Like Nicolas Sarkozy, I knew I would be a disgraced former president going to prison. Okay, as the once co-president of my hospital’s junior doctors’ mess, perhaps my comparison is a bit grand. And where Sarkozy brought only a few books with him – including Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, perhaps manifesting an early release if his appeal is successful – I was bang to rights for drugs offences, so brought a suitcase full of books into the dock for my inevitable stretch.
Books and prisons have a strained relationship. I regularly get letters from people in prison complaining that their prison won’t let books in for fear of spice adulteration. But I also get requests from governors asking me to bring crates of books in during visits because the state won’t provide the means to address prison illiteracy.
In short, my advice to anyone going down: bring as many books as you can with you. Here are five which I think are perfect for helping to navigate our overcrowded prison system.
The Castle by Franz Kafka
It’s beyond cliche starting a list like this with Kafka. But when I arrived at HMP Altcourse with my literary suitcase, the officers told me, ‘You can only have three.’ My plans were thwarted by one of many unwrittenrules endemic in the prison estate. The Castle, written a century before my incarceration, perfectly reflected the mundane and crushing bureaucracy of prisons (which are often equally ancient). There’s a passage early on, where the protagonist, K, is awaiting on a reply to his letter to the castle for permission to do something, unsure if it was ever delivered, or is simply being ignored. This book will elicit immense sympathy from anyone who has ever been through our prison system.
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
If things go well, prison is incredibly boring: identikit furnishings in every cell that you’ll be confined to for most hours of the day. It’s no wonder that escapist fantasy novels fill the shelves of prison libraries. But like figuring out what ambiguous crime your cellmate is in for, Ishiguro is adroit here at drip feeding you information about this world, so you’re never sure if what you are reading is real or myth. Which is why, like a prison sentence, this book lodges in the back of your mind. It asks deep and fundamental questions about the role of collective human memory, and, pertinent to prisons and the ever-inflating sentences doled out to people filling them up, the price memory exacts on forgiveness.
Criminal by Tom Gash
It’s not just the furniture that is repetitive in prison. You start to see patterns, and the familiar life trajectories which lead people back inside the walls again and again. It’s no wonder so many ex-prisoners become criminologists and reformers. Criminal is the perfect place to start to understand why this is (top tip for authors: this book happened to be the only criminology book in the prison library, so get your books into prisons and you’ll be rewarded with lifelong fans). Gash spells out a compelling and well evidenced treatise on the more probable causes of crime than the usual narratives. He also offers solutions to them. You’d need to read the memoirs of former justice secretaries to understand why we fail to implement such obvious measures, but given we’ve had seven in the five years since my release, you’d need quite the stretch.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
Like many who go to prison, Sarkozy says he’ll write a book. With rich material to draw on, and minimal equipment requirements, there is a pulse of creative writing in prisons. It is supported almost entirely by volunteers and like many things prison, coverage is patchy. Saunders dissects the prose of short stories written by Russian authors in an entirely unpatronising way, making pedestalled names like Gogol or Turgenev unimposing – and reminding the reader that they, too, can write.
Normal People by Sally Rooney
This is a slight cheat, as I’m mainly referring to the TV show version I watched in my cell. But the book works, too. Prison, above all else, robs you of time with those you care about. It warps your perception of love and relationships, which are supplied only by Love Island, and, if you’re lucky, ITVBe. Normal People allowed me a glimpse of, well, normality. It reminded me of the affection we can show each other, which we struggle to do when in prison. Helping me to reflect on my own failed attempts at relationships, this book is the closest I got to crying in prison.
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