Life inside our prisons is gloomy, violent and humiliating. So why do around half of those who leave prison go back within a year? In his latest book, film-maker and former inmate Chris Atkins explains how our chaotic and inhumane system helps to create this bleak statistic.
In many incarceration stories, redemption comes through an individual who beats the institution against the odds. Andy Dufresne chisels his way through the walls of Shawshank prison. Viktor Frankl retains his appreciation for beauty despite being in a Nazi concentration camp. But in Time After Time the game is rigged. Those who aspire to change are defeated by the absurd logic of the system. Like Simon, whose licence conditions state that he isn’t allowed to be homeless, yet probation can’t offer him any accommodation. He’s in breach the moment he steps out of the prison gates. Another man, Ed, is given accommodation in a hostel with other people just out of prison, only for his probation officer to ask him: “Can you resist mixing with bad company?” Sex offenders are sent on a treatment programme even though a report finds it actually increases their chances of reoffending.
Atkins is never surprised by how inept and malevolent our system is. But sometimes the messy human stories and his moral message are in tension. When we meet Alex, a classical musician turned fraudster, Atkins argues that longer prison sentences don’t reduce reoffending. This is true for many types of crime, but Atkins doesn’t consider inconvenient evidence that suggests that financial criminals such as Alex, and indeed Atkins himself, are less likely to reoffend if they spend longer in prison. Here, Atkins’s analysis doesn’t get far enough beyond his generalised outrage at the system. The reader misses out on a more searching inquiry into the particulars of crime and punishment.
Atkins is in the tradition of prison writers such as Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer. Boys forged in the debating society of a private school, who as men find themselves in a jail cell and have something to say about the standards. Many prisoners dream of publishing their story in revenge, but these men actually can. They’ve got the social capital, and readers find them more relatable than black, Muslim or poor inmates. Atkins is self-aware about this. His encounters with those still trapped in their ordeal remind him how his socioeconomic safety net helped him to avoid reoffending. He confesses that he sometimes catches himself slipping into a cod-cockney accent when talking to ex-cons, gracefully accepting the awkwardness of being in a working-class culture while not being of it. One ex-prisoner Gavin says to him: “Not all of us can write a book.” Atkins wants to use his privilege for good, knowing that Gavin’s testimony is more likely to be believed because the reader hears it via him.
Atkins thinks that the ways to reduce crime are obvious and that we know what the solutions are already. Build social housing. Invest in education. A man called Marc is used to illustrate why we should be “less stick and more carrot”. Marc broke the cycle of reoffending since transferring to the UK’s only therapeutic jail, HMP Grendon. Those who stay there for more than 18 months have only a 20% probability of reoffending (a rate less than half of conventional prisons). Atkins wants to see Grendon’s success “modelled and replicated across the system”. Incentivise therapy by offering prisoners time off their sentence. This could be cost neutral when you consider the most dangerous inmates currently cost more than £100,000 per person each year.
Atkins’s attitude that almost every problem can be explained by the dumb cruelty of our institutions sometimes leaves him sounding complacent when talking about an issue that is complex. Grendon (which I know from having taught a writing class there) is a selective, peer-led institution of fewer than 250 people, where a key part of the philosophy is that inmate hierarchies are abolished and paedophiles and rapists mix with everybody else. How would Atkins expand that to thousands across multiple prisons without losing the therapeutic culture or creating a bloodbath? Prisoners must apply to Grendon and have a sincere and robust desire to change. Would therapy still be transformative if people did it with the motive of getting time off their sentence? Atkins doesn’t say. Time After Time is unrelenting on why the stick is bad, but it would be a more rewarding read if Atkins were less cursory about the carrot he dangles before us.
• Time After Time: Repeat Offenders – The Inside Stories by Chris Atkins is published by Atlantic (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• This article was amended on 2 October 2023. An earlier version incorrectly referred to an individual featured in the book as having served time in prison and questioned how the availability of drugs there might have affected his chance of rehabilitation. In fact, he has not been to prison; the book describes him being clean for nearly 20 years and as going on to run an addiction recovery service. The reviewer’s connection to HMP Grendon has also been added to the article.
