A Bit of a Stretch - Prison Memoir

A Bit of a Stretch – a memoir of time in Wandsworth Prison by  Chris Atkins

My report to a reading group.

I finished the book last night and then had to try to get to sleep. With the momentum of the story gone. I felt as if I’d been turned inside out and all the soft inner bits were facing the world. I felt I’d been brought face to face with the dreadful side of humanity, with what we allow to happen and seem powerless to stop happening.

The awful truth is that the prison is the result of failure, not of any malevolent power.

The only malevolence was from dehumanized humans and the punitive obsessions of the general public. There is incompetence galore and helplessness galore. Where do you start fixing things in a place where everything is broken? With the showers perhaps? But someone, who should have been able to, said they would, and it didn’t happen. The level of inefficiency and incompetence is so high it has become its own creation, an unstoppable force. Everyone, from the Minister of Justice to the Governor to the Chaplain to the Guards seems unable to affect the steamroller of degradation. All a few strong individuals can do is preserve their own humanity and share it with others by busting through the idiocy when they get the chance.

It often felt as if it was the prisoners who were truly running the prison. In the sub-society they had created there was the worst, the self-harm, drug dependency and culture of fear, but also the best, like the Listeners who went into the worst situations to try to prevent suicide. “He is presenting,” Lunn says of the sex offender who repeatedly calls on the Listeners services only to complain about trivial, in prison terms, things. How many people in the world have that degree of education, insight and compassion in such circumstances?

Atkins quotes Dostoevsky: ‘the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons’. What Chris Atkins did for me was let me enter a prison.

I find it hard to give a score to a book that is personal experience. The writing standard is high, a difficult thing to achieve in the first person, present tense. The book is a valuable contribution. Enjoyable – well no! It went on too long – yes – but criticizing that feels pathetic given that he served the sentence, not me. Believable – completely, other sources on the inside of prisons corroborate that and so does the fact that many of the tropes we’ve ingested from American sources are absent, such as the rampant racism and sexual assaults.

So, eight out of ten, I think. It’s a gut reaction, in the end