This is the BBC.

Hello, I'm Kristi Young.

Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item

that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.

You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.

Music

My castaway this week is the criminologist, academic and author, Professor Phil Scraken.

The castaway is a place where people can be seen in the past, in custody, prison conditions and the treatment of children in the penal system are some of the subjects he's turned his attentions to,

but at the heart of much of his life and work has been the Hillsborough disaster.

For the families of the 96 football fans who died, justice has been a long time coming, and my guest, Relentless and meticulous quest for the truth, has been fundamental to our understanding of what really went wrong on that spring day back in 1989.

The rigor of his research and his academic credentials are faultless, but it's easy to believe that for him, Hillsborough is personal.

Born on the widow in Marseyside as a little tot he would sit on his dad's knee at matches, growing up to become a lifelong Liverpool supporter.

He says, I don't care about external validation, the only validation I would ever want is from the people to whom I owe an obligation and a responsibility.

And if I don't think I owe them that obligation, I shouldn't take the work on in the first place, and so welcome Professor Phil Scraken.

That sense of obligation then that you talked about there, of feeling that you shouldn't or that you simply can't walk away, that's a thread that seems to run through your life's work. Why do you feel it?

It came very early on, it came when I was in school, and I saw, you know, unferness in justice. One example stands out, was a day when all the girls were removed from assembly, and we all had to sit down, cross-legged on the floor, the boys.

And up on the stage there was the head teacher, the deputy head teacher, and the parish priest, and a wee boy was brought in undernourished, very poor.

And he was walked between two very tall teachers, male teachers, up onto the stage, and he was told that he'd been caught stealing from the local shop, or we were told, and that he was to be punished.

And they proceeded to cane him on his backside, cane him on both hands, and he walked out between the two teachers. And I sat there trembling, holding on to myself.

And as you walked past, there were tears just running down his cheeks, and I knew that was wrong. Immediately I knew that was authority completely wrong.

And all of this because he'd stolen what?

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