‘In the media, prisons are always topical, but the portrayals are often prurient and voyeuristic, if not caricatured. In contrast to them is the carefully moderated voice of government reports and other such documents. Occupying a different ground altogether is the highly detailed picture of prison life presented in personal memoirs based on first-hand experience. A recent contribution to that comparatively rare field is Hilary Beauchamp’s Holloway Prison: An Inside Story, a remarkably frank account of the many years the author spent working inside one of Britain’s best-known prisons for women and young offenders……Her book may be described as a social realist, off-the-record account. She does not shy away from the subjective authenticity of her own voice, even when it exposes her own weaknesses and the frailties of the whole system…
…The book is of wider interest than its main thread of art in custody. For students of applied criminology, the contextual descriptions of the successive forms of prison management that accompanied Holloway’s transformation from a traditional gaol to a modern redbrick organisation are particularly revealing…
…With many of its pages taken up with the contradictory, unexpected events that Beauchamp witnessed – at once fascinating, bizarre and heart-wrenching – the book is an amalgam of personal interactions bound together by a graphic texture that conveys the look, feel, smell and sound of the prison – a place where every seemingly random noise translates into a meaning…
…it is the pen-portraits of the women who came into Holloway that give Beauchamp’s account its penetrating edge…’
* Excerpts taken from review in November 2010 edition of Current Issues in Criminal Justice, published by the Institute of Criminology, Sydney Law School.