A BIT OF A STRETCH CHRIS ATKINS

THE DIARIES OF A PRISONER

Atlantic, 336pp, £16.99

‘If you thought you knew how bad British prisons are, you haven’t read this book,’ Blake Morrison wrote in the Guardian. ‘Drugs, riots, suicides, squalor, overcrowding, understaffing, dangerous criminals let out early, minor offenders kept in too long or wrongly banged up in the first place; that’s only a fraction of the story.’

The acclaimed documentary film-maker Atkins was an unlikely candidate for a five-year prison sentence, but was in there for tax fraud. ‘The shock-horror of being a middle-class man in prison is well evoked,’ Libby Purves noted in the Times. Olivia Lichtenstein in the Daily

Mail found it ‘a highly readable and thought-provoking account .... Alongside the picaresque tale of our hero navigating prison life runs the darker story of the ineptitude of the penal system: a rotting, archaic machine held hostage to staff shortages, impenetrable bureaucracy and unforgivable ineptitude.’

‘Chris Atkins’s powerful memoir of his time in HMP Wandsworth is a dispassionate record of the grinding down of the human soul, deliberate hopelessness, insane and moribund bureaucracy, the whims of bullying guards,’ Roger Lewis concurred in the Telegraph.

Yet, as Lichtenstein attested, ‘The book teems with larger than life characters’ and contains ‘many lively and alarming anecdotes’. Alexander Larman in the Critic agreed the ‘anecdotes are hilarious ... there is a wealth of gallows humour amongst his fellow inmates.’

Will Heaven in the Spectator applauded ‘a razor-sharp and darkly funny memoir that should be mandatory reading for justice ministers, ministry officials, Her Majesty’s inspectors, and anyone at all interested in the anarchy that is the UK prison system’.