The Bookseller – News – Bang up Books: How one ex-prisoner launched scheme to send 150,000 books to UK prisons

An ex-prisoner who experienced the lack of access to books while serving his sentence has explained how one post on X (formerly Twitter) led him to launch a national scheme, which has now seen 150,000 books donated to prisons up and down the UK. Just last week, Chris Atkins and his team delivered another 1,000 books to prisons.

The founder of the prison book scheme Bang Up Books, which is run in partnership with the Ministry of Justice, is also now working on a new anthology of writing by prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families.

The founder experienced how “terribly underfunded” prisons had become after he was convicted of tax fraud and received a five year sentence. He spent two and a half of those years in custody. “Everything was decaying and falling apart and dysfunctional, and nothing more so than the library and the books that were there,” he said. 

He was released in 2019 and his book A Bit of a Stretch (Atlantic Books), in which he chronicles his experience in the UK prison system, was published in 2020, just as the pandemic started. He saw a post on X from Pentonville Prison asking for book donations, at a time when people inside the prison were “stuck in their cells”.

“I kind of dodged a bullet a bit, by getting out just before the pandemic,” he said, “I felt really bad for the people inside.”

As a documentary filmmaker and journalist, he knew a lot of other journalists and writers who could donate books, so he drove to their houses to collect them and dropped them off at Pentonville Prison. “It kind of snowballed from there,” Atkins said. With the support of others who were not working during the earlier days of the pandemic and had time to help drive books to various locations, he started delivering books to other prisons as well on an ad hoc basis.