Prisons are in crisis – overcrowding, understaffing, violence, drugs – yet thanks to unsung saints and heroes among the staff and volunteers, spaces are being created where quiet wonders are worked

In the mid 1990s, it seemed as if almost all my friends joined reading groups. They’d agree on some literary humdinger – Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace – then gather in one another’s kitchens and discuss the books over supper. So when, towards the end of the decade, two academics at the University of Roehampton, Sarah Turvey and Jenny Hartley, conducted some research, they found that the benefits of these groups were not just literary and intellectual but psychological. They built communities; they eased loneliness. If this is what they were doing for the middle classes, they wondered, how much more might they benefit offenders, male and female, serving lengthy prison sentences up and down the United Kingdom?

“Getting into prisons is much harder than getting out of them,” says Sarah. Today there are roughly 51 reading groups in 42 prisons, but when Prison Reading Groups began 20 years ago there were just two, one in HMP Coldingley in Surrey and one in HMP Bullingdon in Oxfordshire. Diminutive but determined, Sarah was insistent from the start on two principles. First, the groups must be purely voluntary: “For so many prisoners, formal, compulsory education is associated with failure, so they come to these groups only if they want to. We have no certificates, no tests, no right and wrong. If they want to say, ‘I’d rather eat my eyeballs than reread On Chesil Beach,’ that’s fine.” Secondly, it must be the prisoners who choose which books they want to read: “Anyone can suggest anything.” Books are provided for them by the charity Give A Book, under whose umbrella PRG now operates.