A controversial ban on literary gifts to UK prison inmates is to stay according to a government minister.
A number of high profile authors, including Philip Pullman and Mark Haddon, have condemned the ban, accusing the government of removing books which can be sources of intellectual pleasure as well as literacy and rehabilitation aids.
However, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling defended the rules that prevented people from sending books to inmates, calling on prisoners to change their own behaviour, and not just spend their sentence “lying around watching television”.
In his article, Grayling seems to have conflated reading with laziness and watching television, and blames this behaviour for re-offending rates, which have not fallen in over a decade.
Prisons Minister Jeremy Wright has also called the restrictions on books being sent to inmates as “sensible” for prison security, and called on prisoners to earn their “creature comforts”.
