No Books Here

By AM Sunday, July 6, 2014

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This is Boko Haram, Grayling style … No education for unsuitable candidates, no money to search parcels, no mental release or privacy for prisoners confined in a dangerous and counterproductive environment - A.L. Kennedy, writer.

One of the most dignified aspects of prison life was the ability to read, which perhaps explains why the prison authorities during the protest years were keen to use literature deprivation as a central plank of punishment. It was a cruelly designed act of sensory deprivation aimed at psychologically assaulting the prisoner. In the punishment cells none were spared, whether on protest or not. ‘No books here’, the one permanent rule.  

No reading material, I found to be the most deadening part of protest life. Probably more than anything else in the armoury of prison management that was the big gun in what was a calculated soul destroying programme. It rankles to this day that great minds went to their graves denied great books. For a while there was access to religious magazines, such as Reality and from which a great deal of material for philosophical and moral reflection could be extracted. It was through them that we became aware of Camus and Sartre. A favourite was Communism and Religion by the Jesuit, Louis Watt. From them we gleaned more about Communism than religion. Eventually they too were prohibited, until all that remained was the bible. 

Once in 1978 when an unctuous member of the Board of Visitors doing a round of the cells stepped inside our rancid abode she asked had we any requests. Without the slightest expectation of a positive response, I suggested that some reading material would not go amiss. She told me I had the good book which was all I needed. I hated the sanctimonious cow instantly and responded that I would never read it. Previously I had flicked through its pages but after that point, never again. Driven to believing the stuff in that by the coercion of deprivation would surely be the collapse of what made us human. Amusingly, the irony of her recommending a violent book to people locked up for political violence was not lost on me. 

There was no escaping the craving. A recurring protest dream was of being in a library, running my hand along the spines of endless rows of books and selecting a big thick one. The pages when opened were in German. Even in sleep there was no respite from the gnawing consciousness of deprivation.

Not everybody associated with the prison management was of such a narrow mind. Freddie Chambers, a former cop I bumped into along the way during the course of a short sentence for a car offence, would make a point of bringing in paperbacks from his home, if he had them, and they weren’t available on the wing. Decent and humane, he had not the slightest interest in policing what prisoners read. Billy Gray, another former cop who staffed the republican wings in the 1980s, badgered me so much to read the Black Donnellys, I finally gave in and derived immense enjoyment from it.

When the blanket protest ended although not the protest per se, access to both books and the prison library was restored. Novels but not factual material were allowed to be sent in from outside provided they were in paperback form. The unexplained anomaly was that factual material could be obtained via the prison library. The screws who worked there would bring their van to the block once a fortnight and roll their shelves on wheels into the classroom. They seemed to have a genuine interest in books and went to considerable lengths to access a book once requested. I don’t recall them never being able to get what I had asked for. I often felt that working in the library would be a worthwhile prison job.

So edifying was the experience of reading that it struck me as a throwback to darker days on learning that the former British Labour Party MP Denis MacShane, should have his access to books limited while he was in Belmarsh Prison serving a short stretch for some expenses transgression. Literature was not banned altogether but heavily curtailed by the more repressive regime initiated by the British Minister of Justice (pronounced with a sharp Orwellian twang helps improve our understanding of the term immensely) Chris Grayling. Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform explained:

New rules introduced by the justice secretary ban anyone sending in books to prisoners. From now on, any man, woman or child in prison will not be able to receive a book from outside. This is part of an increasingly irrational punishment regime orchestrated by Chris Grayling that grabs headlines but restricts education or rehabilitation.

The real purpose reveals itself in the government explanation given: 'good behavior is incentivized, and bad behavior is challenged with loss of incentives'. In other words the punitive approach crafted to appeal to the hangers and floggers of the Tory right.

The writer Philip Pullmann summed matters up:

It comes from the mind of a man with the outlook of the sort of school bully who is indulged and favoured by the teachers, who can see perfectly well how noxious his behaviour is, but allow it to continue on the grounds that at least he's keeping order. Any government worth having would countermand this loathsome and revolting decision at once, sack the man responsible, and withdraw the whip from him.

Withdraw the whip surely before the medieval throwback decides to flay prisoners with it.

A campaign has been launched to force a climb down by Grayling and the Tory Taliban, with many writers leading their shoulder to the wheel and an online petition has been attracting many signatures.

One small step ... from book banning to book burning.