Since lockdown began, most of the inmates in Britain’s already overcrowded prisons have been banged up at least 23 hours a day. The number believed to have been infected with Covid-19 may be much higher than the published figure, and many prisoners are frightened and angry

On Tuesday 17 March, less than a week before the world turned upside down, Victoria Gray made one of her regular visits to HMP Wormwood Scrubs. She is the director of a charity, Give a Book, dedicated to promoting the pleasure of books “in the hardest places”, and once a month she meets up with a group in the Scrubs to chat about something they’ve all been reading. This time, it was A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines.

There were nine men in the group, and they rounded off their time together with Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers”, and a bit of Macbeth – “which we were working our way through slowly but enthusiastically”. Lockdown was looming, but the men seemed unruffled: “So what’s the big fuss?” they said. Several weeks on, Victoria wonders how they’re coping now, “with no visits, no face-to-face education, no gym, no library and, of course, no internet”.

It is not easy to get a picture of what it’s like in prisons during the Covid-19 crisis because the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) rules that no one employed in a prison, whether officer, chaplain or cook, should talk to the press without permission. Jonathan Aitken is one of the few who refuse to be cowed by what he calls this “Stalinist censorship”. Having himself served seven months for fraud in 1999, he is now ordained as a priest in the Church of England and a voluntary chaplain at HMP Pentonville, and he talks openly about how frightened the men are – “they say, ‘I’m going to die and be forgotten’” – and how the wings are bristling with rodents. There’s a great demand for rosaries, he says.