Take it from an ex-con — the outrage over prison books is misplaced

When I was doing my time in HMP Standford Hill, a strange pair of heavily perfumed Korans and Bibles were delivered to one inmate, ostensibly to help him with his ‘studies in comparative religion’. As intended, the perfume threw the sniffer dogs off the scent. But a suspicious prison officer found a significant quantity of heroin stuck between the pages of these holy books. This was an example of ‘parcelling it,’ con-speak for getting drugs into jails.

So Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, has a point now that he is trying to restrict the supply of books into prisons. But not much of a point: such examples are real but rare. They have little to do with the current controversy, which was never designed to be either a crackdown on crack or an attack on prisoners’ rights to receive books. It is a limited effort to make life stricter on the inside and to look tougher from the outside.