Incompetent, inadequate, spiteful, indifferent - these are just a few of the words that come to mind when considering the management of UK prisons as described in Chris Atkins's journal, A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner. As the title explains, the book is an account of the author's experience in prison after being convicted of tax fraud. It's limited to the first 9 months of his sentence, which he spends in HMP Wandsworth. Urged on by some of his friends, he recorded his experience with the hope that his "unvarnished account will provide a strong argument for urgent prison reform".
The book is full of absurdities and on starting to read you're buoyed by the dark humour that Prisoner A8892DT finds in his ordeal. Who knew, for instance, that "the 75p tuna in brine has long been the basic unit of prison currency"? As time progresses tho' the number of catch-22 situations increases and there's a feeling that Atkins and his fellow prisoners are walking on quicksand and with each step the deeper they sink.
Most shocking is the issue of prisoner mental health, unsurprising since a lack of staff leads to inmates often being locked up in their cells for 23 hours a day. Some prisoners, like Atkins, are trained by the Samaritans to be Listeners, talking down others from self-harm and suicide.
At the end of the book there's more than "enough evidence that Wandsworth, and the prison system as a whole, is failing on an epic scale". Atkins uses his experience to suggest changes need to be made in a number of areas: mental health, officer numbers, offending behaviour courses, employment, education, Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentences, Incentives and Earned Privileges (IEP) system, telephones, bureaucracy, healthcare, and visits. It's such a long list of problems which unnecessarily penalise convicted criminals, when "what's frequently ignored is that deprivation of liberty is a punishment all by itself".
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