I regret to say that until I was committed to prison 15 months ago, I had never even had a conversation about the plight of prisoners in UK jails. And so it was with a mixture of shame and relief that, on reading Terry Philpot’s article for Prisoners’ Sunday, “Doing the hardest time” (10 October), I realised that someone actually cared.The number of people incarcerated in this past 25 years, even as the number of prison officers has declined by about one third under the impact of government budget cuts, leading inevitably to cuts in education and health care provision in prisons, despite heroic attempts by staff to maintain civilised standards of care.The fastest-growing section of the prison population is the 50+ age range. In my prison, the number of older prison