Simon Shepherd worked in prisons throughout the 1990s. He has been Director of the Butler Trust since 2008, and
from 2018 to early 2019, as part of the ‘Good Book of Prisons Project’, visited every closed prison in England & Wales to highlight and
share the good work going on across the estate.
As I saw when I worked in prisons, and continue to see at the Butler Trust,
there’s a lot more to prisons than you see in the media, and it’s the Officers
who are central to all that’s good in our jails.
They’re the ones who lock people in their cells when that’s the last place they
want to be, and open them up again unsure what they might encounter; who
run to trouble when an alarm bell sounds, and put their bodies on the line if
they need to; who cut prisoners down when they try to hang themselves, and
worse, when they succeed – and it’s they who, more than anyone else, really
make a difference to the lives of the men and women in their care.
They are highly skilled public servants doing difficult, demanding, and often
dangerous work on all our behalves.