Books in prisons: nasty party – the sequel

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/25/books-in-prisons-nasty-party

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The hoodie-hugging Tory party with a faith in rehabilitation has gone the way of the greenest government ever, lost in an anxious populism where the justice secretary himself chooses what books are appropriate for inmates to read. Deciding whether to permit Fifty Shades of Grey was the only big debate he has had about prison libraries, Chris Grayling claimed in one of a series of angry blogs written since the Howard League for Penal Reform's chief executive, Frances Crook, lit the blue touch paper on Sunday with an article protesting at restrictions on books for prisoners.

Mr Grayling, perhaps riled by accounts in some newspapers describing prisons so cushy that people wanted to break into them, took the bizarre decision to concentrate control of privileges in Whitehall, even over what titles prison libraries can stock and the access prisoners have to them. It was all folded into a new incentives and earned-privileges regime, which first came to public attention soon after it was introduced last November, when it emerged that children could no longer send so much as a Christmas card to a jailed parent. And now it has provoked a full-scale row that has united a swath of political opinion against Mr Grayling. The nasty party may never have looked nastier.

The facts, filleted from Mr Grayling's blogs over the past 24 hours, are these: there is no ban on books. However, the new, centralised privileges scheme bans parcels, including those containing books, because parcels might be used by prisoners to get things they would otherwise only be entitled to as a privilege. Prisoners can indeed have up to 12 books in their cells at any one time, but that assumes that the library – supplied by the hard-pressed local authority – has books the prisoner wants to read, and that going to the library is possible when all prisons are doing more with less, and overcrowding is so chronic that it is normal for inmates to spend 22 hours a day in their cell.

Mr Grayling's retort is that prisoners can buy their own books. But that depends on work being available and books affordable. Average pay is around £10 a week. Until the introduction of the new regime, prison governors decided who could receive parcels on an individual basis. Devolving that power back to them would reduce the logistical dilemma of searching every parcel sent to 85,000 prisoners, and could easily be incorporated into the privileges regime. But the justice secretary, usually a nimble defender of even the most contentious polices, is so rattled that he has even denounced the Howard League, whose roots lie in the 18th-century search for a humane penal system, as a leftwing pressure group. There is still time for him to calm down, acknowledge unintended consequences, and think again.