An incomplete picture of life in our prisons fails to show the depth of suffering and cruelty which occur within them.

Finding Beauty Behind Bars:
A Climate Activist’s Enforced Retreat
TIM HEWES

(DARTON, LONGMAN & TODD, 160 PP, £12.99)
TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £11.69 • TEL 020 7799 4064

This was a hard book to review. As a former prisoner, I have a great deal of sympathy for anyone who, like the Revd Tim Hewes, spends time as an inmate in our cruel and neglectful prison system. My sympathy for Hewes is made even greater by the fact that he wasn’t jailed for a crime motivated by selfishness, greed or hate; he was imprisoned for his work as a climate activist, or “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance” as the charge sheet put it. Hewes and I both spent time in one of the worst prisons in the country: HMP Wandsworth (although I left the year before he arrived). So I was predisposed to like Tim, and his book. But I’m afraid it falls short of what it could have been.

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