Recommended Reading for Grayling
I cannot help but wonder if this Government is starting to do stupid things on purpose. They seem to have abandoned the art of carefully crafted spin and opted for the maxim that all publicity is good publicity. Grant Schapps' beer and bingo moment was ridiculous enough but as the Manics can testify, "we only want to get drunk" (MSP Design for Life).
Now Chris Grayling, the man least informed about the law and criminal justice matters, is doing his bit for idiocy by making the gift of books subject to a new system of reward and sanction in prisons. So if prisoners behave they can have books. Birthday cards are also banned by the way. This isn't just nonsensical and counter-productive; it is heartless and cruel.
It gets to a point when you have to question what a system is supposed to achieve. And more importantly what do we, the people who pay for it, want it to achieve? Do we want it to solve the problem or make it worse? Is it about individuals who have been convicted of doing the wrong thing turning their lives around, sorting their problems out and escaping the cycle of poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, joblessness, offending, prison, re-offending, prison and so on? Or is it simply as Jock Young argues simply "a gulag to maintain a winner-takes-all society" (Young in the Exclusive Society 1999).
We know literacy is a fundamental building brick of active citizenry, educational achievement and gainful employment. Books on prescription schemes are being launched up and down the country to support positive mental health through the enjoyment of books. There are now also suggestions that reading for pleasure has some kind of positive relationship with empathy.
For all these reasons and lots more, prisoners need to read more, not less! Books are not the same as video gaming consoles or chocolate. Books change lives, they broaden the mind and feed the soul. They challenge our assumptions and they extend our knowledge. They change who we are and the way we see the world. They also provide us with psychological space outside of our physical and time bound contexts. They often make the unbearable situations of life, a little more bearable. If all our prisoners were readers, then our prisons would be better places, as would the communities they return home to.
Family and work are two key factors in supporting former prisoners to not take up re-offending as soon they are released. Education is a massive factor in preventing offending in the first place. So let's take away their jobs, their books and their birthday cards from loved ones, and condemn them to a life of recidivism and ourselves to its effects.
My only advice to Lord Chancellor Grayling (who doesn't understand law, justice or the justice system) is to pick up a book and start reading. There are millions to choose from. To start, how about Jock Young's The Exclusive Society for his political education and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird for his deeply neglected soul?