a standstill. Thousands of convicts had paid off their debts to society, often fatally, yet where were our cures and chemicals?

Fantastic scientific breakthroughs, sage professors and official-looking government spokesmen assured us, were just around the corner.

But the breakthroughs never came, and I started to wonder.

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