Send Chris Grayling books, urge campaigners against prison ban

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/30/send-chris-grayling-books-prison-ban-howard-league

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Campaigners fighting the ban on books being sent to prisoners are hoping to swamp justice secretary Chris Grayling in reading material – requesting that he send the books on to prison libraries.

The Howard League, which revealed in March that new ministry of justice rules were preventing prisoners from receiving books from outside, kicked off the latest strand in its campaign on Tuesday by sending a copy of Fyodor Dostoevesky's Crime and Punishment to Grayling. "[I] request that you send it on to a prison so that prisoners will be able to read it," wrote chief executive Frances Crook in an accompanying letter.

The book, copies of which were held up in parliament earlier this month by supporters of the campaign as Grayling faced questions from the justice select committee, is set to be one of many literary missives winging Grayling's way: the Howard League is urging supporters to join it in donating books to prison libraries via the justice secretary, with many already joining in. Rosemary Keenan, chief executive of the Catholic Children's Society, said on Twitter that she had sent in Jim Flegg's exploration of bird migration, Time to Fly; another supporter will be sending Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's vision of a future where books are burned. "Imagine the irony of my choice will be somewhat lost," tweeted @InspsWMFed.

Crook said that "what we didn't want to do is just send books to Chris Grayling – they'd end up in a box. So we're asking people to send them to Chris Grayling [asking that] he pass them on to prisons, or to give books to their MPs to give to Grayling to pass on to prisons. We don't want books wasted."

"It's symbolic," she said. "It's just keeping the pressure up over the summer."

Crook, in her letter to Grayling, presses the justice secretary to review the ban on sending books, which was introduced almost a year ago as part of the incentives and earned privileges changes. "You have indicated that you consider sending in books to be a security concern because they could be used to smuggle in drugs, although there has never been any evidence of this being the case," wrote Crook. "Both the Prison Governors Association and the Prison Officers Association have refuted the contention that there is a security issue with the sending in of books from reputable stores or from families."

The Howard League chief executive also pointed to recent inspections of prisons, which she said had "drawn attention to the increasingly limited access to libraries" for prisoners: in Pentonville, a report said that prisoners were often not escorted to the library because of staff shortages, while in Liverpool, the report said, library opening hours were "very restricted". "ln a young offending institution the HMI noted that only one young man had managed to get to the library in a month," said Crook. "We understand that due to budget cuts some prisons are running libraries themselves so that there is now no possibility of getting any book that is not held in the library on the local authority inter-library loan scheme."

She described books as a "lifeline", "at a time when prisons are having their budgets cut so that prisoners spend many long hours locked in cells and the suicide rate has doubled", and said that "restricting access to books and to learning is counter-productive and stifles education".

"We urge you to review the ban on sending books and other essentials to prisoners and I look forward to hearing which prison has benefited from our gift," wrote Crook in her letter to Grayling, dated 29 July.

The book mailing follows poetry readings from major literary names outside Pentonville prison in protest at the ban, and widespread denunciation from the literary community. The novelist Kathy Lette has gone so far as to name a character Chris Grayling in her new novel, sending him to prison where Lette has said he "goes mad from boredom" because he has no books.

The most recent jab at the ministry of justice comes from the Bookseller magazine, which has printed a satirical "modest proposal" – a nod to Jonathan Swift's solution for the Irish famine – purporting to be a leaked memo from one LTM Eatcake to the minister.

"Allowing those on our prison estate … to benefit freely from that which has to be bought by the majority of the non-criminal element of our society is fraught with political and economic error. We should therefore propose that all books entering the prison estate should be bought by prisoners; and/or acquired in exchange for other essential privileges, such as bedding," it runs, going on to defend the decision not to allow books into prisons because they could be used to smuggle drugs, because "books are much larger and more easily identifiable than drugs, which can often be very small indeed", and "through surveys undertaken at a number of HM Prisons we have discovered that staff are three times more capable of identifying books than drugs consignments".

The letter also points out that "a well-educated criminal class would find itself more capable of conceiving increasingly intricate villainous designs", and "a criminal fraternity finding itself au fait with the works of Conan Doyle, McDermid et al would surely soon deploy their new found knowledge to aspire to even more sophisticated acts of criminal enterprise".