How reading can change prisoners' lives

Simon Short was 11 when he first started hanging around with gangs in his native Manchester. He could read and write but education, he says, was the last thing on his mind.

By 13, he was in a secure unit. Now 32, he has been in 22 different prisons, and it was in a category A prison - the most secure type in the UK classification system - that he started to study for a degree at the age of 23. In high-security prisons, intelligence, he realised, was respected much more than muscle. "I would try and get through two or three books a month. I jumped on lots of different topics, from foreign policy to business psychology. My appetite for knowledge is there, and when I was in prison, more so," says Short, who since his release in 2011 has run a company that works with former offenders.

Next week about 10,000 volunteers will give away some 250,000 books for World Book Night, as part of efforts to encourage the 35 per cent of the UK's adult population who don't read regularly to pick up a book. About 109 prisons and young offender institutions have applied for books from the list of 20 titles, with Street Cat Bob - an abridgment of James Bowen's bestselling A Street Cat Named Bob - and Blaine Harden's Escape from Camp 14 among the most popular titles.

"For a country with huge GDP and standing in the world, we do have a shocking literacy problem," says Rose Goddard of the Reading Agency, the charity that runs World Book Night. Nowhere is this more apparent than in prisons: the Reading Agency says more than half of the UK's 85,000-odd prisoner population would benefit from "literacy support". A so-called ban on books last year - when prisoners were prevented from receiving books by post - prompted a huge outcry, not least because of the perceived link between books, or at least education, and rehabilitation. The ban has since been lifted.

Statistics suggest a link between poor education and crime as well as recidivism. Forty two per cent of prisoners had been expelled or permanently excluded from school, according to the "Bromley Briefings", produced by the Prison Reform Trust, and people who reported having a qualification were less likely to be reconvicted in the year after release - 45 per cent compared with 60 per cent. There is also much anecdotal evidence about the importance of books in prison life.

"With a lot of young men we deal with, their world is very small, very closed," says Alan Smith, a reader development adviser for prison libraries in Staffordshire. "They have never been off the estate where they grew up. What reading does for them is open up their world."

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There are opportunities to learn in prison, with the total budget for adult learning in UK prisons put at £131m by the Ministry of Justice. A recent rise in learner numbers could be linked to the introduction of mandatory assessments of prisoners on arrival, it adds. Charities such as the Shannon Trust also help. Last year, it trained 2,200 prisoners to teach fellow inmates who cannot read. Within a few months, if learners study 20 minutes a day, five times a week, they can read simple texts, says David Ahern, the trust's chief executive.

Trained as a mentor by the trust, Short saw the harm caused by poor reading skills. Some prisoners are desperate to understand and reply to the letters their children send them. "I [could] see the sincerity in his eyes," says Short of one of his mentees. "He was a lot older than me . . . [He said:] 'I am doing 10 to 15 years, I need to be able to correspond with my child.'"

But the practicalities of teaching or reading in prisons can be difficult. "If you are padded out with Billy Badass and if he wants to watch Coronation Street and you want to read a book, you are not going to be able to concentrate," says Short. Cutbacks mean there are not always staff available to escort teachers to classrooms or prisoners from their cells. While the library was a chance to get away from "the bedlam of the wing", Short adds, "education and reading and books and access to library was always the first thing that went if there was ever an issue in the prison."

Some of the women whom Lesley Graham taught to read before her release last year couldn't even recognise the alphabet when they started. "They were reading the whole book at the end of five months," she recalls. "That is indescribable and very powerful." For these prisoners, learning to read was a cathartic experience; for those who learn enough eventually to pick up one of the books distributed on World Book Night, it could also be a life-changer. "There is no way you can do anything, apart from commit crime, I suppose, without reading," says Graham.

World Book Night will take place on April 23, worldbooknight.org

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