Hardback: In March 2013, Vicky Pryce was sentenced to eight months in prison for accepting her ex-husband's penalty points on her driving licence some ten years earlier.
After a very public trial, she was sent first to the notorious Holloway and then to East Sutton Park, an open prison in Kent.
Inside, she kept a diary documenting her views and experiences; from this diary, Prisonomics was born.
Faced with the realities of life behind bars and inspired by the stories of the women she met, Pryce began to research the injustices she found within the prison system.
In this informed and important critique, she draws upon her years of experience in economics to call for radical reform and seeks to change how we look at crime and punishment.
Prisonomics (2013) is not only a personal account of Pryce's experience in prison. It is also a compelling analysis of both the economic and the very human cost of keeping women behind bars.
As Pryce wrote in her Introduction (excerpts), "Combining my prison diary with various data sources and interviews with individuals and organisations engaged with the prison service or campaigns for penal reform, this book has tried to put as much evidence together as possible to show that in fact the system is broken and a major rethink needs to take place."
"It is absurd that as crime goes down we put more people in jail at a huge cost to society when money is tight and there is a public deficit to deal with. From a strictly economic and public expenditure point of view, the Ministry of Justice bangs too many up but delivers far fewer bangs for the taxpayer's buck than the equivalent ministries in better-run countries."
"Prison is the wrong sentence for a large number of offences. The women I met had rarely, if ever, caused serious damage to others and pose no threat to society. The custodial sentences mostly male judges enjoy imposing do not act as deterrents for crime; if anything they increase the chance of those released reoffending."
"There is also overwhelming evidence that the children of prisoners suffer from being separated from their parents, and those who lose contact entirely or end up in care have a much higher chance of offending themselves than children who stay close to their families, particularly, but not exclusively, to their mothers. The despair of many of the women I met in my brief stay in prison was heartbreaking."
"Throughout this book, I try to give some pointers on how money could be saved through different sentencing guidelines, more community service, more mental health and other support, by keeping families together or at least in touch with each other and, crucially for the economy as a whole, by providing more and better education in and out of prison to improve further chances of employment."
"But this book really belongs to the amazing women I met in Holloway and East Sutton Park."
About the author: Vicky Pryce is an economist and commentator. Following a number of positions in the banking and oil sectors, she worked as senior managing director at FTI Consulting; was the director general for economics at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS); was a partner and chief economist at KPMG; and was the joint head of the UK Government Economics Service. In 2000, she co-founded the Good Corporation to promote corporate social responsibility. Pryce is the author of several publications, including Greekonomics (2012) and Restarting Britain (2011). She lives in south London and has five children.
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