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Jump to navigationJump to searchA Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner by Chris Atkins (view source)
Revision as of 08:56, 18 October 2020
, 08:56, 18 October 2020no edit summary
|reviewer=Sue Magee
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Very readable, thought-provoking and important. we We need better prisons. Honestly.
|rating=5
|buy=Yes
|website=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Atkins_(filmmaker)
|cover=183895015X
|aznuk=183895015X1838950176
|aznus=183895015X
}}
Why would teetotal Muslims join Alcoholics Annonymous? Well, it got them out of their cells for an hour. Why was there a rush to sign up for as many different religions as possible? For exactly the same reason.
The Prisons Minister, Lizz Liz Truss maintained that family ties are vital for prisoners' rehabilitation, but in the early stages of a sentence the visits were restricted to two visits of an hour's duration each month. Atkins had a four-year-old son and it was only thanks to the goodwill and foresight of his ex-girlfriend that he was able to maintain the relationship with Kit.
The book is darkly humorous. The thought that there were so many illegal mobile phones in the prison that Atkins wouldn't have been surprised to find a Phones4U popup in the servery left me giggling. There was also the problem which arose when Atkins paid more than one tin of tuna to get his clothes washed and was ranted at by another prisoner for causing a failure in Keynesian economics and price inflation.
If you'd like more on what it's really like in prison we can recommend [[The Little Book of Prison by Frankie Owens]].
{{amazontext|amazon=1838950176}}
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{{comment
|name=Peter
|verb=said
|comment=
The author was imprisoned for tax fraud. He makes no attempt to excuse his crime although he apparently gained very little financially from what he did. Forget what you might read in the tabloid press about how prisoners have it easy, here the day to day reality of life in HMP Wandsworth is brutally exposed. What I didn't expect was plenty of humour along the way, highly recommended.
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