Dressed in a sleeveless top and knee-length skirt Julie Robertson twirls her hair in a plait and tosses

Dressed in a sleeveless top and knee-length skirt, Julie Robertson twirls her hair in a plait and tosses it over her shoulder. “The screws are always having a go at me for `inappropriate physical contact’,” she says, applying a dash of lipstick and rolling a cigarette. “Apparently, the rules are that I must keep my legs on my side of the table. I ask my husband: do you think that if I give you head with my legs on my side of the table, that’s within the rules?”

Julie is due at Broadmoor maximum security hospital in Berkshire at 2pm, to visit her husband, Alex Robertson, a “mildly schizophrenic” armed robber. “I think…,” she pauses ruefully, as if considering a thought for the first time, whilst gunning her Ford Transit down the M3 …”that my husband is secretly disappointed that he hasn’t killed anyone We had an argument when I visited last time.

I said: `What’s this rubbish you told the prison psychiatrist about a murder?’
`I killed a man over a drugs deal,’ he said.`Nonsense’.`I did’, he insisted.`You also claimed you were in the French Foreign Legion and that you’d taken someone hostage.’”I told the authorities that murder is not Alex’s style,” she continues, emitting a gravelly laugh before biting into a tuna sandwich “He’s not violent, he’s an armed robber. Armed robbery may sound dangerous, but all it is is going into a supermarket with a knife and saying, `Give me your money’.”She is like a character out of a Quentin Tarantino film, her conversation shifting seamlessly between the prosaic and the profound, with her own take on the world, her own home-grown morality, a regular Mrs Pink. Except that she is university-educated and middle class (“my dad was director of a textile company”). And this is real life.It is 2.30pm when she pulls up outside the 20-foot walls that house some of the most dangerous and disturbed criminals in the country Alex will be upset that she’s late. She dashes off, tension etching her brow, through the metal detector and heavy, clanking security gate, through another security gate, past the Dickensian buildings with bars on the windows to the visitors’ room in Central Hall, where her husband is waiting.Like all good prison wives, it appears Julie is standing by her man. But there is a key difference between her and other long-suffering spouses.

Julie met Alex for the first time when he was already in prison. You could say that it’s her choice to be here.Julie (whose detailed story is one of three that follow below) belongs to an extraordinary group of women who fall for men on the inside. They meet their future husbands by becoming prison visitors, voluntary associates, pen-friends or by chance encounters with prisoners allowed out on weekends towards the end of their term.With the release of the Bridgewater Three, women who fall in love with prisoners have been in the public eye. Firstly, there was Christina Spencer, who struck up a pen-friend relationship and then married Hubert Spencer, the ex-convict some suggest is the real Bridgewater murderer. She went on television to defend her husband, saying: “The first thing I asked him when we met was: did you kill that little boy? He said `no’ and I believed him.” They became pen-friends after Christina, who was educated at public school, heard a letter he had written from prison read out on local radio. “As I listened to it, I thought: this is word-for-word how I feel.

I wrote to him to say that people on the outside can also feel low and we began a correspondence. But I had no intention of taking it further – he sent me three visiting orders before I agreed to visit him in prison.” Secondly, we were reminded that Theresa Robinson, the Grange Hill actress who married Jim Robinson of the Bridgewater Three, also met him while he was in prison.There are more than 1,400 prison visitors in England and Wales, half of whom are women, but there are no statistics as to how many end up marrying prisoners. Harry Fletcher, press officer for the National Association of Probation Officers, claims it is a “fairly frequent” occurrence: “The number of women who form these relationships is small but significant.. yet it is rare for men to fall for women on the inside. Perhaps it’s because that is frowned upon as an abuse of power.”What motivates an educated, middle-class woman to become a prison visitor in order to meet a murderer or rapist for a weekly chat in the first place? Such a liaison is the last thing in the world most women would contemplate. Are these women unconsciously attracted to violent men, “forbidden fruit”, or are they extremely virtuous, altruistic women?The formal procedure for prison visiting, established since 1901, allows anyone aged 21 to 70 to apply to the governor of their local prison to become a prison visitor. Simply fill in an application form (two references required) and then present yourself for a 30-minute vetting interview by the prison visitor liaison officer, who is usually the chaplain. “They query your motives and whether you are able to be `non-judgmental’, explains Alma McKenna, general secretary for the National Association of Prison Visitors (NAPV).