‘Prison is not a place for rehabilitation’: Imprisoned rapper Marnz Malone on confronting inmate suicide

IIn November 2022, a year after an 11-year prison sentence on gun charges, Birmingham rapper Marnz Malone was hanging out with his friends during “sosh,” or club time, on his grand piano. One of them, a boxer, preached about the benefits of fitness training and explained how he had improvised an exercise using the equipment he had. Malone noticed that the man who lived in the cell next to him was showing great interest and asking questions. At the time he thought little about it.

“We didn’t know he had just shown the guy how to kill himself,” Malone said during a Skype call. “It traumatized many of us.”

The incident inspired the 25-year-old’s latest single, I Hate January, which was released this week. The music video follows the perspective of two young men who experience a mental health crisis in their cells, leading one of them to commit suicide. The text at the beginning of the video explains that there have been 88 suicides recorded in the British prison system in the past year, an average of one every four days.

“I feel like I have a responsibility to show people what’s really going on here,” says Malone (whose real name is Kimani Shaw). “It’s easy to look at my screenplay and think prison is fun” – Malone has recorded and released all three of his critically acclaimed full-length releases from prison, including Tina’s Boy, which reached number 66 in the UK album charts last year. ‘Or that we glorify it. But this is it not a nice place.”

Marnz Malone, also known as Double M, enters 2025 as one of the most talked-about rappers in Britain. His process is remarkable: he sits in his cell writing complicated, anguished travails about life, love and death, always in silence – ‘without the distraction of instruments, or feeling the need to rap in a certain way… I’ll make sure I write it down. exactly how I feel” – then performs them over the phone to a trusted circle of engineers who lay them over stripped-down, melancholic beats before releasing them to the world.

Like the crackle of an old vinyl, sharpened by the poetic power of his storytelling, Malone’s lines have an analog rawness – and an ever-expanding fanbase, including peers like Nines (whose album featured Malone on the charts in 2024) , Potter Payper and Central Cee. Malone handles the harsh features of life on the road and in prison with precision and sensitivity, without regard to Drill’s short-sighted nihilism. emerged from the troubled genre‘s golden age of the late 2010s – and commercial British rap’s potential for superficial glamour. He is a rapper’s rapper and busy mobile freestyle videos and songs like Ball 4 U or Free Dior, which intimately mourn friends and wish for better days, have generated tens of millions of streams.

“It’s bittersweet,” he says. “Being in prison means I can record it, I have time to think. I’m no different than anyone else in this, which keeps me grounded. I could have £20 million in the bank but I could still only spend £20 a week. Every day my door is unlocked at the same time as everyone else; we all eat and go to the gym at the same time. But it’s sad because I’m not looking to fully experience it. There are rappers I’ve worked with that I haven’t even gotten to know.”

His love for words is deeply rooted. He was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and his father died when he was two; his mother moved to Newtown, Birmingham, where Malone later joined her (the photo on the cover of Tina’s Boy shows the moment they reconnected). At school he was bullied for speaking patois, so he concentrated on English classes. He soon developed a penchant for idiosyncratic vocabulary – he cites the example of ‘aglet’, the sheath on the end of a shoelace – and wrote down his busy thoughts. on paper to understand them. “Reading is an escape. It’s how my mind works, it comes naturally. I like to know information and have knowledge,” he says. He is grateful for studying Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 novel War Horse, which makes sense given the war motif running through his lyrics (his first mixtape was called Trenchfoot). He cites Redemption by Stan “Tookie” Williams, founder of the Los Angeles gang The Crips who were executed in 2005, and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho as books that have since inspired him during his captivity.

I Hate January is about his good friend and fellow inmate British rap success story KayMuni and is so named because the month marks the birthday of Malone’s friend Nasir Patrice, as well as the day he was murdered in 2020, two weeks before he turned 18. It is the first single from his fourth full-length project Sabr, scheduled for release on Valentine’s Day and featuring Dave and Chip, among others.

The album cover of Malone’s critically acclaimed 2023 project Maktub (“it is written” in Arabic) used a cartoon version of the mugshot which was taken and circulated in the press after he was released from hospital after being stabbed twenty times, arrested and charged in 2021: Malone pointed a gun at rival gang members and was found guilty of possession of a firearm with intent to endangering lives. He says the Sabr cover will have the same portrait style, but will depict him as he is now. “Time has moved on. Now I have facial hair and scars on my face,” he says, adding that Sabr means “patience” or “perseverance” in Arabic (its lyricism and branding are peppered with Islamic references).

Everyone involved in the creation of I Hate January, “from KayMuni, to the guy who shot the video, to the guy who mixed and mastered the video, has a personal experience of suicide,” Malone explains. When I ask why it is so common in British prisons, he asks if he can read out some words written by one of his friends who has been in prison for 19 years. “I have to make sure this is heard – because if I don’t do it, who will?”

The piece he reads convincingly addresses the lack of mental health care in prisons, normalized drug use and cramped space; the way so many people in prison become isolated from their outside support network; and the British government, for their fear of the media and for their inability to provide rehabilitation. He quotes prison and probation ombudsman Adrian Usher, who called for better access to phones last summer: “When I investigate the circumstances of a self-inflicted death in prison, far too often I find that the inmate had no credit on his phone bill,” Usher said. “If prisoners had the opportunity to contact a friend or family member in their darkest hour, would they have made a different choice?”

I ask Marnz what he would do to improve the mental health of prisoners. Better training for prison staff, he answers. “I have a good relationship with the people I have to live with: officers, governors, whoever. But I think they can start by ensuring that staff can recognize when someone is suffering so they can handle the situation appropriately.”

“Prison is not a place for rehabilitation. The only reason I got rehabilitated is because of music; without it I don’t know what I would have done. I would probably think about going home and turning to a life of crime to survive. Not everyone gets the break I do,” he concludes passionately. “That’s why I wake up every day and tell myself to remember two things: be humble and complete the mission. Until I get out of here, I don’t feel like my rap career has even started.”