Smoking-ban prisoners tear up Bible pages for cigarettes

 A Christian prisoner has complained that his fellow inmates are tearing up the Bible to make cigarettes.

Prisoners at HMP Garth, an 800-capacity, category B jail in Lancashire, are known to favour using pages from jail Bibles as the pages are “thin and plentiful”. Since the smoking ban came into force in the majority of UK prisons, 25g pouches of smuggled tobacco are selling for up to £150 – 25 times the price on the outside – and single roll-ups cost between £5 and £10.

Writing in the latest edition of Inside Time, a prisoners’ magazine, one unnamed inmate at Garth said that it was “offensive” that pages from jail Bibles were being used as cigarette papers.

He said: “When did people think it was OK to rip the Bible up and effectively burn it? This is not OK.”

He added: “Just for the record, I would feel exactly the same way if it was a Koran or the Torah, or indeed any holy book.”

Another prisoner wrote: “Now they have taken tobacco away, prisoners are making fags with bible paper, tea bags and scraping the nicotine off nicotine patches. So now, passive smoking is 100 times worse.”