I also have to declare an interest. I was Eoin McLennan-Murray's Deputy at Lewes from 2007-09, and was a Deputy Governor of two establishments over which Tom Murtagh was Area Manager. Eoin was a throwback to an era when potential Governors were recruited for their intelligence, iconoclasm, independence of thought, and capacity to innovate when promoted to be first in charge of a gaol. Unfortunately for Eoin, he was given his first command at a point when Governors began to be judged in a different way. Personal qualities and a strong moral character had become much less important than reaching artificial targets, passing audits with complicated weighted baselines, and not giving any ammunition to the Daily Mail or Philip Davies MP. Eoin is by nature a risk taker, and could not possibly fit in with a risk-averse Area Manager and a risk-averse Director General in Martin Narey. Eoin McLennan-Murray became a dinosaur in the era of corporate clones who believed that leadership and management were branches of applied science with measurable outcomes, rather than the high art of leading and managing both human beings being kept in captivity and the staff employed as their jailers. Tom Murtagh did me no harm and was helpful to me both professionally and personally, but then I was not a thorn in his side. A large chunk of this book is devoted to verbatim accounts of the Home Office Select Committee meetings into the Blantyre House Affair, and they do take a bit of wading through. Nevertheless, this is where Eoin finds his vindication, and the powerful friends that were needed to protect his survival in the service from whence he was able to rebuild his career. Normally in HMPPS once you have a target on your back, your career is normally finished and the equivalent of a Siberian Powers Station in HQ awaits, assuming you aren't sacked. Martin Narey and Tom Murtagh were both given a hard time by the MP's on the Committee, and when you have ploughed through the transcripts you will still be left wondering what was really going on behind Eoin McLennan-Murray's back. In his forward to Tom Murtagh's much earlier account of the Blantyre House Affair, the former Director General stated that he believed that Tom Murtagh had saved both his job and possibly that of the Minister. Hyperbole? There is no way of reconciling the two accounts. For myself, I am still left wondering why Eoin was pursued in such a vindictive way. I can only think that Eoin was the ideal person to be made an example of, in the quest to destroy the independence and professional standing of Prison Governors and replace them with nodding dogs. Blantyre House was an important staging post in that process. I can recall working for one Governor who saw no need to build a team, something that you would have thought was a core competence. Fortunately, there are still those fighting the good fight against the bureaucratization of a once-respected profession. As I have said, the book is sometimes hard going, but it is a rewarding and at times uplifting read.

First, I have to declare an interest, Eoin was married to my sister (who has sadly passed away) so I know the story from the family side. This book is an eyewitness account of events that took place when Eoin was governor of HMP Blantyre House, a prison that takes offenders towards the end of their sentence and aims to rehabilitate them into society. You can have a philosophical debate about the purpose of prisons, is it to: a) incarcerate dangerous individuals who can do harm to society, b) punish individuals for law breaking, c) ensure that when inmates have completed their sentence they do not re-offend, or d) some combination of the above? This question is at the heart of the book. The real villains of this story are not the inmates but Eoin's immediate superiors, his regional head and his boss, and they were inclined towards b) above and disinclined towards the modern regime that Blantyre ran which put an emphasis on c). The book also provides an important insight into management of the prison system. Ian Hislop editor of Private Eye picked up the story and the drama that unfolded was recorded in the magazine. I remember bumping into Eoin, my sister and their children walking to Tonbridge railway station on a sunny morning on their way to attend a parliamentary hearing on the events of this book – the drama of that hearing would make good television. I'll end with a statistic: one prison holds the record for the lowest re-offending rate in the UK's prison system, that was Blantyre under Eoin.

I know the author and have worked with him and some of the people mentioned in the book so I had/have a special interest. I didn't know the full story though and I found the book very interesting to read. Anyone with an interest in prisons will find this very interesting to read.