The survival secrets of solitaries

A white paper on crime famously described imprisonment as 'an expensive way of making bad people worse' (Home Office 1990: para. 2.7). The inevitable harms of incarceration include the entrenchment of community disadvantage, the sundering of family ties, and the limiting of human potential. And all of this comes at a huge financial cost: £35,000 per prisoner per year according to recent figures from the Ministry for Justice (2013: table 1). But prison does not destroy all of the people all of the time. Prisoners are resilient and even in the bleakest environments they find opportunities to mature and, occasionally, to flourish.