Justice secretary Chris Grayling’s recent prison policy has caused uproar, meeting with almost universal criticism. If you’ve missed the fuss, Grayling has brought in a new policy which sets up a scheme of rewards and privileges for prisoners. A reasonable enough idea perhaps, except that it effectively bans friends from sending parcels to prisoners – the philosophy being that you can’t have what you haven’t earned. This, of course, includes book.

The heavyweights of the literary world, the likes of Salman Rushdie, Philip Pullman, and Carol Ann Duffy have thrown themselves into the row in protest, calling it ‘vindictive’ and ‘disgusting’, and printing a letter in the Telegraph reading ‘whilst we understand that prisons must be able to apply incentives to reward good behaviour by prisoners, we do not believe that education and reading should be part of that policy.

‘Books represent a lifeline behind bars, a way of nourishing the mind and filling the many hours that prisoners spend locked in their cells. In an environment with no internet access and only limited library facilities, books become all the more important.’

As one might imagine, shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan has done his bit, saying that if it wanted ‘to truly rehabilitate prisoners David Cameron’s government would be encouraging reading, not making it more difficult than it already is’. This is not just political scrapping. There is good evidence that Khan is right, and that a system which limits prisoners’ reading effectively shoots itself in the foot.

The evidence comes from an unlikely direction – Texas. With one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, and a state which still allows the death penalty, it seems an odd place to look when the matter of penal systems arises. Or does it? In such an environment, it becomes clear that prisons aren’t working, with judges seeing the same people coming round again and again. This is what kick-started a program called ‘Changing Lives Through Literature’ (CLTL); instead of prison, a six week reading course is offered.

The results are astonishing. One of the first experiments with the scheme, carried out by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, found that only 18% of those who completed the course reoffended, compared to the control group’s 42%. The cost per offender was only $500. In Britain, the reoffending rate is less drastic, 27%, but one does have to wonder whether we are pouring money into a system which is a deterrent only, with little focus on rehabilitation.

The CLTL scheme is of course fairly radical. But the benefits of reading to the cause of rehabilitation are becoming more and more widely recognised. In 2012, Brazil introduced a scheme whereby for each work of literature, science or philosophy read, an inmate reduces his or her sentence by four days. Part of the idea is simply to increase literacy levels. With over half of UK prisoners having a reading age of an eleven-year-old, and many illiterate altogether, it seems there is something for us to learn from this. Indeed, schemes by the Shannon Trust already promote this cause, teaching basic literacy to inmates.

In limiting access to reading material, the government is surely taking a step backwards, going against the tide of penal systems across the world. Sure, prisoners still have access to the limited prison libraries, and they can still buy books, with money earned through labour, but it is hard to imagine, with £10-15 per week, that even the most literary of inmates will realistically spend it this way. If a reward system is to be introduced, books, a tool for rehabilitation if ever there was one, should be set apart from it.

★★★★☆

The audience is introduced to Eric Love, a young offender so prolifically violent he has been transferred (starred up) to an adult prison, as he is stripped naked, bent over and subjected to an anal cavity search. Starred Up establishes its agenda early on, to provide an unflinching, uncensored portrait of life inside. In a week that saw widespread public outrage at the debacle of justice secretary Chris Grayling’s ban on books and other small gifts being sent to prisoners, a film that asks searching questions about the model of rehabilitation offered by the UK’s prison system feels incredibly relevant.

The film is an intensely close scrutiny of the physical and the psychological experience of incarceration, a closeness that evokes the claustrophobia of confinement. On the one hand, Starred Up captures the corporeality of prisons, alluding to Foucault, who saw imprisonment as entailing ‘an additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself”. This acute awareness of the body is present in the regulation of food, used as means of concealing drugs and other contraband, in the repression of sexuality,and above all, in the violence that, if not physically enacted, is present below the surface in virtually every scene. Eric’s sense of self has been entirely determined by his physical strength, as an institutionalized serial offender, failed by the care system, his body provides him with his only agency or means of self-expression. Ex-Skins alumnus Jack O’Connell exudes physicality and volatility in a performance that sees him slashing a fellow inmate with a makeshift knife, taking on guards in riot gear with a broken table-leg, and, at his most feral, savaging a guard’s scrotum with his teeth. Starred Up is not for the faint-hearted, but neither is a prison sentence.

However, despite these Kubrick-esque orgies of ultraviolence, it is often the silences that have the greatest power to disturb. The film’s minimal soundtrack and the recurrent sequences of prisoners alone in their cells, quiet and listless, tangibly suggest the horror of isolation. If this emphasis on alienation and monotony is sometimes at the expense of plot, we must again refer to Starred Up’s agenda, as explicitly stated by the film’s director David McKenzie: ‘We want the audience to feel like they’re in jail’. In one of the most devastating moments in the entire film, Eric, left alone for the first time in his new cell, contorts his face as if to scream, before quietly placing his head in his hands, as if acknowledging the futility of crying out to nothingness. The film is always concerned to root the explosive, sinewy displays of violence in trauma and vulnerability; on his first day in jail, standing alone in the exercise yard, Eric is more lost schoolboy than hardened criminal.

