Our prisons are in crisis, but there is a get-out-of-jail-free card

Our prisons are in crisis, but there is a get-out-of-jail-free card

The recession presents party leaders with a chance to break the cycle of despair, says Mary Riddell.



A young French-Arab convict goes to jail. He is naïve, illiterate and eager to stay out of trouble. Within weeks he has become a killer, doused in another man's blood, complicit in corruption and destined ultimately to control a violent and drug-ridden modern prison.

Jacques Audiard's film A Prophet opens in Britain this Friday. The highly praised thriller that prises open the locked doors of France's penal system has attracted millions of viewers in its homeland and provoked an outpouring of disgust. Nicolas Sarkozy has declared his country's prisons "a national disgrace".

The awkward truth facing cinema-goers on this side of the Channel is that British prisons, in some respects, make Audiard's closed hell look like Butlins. The fictional French prisoner has his own room, with a separate shower, while many British inmates sleep in bunk beds, two to a squalid cell.