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The UK doesn't have one prison system, it has three, and this book takes England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each on their own terms. It starts with a question most people never ask out loud: what's a prison actually for? Then it follows someone through the whole thing, from the van and the first night to the landing phone, the canteen sheet, the officers who have to bargain with the men they lock up, and the day the gate opens again, often with nowhere to go.
Along the way it gets into the stuff that rarely makes the news. Why prison pay has barely moved in twenty years, how a jar of coffee turns into wealth on a wing, why women and children end up in a system built for men, what the Maze and the hunger strikes did to Northern Ireland's prisons, and why the evidence that any of it reduces crime is thinner than anyone admits. Every case and person in it is real, and there's a table comparing the three systems, a glossary and a timeline at the back.
The UK doesn't have one prison system, it has three, and this book takes England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each on their own terms. It starts with a question most people never ask out loud: what's a prison actually for? Then it follows someone through the whole thing, from the van and the first night to the landing phone, the canteen sheet, the officers who have to bargain with the men they lock up, and the day the gate opens again, often with nowhere to go.
Along the way it gets into the stuff that rarely makes the news. Why prison pay has barely moved in twenty years, how a jar of coffee turns into wealth on a wing, why women and children end up in a system built for men, what the Maze and the hunger strikes did to Northern Ireland's prisons, and why the evidence that any of it reduces crime is thinner than anyone admits. Every case and person in it is real, and there's a table comparing the three systems, a glossary and a timeline at the back.