Prisoners need more help
More needs to be done to help prisoners, asserts a former Quaker prison chaplain in a new book
More needs to be done to help prisoners, asserts a former Quaker prison chaplain in a new book. Confessions of a Prison Chaplain, by Mary Brown, was published last week and deals with her experience of the criminal justice system. ‘One in three prisoners have been in care at some point and it just goes to show that more needs to be done to help people with their problems, rather than just locking them up,’ she writes.
With the book, Mary said that she wants ‘to publicise everything that is good and bad about the prison system’.
She believes that the element of Quaker worship most valuable to the prisoners who attended Meetings for Worship was the silence, which remains in short supply in British prisons. It was the silence that attracted a diverse group of prisoners, including Travellers who could be seen silently saying the rosary during Meetings, she explained.
‘We weren’t sure how the Meetings would be received but they loved them,’ she said.
Mary, of Stroud Meeting, served as a prison chaplain from 2000 until 2012. She previously taught in an open prison, and came to prison chaplaincy with a particular insight, having spent ten days in custody in 1960, as a CND protester.
The book covers a range of topics, from Christmas in prison to learning behind bars.
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