This psychological validity is also present in the nuanced portraits of the prisoners’ relationships. There is little of Shawshank Redemption’s cheerful, Hollywood prison camaraderie. All the relationships are dark, twisted, and thwarted by the environment in which they develop. The emotional breakthroughs in the group therapy sessions, where the prisoners are briefly allowed to feel “part of something”, are constantly threatened by outbreaks of verbal and physical aggression. These meetings move from a thoughtful meditation on “how prison fucks you up” to crude “your mum” insults and racial slurs in a breathless acceleration of pace that characterizes Starred Up’s stop-start trajectory. The veracity of these portraits was informed by the film’s writer, Jonathan Asser’s, own experiences as a voluntary counselor at HMP Wandsworth. As the film progresses, the most important relationship is that of Eric and Neville, a nod to the prison-drama trope of paternal relationships that are readily formed in a male-dominated cast. Indeed, the Governor’s suggestion that Neville should act as a father-figure to Eric is playfully literalized in the revelation that Neville is actually his estranged biological father. An Oedipal struggle ensues, culminating in a fight scene as brutal as any other, before an ultimate reconciliation which is perhaps the only weak, sentimental note of the entire film, after Neville saves Eric from a dramatic murder attempt staged as a suicide by the prison’s sinister Deputy Governor.

The ending of the film may be unsatisfying in the traditional sense; we leave Eric as abruptly as we were introduced to him. Starred Up’s strength lies, however, not in any conventional formulation of plot or drama, but in its direct interrogation of the archaic social values of a penal system in which our protagonist is denied therapy on the grounds that he is ‘too violent’ and in which psychological trauma and disorder are exacerbated rather than addressed. Starred Up, by providing a compelling portrait of a world always obscured from the view of mainstream society,challenges the assumption that any human being, even those who have committed the most socially abhorrent crimes, is beyond help and rehabilitation.

The one fresher’s fair mailing list I could never quite bring myself to unsubscribe from was the Society of Bibliophiles. It’s not just the fact that, with no auto-unsubscribe it would involve the slight embarrassment of actually emailing someone to tell them I’m not interested in the stuff they keep sending me. It’s also that, when it comes down to it, I am a bit of a bibliophile.

So when I found myself in Oxford this vac with not much work, and an email popped up inviting me to bibliophiles term-card printing event, using the Bod’s historic presses, I set aside a year and a half’s precedent of ignoring it, and dropped by.

The presses are kept in a large room in, or rather, behind, the Story Museum, a place I’d never noticed, halfway along Pembroke Street. What a fantastic space! It’s like walking, not quite back in time, but into a world you didn’t think existed, certainly not in central Oxford. A world of letterpress and inks, beautiful cast iron contraptions and ancient wooden ones, and, of course, the master printer himself.

There are five of us there to finish printing the term-cards; my first ever experience of the bibliophiles, I’m not sure whether this turnout is typical. Either way, no one seems perturbed. One side of the term cards is left to do, and the type-block, called the forme, is set in the press, ready for action. The block is made up of individual pieces, known in the trade as ‘sorts’, each one a letter, painstakingly put together in a frame, spaced with blanks, and screwed tight. Because it reads backwards it’s apparently notoriously difficult, when setting the type, to remember that what looks like a ‘b’ is actually a ‘d’; the expression “mind your p’s and q’s” originates from the printing trade. This is not the only idiom to arise from printing; it is essential to have enough ‘sorts’ to finish a page of text, thus ‘to be out of sorts’.

We share out the work; two of us roll red and black ink into the block, another fits the paper onto a hinged board, and another brings  the paper down onto the inked block, rolls it under the press, and pulls it tight for a few seconds with a large wooden lever. The result is stunning – a perfect print, in strong red and black, ready to be cut, folded and sent out. It occurs to me how incredibly patient Paul, the master printer is – to watch five people clumsily muddle around with something that takes seven years in apprenticeship to learn (yes, seven), must be incredibly frustrating.

The process takes a couple of hours, and we get through sixty cards. It is a real labour of love on the part of the bibliophiles. But the result is, without getting too pseudy, a work of art. The slight indentation of the paper, the even slighter wonkyness of the odd letter, the crisp, yet not always perfect line, make the bibliophile’s term card unbeatably beautiful. I suppose one could compare it to an old brick house and a new one – the slight imperfections lend a certain character to the old, in contrast with the perfectly aligned, dead looking new. This is the difference – hand printed type ‘lives’, leaps off the page, and captures you, in a sense that digital printing, in its sterile perfection, can never hope to do.

Apparently the presses are now known as the Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop – if an opportunity arises to go and try your hand at printing (classes are run for the English faculty in Michaelmas, apparently), I cannot recommend it enough.