![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
”Where’s a place in the world for me?
How do I move on with my life?
I’ve done my time.”
Meet the women inside Britain’s biggest female-only prison. The ‘frequent flyers’. The lifers. And the mothers with their babies behind bars.
With her trademark insight and compassion, Dr Amanda Brown shares the most horrifying, heartbreaking tories of the women inside.
From drug addiction to child abuse, self-harm to sex work, the women in her care have been both perpetrators and victims of terrible crimes. But Amanda is doctor to them all.
Dr Amanda Brown is a GP who has previously worked in a youth detention centre and Wormwood Scrubs and currently works at Bronzefield. This compassionate sequel to THE PRISON DOCTOR focuses on her work at Bronzefield and provides an interesting insight into what drives some women to crime and the role of homelessness but the tone of the anecdotes never quite rings true and you never find out what happens to the women after their diagnoses.
I picked this up without realising that it is a sequel to THE PRISON DOCTOR. The good news is that you do not need to have read that book in order to follow this one, as Brown focuses purely on her role at Bronzefield. However I will be going back to read that earlier book as although she mentions how the 2005 change to GP contracts prompted her to leave general practice and she was recruited to work in the prison service, I wasn’t clear whether this necessitated additional training or challenges and wanted to know more.
Each chapter focuses on a particular crime or issue that is common for prisoners, e.g. addiction, violence at home and controlling relationships, homelessness and chaotic and dysfunctional childhoods. Brown writes with a huge amount of compassion. She clearly has a lot of empathy for her patients - even those convicted or terrible crimes - and even though she has frustrations with the prison system (her chapter describing her time working in the Substance Misuse Clinic and the stresses associated with the same shows the challenges without allocating blame) she is someone who wants to do the best for those in her care.
Where I had frustrations with the book is the lack of follow up as to what happened with some of the women she discusses. I understand that some of this will be due to confidentiality (although it appears that she has anonymised everyone in the book) but it is a shame that you get these snippets of people who come in with a problem (e.g. Helen who has to go for tests to see if she has a brain tumour and who is in Bronzefield with her daughter) and you never find out what happened to them. That takes away from some of the impact of those anecdotes and means you seldom get closure.
The other main issue I had with the book is that the voice of the women whose stories Brown shares doesn’t ring true. Part of this is the fact that Brown is clearly reconstructing these events from a distance and in some case, I suspect is amalgamating stories for the purposes of the book (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that). It is equally possible that I am coming at this from a place of middle class prejudice but the dialogue doesn’t ring true and as a result didn’t quite have the impact that they could have had.
That said Brown is good at showing what leads some women to end up in prison, the problem of drugs in prison and the cycle of homelessness and crime and she does it in a way that is not preachy or polemic. As a result it’s a book that held my interest from beginning to end and I would definitely go back and read THE PRISON DOCTOR on the strength of it.
The Verdict:
Dr Amanda Brown is a GP who has previously worked in a youth detention centre and Wormwood Scrubs and currently works at Bronzefield. This compassionate sequel to THE PRISON DOCTOR focuses on her work at Bronzefield and provides an interesting insight into what drives some women to crime and the role of homelessness but the tone of the anecdotes never quite rings true and you never find out what happens to the women after their diagnoses.
How do I move on with my life?
I’ve done my time.”
Meet the women inside Britain’s biggest female-only prison. The ‘frequent flyers’. The lifers. And the mothers with their babies behind bars.
With her trademark insight and compassion, Dr Amanda Brown shares the most horrifying, heartbreaking tories of the women inside.
From drug addiction to child abuse, self-harm to sex work, the women in her care have been both perpetrators and victims of terrible crimes. But Amanda is doctor to them all.
Dr Amanda Brown is a GP who has previously worked in a youth detention centre and Wormwood Scrubs and currently works at Bronzefield. This compassionate sequel to THE PRISON DOCTOR focuses on her work at Bronzefield and provides an interesting insight into what drives some women to crime and the role of homelessness but the tone of the anecdotes never quite rings true and you never find out what happens to the women after their diagnoses.
I picked this up without realising that it is a sequel to THE PRISON DOCTOR. The good news is that you do not need to have read that book in order to follow this one, as Brown focuses purely on her role at Bronzefield. However I will be going back to read that earlier book as although she mentions how the 2005 change to GP contracts prompted her to leave general practice and she was recruited to work in the prison service, I wasn’t clear whether this necessitated additional training or challenges and wanted to know more.
Each chapter focuses on a particular crime or issue that is common for prisoners, e.g. addiction, violence at home and controlling relationships, homelessness and chaotic and dysfunctional childhoods. Brown writes with a huge amount of compassion. She clearly has a lot of empathy for her patients - even those convicted or terrible crimes - and even though she has frustrations with the prison system (her chapter describing her time working in the Substance Misuse Clinic and the stresses associated with the same shows the challenges without allocating blame) she is someone who wants to do the best for those in her care.
Where I had frustrations with the book is the lack of follow up as to what happened with some of the women she discusses. I understand that some of this will be due to confidentiality (although it appears that she has anonymised everyone in the book) but it is a shame that you get these snippets of people who come in with a problem (e.g. Helen who has to go for tests to see if she has a brain tumour and who is in Bronzefield with her daughter) and you never find out what happened to them. That takes away from some of the impact of those anecdotes and means you seldom get closure.
The other main issue I had with the book is that the voice of the women whose stories Brown shares doesn’t ring true. Part of this is the fact that Brown is clearly reconstructing these events from a distance and in some case, I suspect is amalgamating stories for the purposes of the book (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that). It is equally possible that I am coming at this from a place of middle class prejudice but the dialogue doesn’t ring true and as a result didn’t quite have the impact that they could have had.
That said Brown is good at showing what leads some women to end up in prison, the problem of drugs in prison and the cycle of homelessness and crime and she does it in a way that is not preachy or polemic. As a result it’s a book that held my interest from beginning to end and I would definitely go back and read THE PRISON DOCTOR on the strength of it.
The Verdict:
Dr Amanda Brown is a GP who has previously worked in a youth detention centre and Wormwood Scrubs and currently works at Bronzefield. This compassionate sequel to THE PRISON DOCTOR focuses on her work at Bronzefield and provides an interesting insight into what drives some women to crime and the role of homelessness but the tone of the anecdotes never quite rings true and you never find out what happens to the women after their diagnoses.
