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quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Assaults. Riots. Cell fires. Medical emergencies. Understaffed wings. Suicides, Hooch. Weapons. It’s all in a week’s work at HMP Parkhurst.
After 28 years working as a prison officer, with 22 years at HMP Parkhurst, one of Britain’s most high security prisons. David Berridge has had to deal with it all: serial killers and gangsters, terrorists and sex offenders, psychopaths and addicts.
Thrown in at the deep end, David quickly had to work out how to deal with the most cunning and volatile of prisoners, and learn how to avoid their many scams.
Inside Parkhurst is his raw, uncompromising look at what really goes on behind the massive walls and menacing gates.
Both horrifying and hilarious, David’s diaries will shock and entertain in equal measure.
David Berridge worked as a prison officer at Parkhurst and its sister site Albany for 28 years between 1992 and 2019. This book, based on notes that he took as part of his job, paints a bleak picture of a tough job dealing with violent and manipulative men but also men who are suicidal. While strong on the job, I wanted to know more about Berridge, who he is, what drives him, and how the service can be improved to give it a human aspect.
In the interests of disclosure, I picked this up having browsed it in a bookshop because at the end of the book Berridge mentions the impact that Carillion’s insolvency had on the prison service. I worked at Carillion and the prisons division was the only one where we were counselled against doing site visits due to the tough conditions there, with one of my colleagues telling me how bleak things were. I therefore wanted to get more of an idea from an insider of what prison is like.
Berridge gives a bleak account of just how difficult it is to be a prison officer. For privacy reasons, he anonymises inmate names (although in the case of some of the prisoners he encountered from the information he gives it is pretty easy to guess who he is talking about) but he does give a warts and all portrayal of what officers run up against and at times it is very difficult reading. This is particularly the case in his description of self-harm incidents, some of which is stomach-churning both in terms of what the inmates do to themselves but also how officers react to that. I understand why Berridge has an emotional distance to what he has witnessed but I would like to have known more about the impact on him and how he came to terms with it and handled it on an emotional level.
Similarly, Berridge talks about prison officers who are clearly not up to the job - those who shirk requirements to work on wings or who abandon colleagues when inmates turn violent. However while he conveys his sense of contempt for those officers, he doesn’t talk about what he thinks the solution is. Equally, he describes what seems to be a very ‘blokey’ culture among the prison officers but later mentions working with female officers and I wanted to know what he thought about that.
Ultimately, this is one of those memoirs where all you get is the job rather than the author and I think for it to work you need the human, author element to it to take it to the next level. That’s a shame because I think Berridge is a good writer and this is clearly a role that he cared deeply about and took pride in so while you get a sense of his anger towards politicians and identifies issues with management structures within the prison system I wanted him to put more of himself and his solutions into it. As a result although this is an interesting book and definitely worth reading if you are interested in prisons, there is so much more that could be said that I think it doesn’t reach the level it could have done.
The Verdict:
David Berridge worked as a prison officer at Parkhurst and its sister site Albany for 28 years between 1992 and 2019. This book, based on notes that he took as part of his job, paints a bleak picture of a tough job dealing with violent and manipulative men but also men who are suicidal. While strong on the job, I wanted to know more about Berridge, who he is, what drives him, and how the service can be improved to give it a human aspect.
After 28 years working as a prison officer, with 22 years at HMP Parkhurst, one of Britain’s most high security prisons. David Berridge has had to deal with it all: serial killers and gangsters, terrorists and sex offenders, psychopaths and addicts.
Thrown in at the deep end, David quickly had to work out how to deal with the most cunning and volatile of prisoners, and learn how to avoid their many scams.
Inside Parkhurst is his raw, uncompromising look at what really goes on behind the massive walls and menacing gates.
David Berridge worked as a prison officer at Parkhurst and its sister site Albany for 28 years between 1992 and 2019. This book, based on notes that he took as part of his job, paints a bleak picture of a tough job dealing with violent and manipulative men but also men who are suicidal. While strong on the job, I wanted to know more about Berridge, who he is, what drives him, and how the service can be improved to give it a human aspect.
In the interests of disclosure, I picked this up having browsed it in a bookshop because at the end of the book Berridge mentions the impact that Carillion’s insolvency had on the prison service. I worked at Carillion and the prisons division was the only one where we were counselled against doing site visits due to the tough conditions there, with one of my colleagues telling me how bleak things were. I therefore wanted to get more of an idea from an insider of what prison is like.
Berridge gives a bleak account of just how difficult it is to be a prison officer. For privacy reasons, he anonymises inmate names (although in the case of some of the prisoners he encountered from the information he gives it is pretty easy to guess who he is talking about) but he does give a warts and all portrayal of what officers run up against and at times it is very difficult reading. This is particularly the case in his description of self-harm incidents, some of which is stomach-churning both in terms of what the inmates do to themselves but also how officers react to that. I understand why Berridge has an emotional distance to what he has witnessed but I would like to have known more about the impact on him and how he came to terms with it and handled it on an emotional level.
Similarly, Berridge talks about prison officers who are clearly not up to the job - those who shirk requirements to work on wings or who abandon colleagues when inmates turn violent. However while he conveys his sense of contempt for those officers, he doesn’t talk about what he thinks the solution is. Equally, he describes what seems to be a very ‘blokey’ culture among the prison officers but later mentions working with female officers and I wanted to know what he thought about that.
Ultimately, this is one of those memoirs where all you get is the job rather than the author and I think for it to work you need the human, author element to it to take it to the next level. That’s a shame because I think Berridge is a good writer and this is clearly a role that he cared deeply about and took pride in so while you get a sense of his anger towards politicians and identifies issues with management structures within the prison system I wanted him to put more of himself and his solutions into it. As a result although this is an interesting book and definitely worth reading if you are interested in prisons, there is so much more that could be said that I think it doesn’t reach the level it could have done.
The Verdict:
David Berridge worked as a prison officer at Parkhurst and its sister site Albany for 28 years between 1992 and 2019. This book, based on notes that he took as part of his job, paints a bleak picture of a tough job dealing with violent and manipulative men but also men who are suicidal. While strong on the job, I wanted to know more about Berridge, who he is, what drives him, and how the service can be improved to give it a human aspect.
