The Truth About Prison: Prisoners, Professionals and Families Speak Out

"Different to any other book on prison. Compelling and quite breath-taking in its scope of insights, giving a voice to the only people that really know" - Erwin James. If you ask people who've just left prison about their experiences of being inside, their responses are fascinating and often quite frightening. If you ask professionals - such as prison officers, governors, probation officers, psychologists and teachers - to talk truthfully about their work within prisons and the criminal justice system, and you guarantee them anonymity, their responses are also fascinating, but highly revealing too. And when you read these stories together, you notice threads and themes that not only tell stories of personal redemption and endurance, of fear and violence, but of an insular environment that hides many of its challenges and secrets from the public. Professionals are not allowed to speak to the press and would be disciplined or sacked for doing so. There are valid reasons for this and the tax-paying public should know the truth. Newspapers, computers and televisions bring us statistics and stories on an almost weekly basis: prisoners off their heads on drink and drugs; self-harm and suicide rates rising to a record high; an understaffed and underfunded prison service; a specialist team of counter-terrorism experts aimed at tackling extremism; mindless violence captured on contraband mobile phones; inmates taking over whole wings during riots. How has government policy impacted upon all those affected? Are criminals leaving as better people, less likely to commit crime? What's the difference between high security, local and young offender prisons? Hundreds of terrorists have been imprisoned in the past decade -what affect does this have upon the prison population? Are psychologists, probation officers and teachers helping rehabilitate vulnerable and volatile criminals or simply ticking boxes? What is the effect on mothers, daughters and other family members when their loved ones are incarcerated? Do prisons actually work? And what kind of future are we heading towards?