HMIP report on Reading for Rehabilitation
Prisons Reading Groups and Give a Book projects are commended in a recent report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate for Prisons. After highly critical reviews of reading education in prisons in 2022 and 2023, Reading for Rehabilitation celebrates the best work going on, including our Books for First Nighters (BFFN) and Raising Readers initiatives.
The report stresses the importance of a whole prison reading culture and what’s needed to create it. The starting point is good leadership, which ensures that everyone in the prison takes responsibility for reading development. Interventions need to be joined up through a reading strategy that’s not a dead letter but a dynamic programme including family reading and reading for pleasure as well as formal phonics training.
Governors need to be seen promoting reading – in the library, at author events, on the wings and at award ceremonies. In PRG reading groups we’ve seen first-hand how this can motivate prisoners. As one member put it: ‘I’ve interacted with people I otherwise wouldn’t, including the Governor who read out a poem I wrote as part of book club.’
Officers too need to be part of the picture. And when they do step up, many discover the benefits in terms of safety on the wing and good relationships with prisoners. ‘Being able to facilitate the reading group has been one of the highlights of working in prison…I was always met with real enthusiasm when I unlocked for the sessions.’
The report insists that opportunities for reading need to be everywhere. It spot checks our Books for First Nighters project as a good resource for new arrivals who are often in greatest need of something to calm and ease anxiety: ‘Brilliant that I was able to get something to read the moment I was inside, completely distracted me.’
Family reading is the perfect way to combine connection and reading development for both children and their prisoner parents. The report cites Raising Readers as one of the projects that needs to be assured ‘visibility, status and priority, and valued as part of a rehabilitative culture’. Our feedback says it all: ‘My son loves his book and at one point he was sleeping with it. Every night when I rang home, we had to read it.’