What prison taught me

00:00 05:45

Peter Hitchens has narrated this article for you to listen to.

I confess I never expected to see myself going to the lavatory on prime-time national TV. In fact, the expedition was a failure. Sharing a cell, especially with a young man with a record for GBH, is a very constipating experience. But when I accepted Shine TV’s proposal that I should submit to living alongside a large number of former prisoners, in a real but decommissioned jail, I had agreed to almost anything that might happen. Including that.

Dozens of cameras covered us the whole time from every angle. We wore microphones around our necks. It is impossible to guard your tongue the whole time, and so my exclamation of ‘at last!’ slipped out. And I can see why they used it. I wondered, during the whole four days I was inside Shrewsbury Prison, just how genuine the experience was. Sometimes it felt very genuine indeed.

There were dark corners where the cameras could not see and where I might easily have ‘fallen downstairs’

I confess here that I was truly afraid of what might happen. The building itself, with its low arched doorways and narrow tunnel-like cells, oppresses the spirit and encourages miserable, lonely thoughts. Cunningly, the film-makers refused – to begin with – to let me have the novel and the history book I had brought with me, though they allowed me my Prayer Book and Bible. The First Book of Kings has much to recommend it, as do the 39 Articles and the Forms of Prayer to Be Used at Sea, but they’re no substitute for history or popular fiction, and I was left to draw on my imagination quite a bit. It did not always take me where I wished to go.