It’s a true account of a disastrous climb in the South American Andes in which the two climbers face terrible choices, hit rock bottom, facing death, yet manage to survive. I would recommend giving prisoners Touching the Void by Joe Simpson. It is a book everyone concerned with this current debate should read when the most wretched of our fellow citizens, who have nothing, are now being told they have less than nothing. It describes his journey from a violent, criminal youth to the degradation, shame and remorse he experienced in Scotland’s most draconian prisons – and the redemption eventually delivered by literature and art in the special unit at Barlinnie. I would send Jimmy Boyle’s visceral autobiography, A Sense of Freedom. I’d send the Prison Trilogy by Pramoedya Ananta Toer – written in the head and remembered while on Buru prison island, but denied pen, paper and books. It is a masterly evocation of something much worse than prison: murderous enslavement for the crime of being born.

I would recommend Primo Levi’s If This is a Man.

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