A story

A reading of

Enjoy!

Today, in the back pages of the internet, it was revealed that HMPPS had decided to roll out PAVA spray throughout the male closed prisons. At this time when staff relations with prisoners is at an all time high, this decision beggars belief.

A few of my favourite excerpts from De Profundis. The Letter written by Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas. De Profundis is an amazing letter, showing the machinations of his mind.

De Profundis is a letter written by Oscar Wilde over 3 months in 1897 to Lord Alfred Douglas.

This letter, written in 1898 from Paris was Oscar Wilde's last known letter to the Editor of the Daily Chronicle. In it he discuss the need for urgent reform in England's gaols. In it you will hear about Wandsworth prison having in cell lavatories. Such was the outcry from the neighbourhood that a prison should be built with in cell facilitries that they were soon removed.

Wilde was released from prison in May of 1897 and died in Paris some 3 years later. The average life expectancy of someone released from prison at this time was no more than 4 years.

The Ballad of Reading gaol was written by Oscar Wilde in 1897, a year after he left prison and was living in self-imposed exile in France.

Taken from the wonderful David Sedaris' book Squirrel Seeks Chimpunk

a short while after being reelased from prison Oscar Wilde writes to the Editor of the Daily Chronicle. In it he asks for the intervention of the newspaper in looking at the treatment of children in Prison and the treatment of those who are mentally ill. He decries the firing of an officer for giving a child a biscuit !

A Reading of the wonderful Desiderta originally written my Max Ehrman in 1927