If you thought you knew how bad British prisons are, you haven’t read this book. Drugs, riots, suicides, squalor, overcrowding, understaffing, dangerous criminals let out early, minor offenders kept in too long or wrongly banged up in the first place; that’s only a fraction of the story ... It’s an inside story to make you weep at the incompetence, stupidity and viciousness of the current system ... Atkins admits that keeping his diary was personally helpful – a way of staying sane. It’s also, for all its knockabout humour, fantastically informative ... His epilogue lists the changes he’d introduce were he ever appointed justice secretary. They are humane, straightforward and make good sense. What are the chances of them being adopted by the current incumbent, Robert Buckland? As someone who once invested in a film partnership that HMRC investigated as a tax avoidance scheme, he and Atkins have some common ground. Let’s hope against hope they get together and that some of the reforms proposed here are implemented before conditions in our prisons get even worse.

There has been a good deal of excellent writing, in the last few years, about jail and African-American men ... Atkins’s book....is a different, less harrowing sort of volume. But it’s a good one. He’s a sensitive observer, sober but alert to wincing varieties of humor. He’s not one of those people who, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, 'had the experience but missed the meaning.' ... Atkins’s best writing is about what imprisonment does to one’s body and mind: the adrenaline surge of arrival in prison, the taste of shock in one’s mouth. He writes about the exhaustion prisoners feel, a vastly more extreme version of what many have felt during quarantine ... He spends nine months at Wandsworth before he is transferred to a minimum-security prison to serve the remainder of this time. His diary ends with his transfer. He writes that prison made him a better person; he’s less of a judgmental soul. A Bit of a Stretch may not be a major book, but it’s soulful indeed.

...a razor-sharp and darkly funny memoir that should be mandatory reading for justice ministers, ministry officials, Her Majesty’s inspectors, and anyone at all interested in the anarchy that is the UK prisons system. Behind bars, Atkins seems to have kept his sanity by turning an imaginary camera on himself ... Prison is not the Oxford-educated filmmaker’s natural habitat. But there are some funny and touching moments ... Does prison work? In a very narrow sense, just about. Despite what some campaigners claim, there is probably a link between the generally lower levels of crime today and the fact that the UK prison population has risen by 69 percent over the past 30 years. One gathers, in this case, that Atkins will not be scamming the taxman again anytime soon. Yet it is hard to avoid two conclusions when reading his lurid account of prison life. That, if a society is judged by how it treats criminals, we can hardly call ourselves civilized — and that the organization which manages this national scandal, the Ministry of Justice, isn’t up to the job.

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner gives a surreal, darkly funny, at times horrifying but always humane account of what it’s like to be locked up in a dysfunctional institution in which 50% of prisoners are functionally illiterate, mental ill health is rife and it’s easier to obtain spice, a synthetic version of cannabis, than paracetamol, let alone therapeutic support ... Atkins was released in December 2018, having completed his sentence in open prisons. Now, he says, he is a less judgmental man. Prison should be about loss of freedom and rehabilitation, not torment, fear, violence, addiction and loss of self-respect. He ends with recommendations. Among them are improved facilities for education, training and employment, secure psychiatric units for the mentally ill and upgraded conditions ... England and Wales have a prison population of 85,000, higher than any EU country. The reoffending rate is 48%: it is 27% in Denmark. The prison budget for 2018/19 was £4.56bn: the cost of reoffending is £15bn a year. Something isn’t working. So what’s the government’s solution? Longer sentences and 10,000 more prison places. Whether this is stupidity or vindictiveness at work, we all pay.

[Atkins is now one of that rare breed, a middle-class liberal who has seen the true horror of our penal system, so he has done the inevitable: written a book about it ... He wants his pacy memoir, which is imbued with a dark humour but is often heart-breaking, to make the case for penal reform. It does, but who will listen? ... A test of a prison memoir is whether its author is honest enough to have left in the parts that would make their mother wince. Atkins has...He does not shy away from the scatological, either ... This is yet another desperate cri de coeur to improve conditions in our prisons. All previous ones have been ignored, though. It is hard, then, to argue with Atkins’s conclusion: 'The British public has developed a sadistic mindset towards prisons, and fiercely resists any policies that actually rehabilitate offenders.'I do hope, though, that Buckland has been sent a copy.

There is a rich vein of humour here ... There is a rich vein of humour here ... There is a wealth of gallows humour amongst his fellow inmates ... Yet for every grim laugh, there are more moments of frustration or dreadful fear, and the greatest punishment of all for Atkins was being parted from his young son Kit ... It feels like an awkwardly tacked-on attempt to find a universal truth in his experiences, but A Bit Of A Stretch is mostly extremely readable and horribly revelatory. It rattles along, avoiding self-indulgent navel-gazing or the temptation to gloat at the relative good fortune that Atkins enjoyed. Most people will finish this book and feel a profound sense of relief that they have not had the misfortune to spend the best part of a year inside this medieval and barbaric system, breathing, 'There, but for the grace of God, go I.'

... lively ... The shock-horror of being a middle-class man in prison is well evoked ... Given he was sentenced in 2016, the book’s serious use is in its topicality ... He pinpoints known problems such as illiteracy and smuggled smartphones (everyone seemed to have one) and the absurdity of regulations