David Shipley has narrated this article for you to listen to.
In a week when the Chief Inspector of Prisons published an Urgent Notification detailing the horrors of HMP Wandsworth, I found myself revisiting memories of being jailed there for the crime of fraud. Clanging doors, rattling chains, men screaming at night in anguish or despair or because their cellmate was assaulting them. No help coming. Emergencies unattended for far too long, and people dead as a result. No purpose, no hope, not even the possibility of redemption. Wandsworth is a miserable prison, one which does as much as possible to brutalise, punish and hurt those it jails, and nothing to heal or change them for the better.
The process does provide a different model, where victims and offenders recognise one another as people
My mind full of memories of pain, I then travelled to Nottingham to see James Graham’s new play, Punch, an adaptation of Jacob Dunne’s memoir, Right From Wrong.
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