There’s an old saying, usually attributed to the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky: ‘the degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.’ Perhaps easier said than done, however Chris Atkins’s newly-published memoir A Bit of a Stretch makes for a good place to judge. This account of his nine months spent at HMP Wandsworth during ‘the worst prison crisis in history’ is in equal parts entertaining and shocking, and provides a valuable insight into the UK’s appallingly dysfunctional prison system.

A self-described ‘lefty middle-class film-maker’, Atkins enjoyed a reasonable amount of success making documentaries before his conviction for tax fraud in June 2016. His BAFTA-nominated 2007 film Taking Liberties criticised the erosion of civil freedoms under the Blair government, and featured interviews with the likes of Tony Benn and Boris Johnson. His second feature, 2009’s Starsuckers, looked at the treatment of celebrities by the British tabloids, and was screened to the Leveson Inquiry; but it had been financed through a ‘dodgy’ tax investment scheme, and on July 1^st 2016 Atkins was sentenced to five years starting at Wandsworth. This is where the diary begins. 

Wandsworth, the UK’s largest prison, is quickly shown to be nothing like the ‘holiday camps’ described by Chris Grayling. The prison is chaotic, overcrowded, and so understaffed that most wings are on a twenty-three-hour ‘bang-up’, with inmates locked in their cells all day except for one hour of exercise (which is invariably cancelled). Within the prison’s imposing Victorian structure is an even more archaic administrative system, with virtually all correspondence (including any complaints or requests made by inmates) being written out by hand on index cards or slips of paper and then lost. During this period, Wandsworth was one of the six so-called ‘reform prisons’: a short-lived scheme devised by David Cameron and Michael Gove which gave governors extensive new powers to set budgets and concoct new policies. But despite the name, this was less about reform and more about rebranding: prisoners became ‘men’ and riots became ‘disturbances’. One governor, whose wings are piled with rubbish and infested with rats, tells the men: ‘My vision is to appoint officers as Cleaning Champions, who will own the hygiene journey.’

Such appalling physical conditions and inert bureaucratic structures have an obvious detrimental effect on prisoners’ mental health. Whilst the Ministry of Justice publishes no statistics on the issue, Atkins writes that the number of inmates with a mental illness is ‘estimated at around 50%’. Many turn to spice, the highly-addictive synthetic form of marijuana which is ‘mostly undetectable by sniffer dogs’. Its debilitating effects are part of the appeal: one potent strain is called ‘Man Down’. The most vulnerable prisoners soon become caught in a vicious cycle of addiction and psychotic side-effects, and Atkins writes that ‘one in five addicts actually picked up their habit while serving their sentence, one of the many examples of how prison increases crime.’

Suicide and self-harm are rife within UK prisons. Atkins quotes MoJ statistics that show ‘self-inflicted deaths’ including suicide and unintentional death from self-harm ‘reached a record high in 2016: 119 inmates killed themselves, one every three days.’ Wandsworth is, according to Atkins, ‘a place almost structurally designed to make them take their own lives’. The most affecting story is that of the Lithuanian teenager Osvaldas Pagirys, who died in November 2016 whilst he was in Wandsworth on remand for stealing sweets. Pagirys was known to be suffering with ‘severe mental health problems’ and had been found with a noose around his neck five times in the three months before he died. But he was still moved to the segregation block, and on the day he died his cell’s emergency bell had gone unanswered for 37 minutes: by the time staff responded, Pagirys was unconscious. After the 2018 inquest into Pagirys’s death, the Probation and Prisons Ombudsman stated that Wandsworth staff had not ‘taken adequate action to tackle his deteriorating mental health, and had failed to manage his suicide risk’. 

One of the few support services available in prisons is the ‘Listeners’ scheme run by the Samaritans, which aims to reduce suicide and self-harm through a ‘peer support service’. Prisoners are trained by Samaritans volunteers to become Listeners who ‘provide confidential emotional support to their fellow inmates who are struggling to cope.’ When Atkins becomes a Listener he is instantly shocked by the prevalence of mental health problems amongst his contacts: the majority ‘have at least one mental illness’. Listening is clearly a difficult job, and Atkins himself witnessed so much self-harm that he became ‘completely desensitised to it’.

This mental illness epidemic in prisons is exacerbated by poor literacy levels, which among other things prevents any meaningful communication between inmates or with staff. Atkins writes that ‘Half the inmates in British jails are functionally illiterate, and up to 30% have learning difficulties.’ Wandsworth has plenty of classrooms, but almost all are empty during the constant bang-up. Illiteracy also has other negative effects: being unable to enjoy reading or the many benefits of education, of course, but also being unable to complete basic tasks such as filling out application forms or choosing from the dinner menu. It also contributes to re-offending rates, as prisoners are less able to re-enter society and find meaningful work. The UK has ‘the worst re-offending rate in Europe, with 48% of ex-prisoners being re-convicted within one year of release.’ If that weren’t an obvious moral failing, this costs the UK £15 billion a year, three times the entire prison budget. 

The book finishes with a list of policy suggestions to reduce re-offending rates and the mental illness epidemic. Whilst this is by no means a ground-breaking theoretical work, Atkins’s recommendations are profound in their simplicity: increasing staff and digitising administrative procedures allows for more time and resources to be spent on improving mental health services and focusing on education and training. In Denmark, where the focus is on education, 27% of prisoners go on to re-offend, almost half the UK’s re-offender rate. The more reactionary members of the British public will find such reforms too cushy, but it would be the public who benefit the most from reducing re-offending. 

Socialists are generally divided into two camps: those who believe in prison abolition, and everyone else. But Atkins’s portrait of life in Wandsworth emphasises the very urgent need for prison reform in the UK. Whether you consider such reform to be a means to abolition or an end in itself, putting a stop to such unnecessary human misery must be a priority for our movement.