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Bang up Books: How one ex-prisoner launched scheme to send 150,000 books to UK prisons
An ex-prisoner who experienced the lack of access to books while serving his sentence has explained how one post on X (formerly Twitter) led him to launch a national scheme, which has now seen 150,000 books donated to prisons up and down the UK. Just last week, Chris Atkins and his team delivered another 1,000 books to prisons.
The founder of the prison book scheme Bang Up Books, which is run in partnership with the Ministry of Justice, is also now working on a new anthology of writing by prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families.
The founder experienced how "terribly underfunded" prisons had become after he was convicted of tax fraud and received a five year sentence. He spent two and a half of those years in custody. "Everything was decaying and falling apart and dysfunctional, and nothing more so than the library and the books that were there," he said.
He was released in 2019 and his book A Bit of a Stretch (Atlantic Books), in which he chronicles his experience in the UK prison system, was published in 2020, just as the pandemic started. He saw a post on X from Pentonville Prison asking for book donations, at a time when people inside the prison were "stuck in their cells".
"I kind of dodged a bullet a bit, by getting out just before the pandemic," he said, "I felt really bad for the people inside."
As a documentary filmmaker and journalist, he knew a lot of other journalists and writers who could donate books, so he drove to their houses to collect them and dropped them off at Pentonville Prison. "It kind of snowballed from there," Atkins said. With the support of others who were not working during the earlier days of the pandemic and had time to help drive books to various locations, he started delivering books to other prisons as well on an ad hoc basis.
The project was taken to a new scale when the Ministry of Justice reached out to him after seeing the work he was doing and offered to support his project by dealing with the distribution of the books. Lord James Timpson, the current minister for prisons, parole and probation, also helped Atkins by sending a van to drop off books at a prison. "When the Ministry of Justice got involved, we could really scale it up, because at that point we were just doing it very much in our spare time, driving to prison basically in and around London," Atkins said.
The founder runs the scheme with Laura Suggitt, who has worked for the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Justice and helped set up the back-end operation. Today, they deliver books to more than 100 prisons. "We’ve done over 150,000 books in four years, and they’re all new books donated from publishers and literary agents," he said. "We get industrial levels of books."
Curtis Brown, Greene & Heaton and the Wylie Agency have "been amazing" at donating books for the scheme, according to Atkins, who explained that the Times also donates children’s books for young visitors to read while they’re in waiting rooms. The support of authors was also key to scale the scheme; Deborah Moggach, Sathnam Sanghera, Anthony Horowitz and C J Sansom all "lent their support and also gave books and made calls to trigger more books".
Many of the books are placed in prison libraries, but during the pandemic, when these were closed, officers would hand out the books directly to the people inside the prison. Today, Atkins said that some of the books are also distributed to prison reading groups, while some are reserved for when people first arrive at the prison, which Atkins said can be "the most stressful part of the experience". He argued that having books available to read or browse at the prison "calms people down and distracts them".
The scheme has gotten "extraordinary" feedback from the people inside, one of whom has been doing advocacy work for the project since getting out of prison. "He was in Wandsworth during the pandemic, facing extradition to America," Atkins said. "He was very, very stressed, and the way he could cope with it was by reading, so he would read one of our books every day." This man "rediscovered reading" while he was in prison.
The ex-prisoner told Atkins: "I read 164 books in prison, which is more than I had in my whole life before that. I got really into fantasy novels. The Wheel of Time series [Orbit] were over 1,000 pages each, which ate up a lot of hours. When I was reading I was no longer inside."
The project has also been welcomed by those running the prisons. "The books are absolutely wonderful," one chaplain said in an email to Atkins shared with The Bookseller. "They are beautiful and have enormous range—the book trolleys could vie with a branch of Waterstones." In the message, the chaplain shared with Atkins the positive impact the books had on the lives of the people inside the prison. "It is hard to express how much relief they are giving but I look into endless cells where there is a pile of books on the counter and someone lying down reading," they said.
There is scope for the scheme to grow even more in years to come and Atkins encourages publishers and agents who want to donate books to get in touch, and said that this can be done anonymously.
