4.4 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 31 October 1993
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons, Judge Stephen Tumim. He'll be talking to Sue Lawley about many of the controversial issues surrounding the prison service today, as well as about his own private passions for books and painting.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Jerusalem by Blake/Parry Book: Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne Luxury: Marble bust of Laurence Sterne
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0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a judge, now age 63 he led a distinguished but largely uneventful professional life |
0:36.1 | until six years ago. |
0:37.7 | He went to Oxford, was called to the bar and became a county court judge in London. |
0:41.9 | And then in 1987, he was asked if he'd take the job of |
0:45.1 | Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons. He did and has rarely been out of the |
0:49.8 | headline since. In a series of vivid and outspoken reports he's called attention to the inefficiencies and |
0:56.3 | squaller of some of our penal institutions. |
0:59.2 | He wants an end to what he's called the nasty humiliating nonsense of slopping out and to |
1:03.8 | enforced idleness. What's more he's been listened to and has brought closer |
1:08.4 | therefore the possibility of fundamental change in our prison system. He is Judge Stephen Tumim. |
1:14.8 | Your reports have been devastatingly frank over the years. You've called Brixton a |
1:19.8 | corrupting institution, Dartmouth or a duspin. Do you think the government got more than it bargained |
1:24.8 | for when it appointed you? |
1:25.8 | No, because I've also made quite a lot of favourable remarks about prisons and all I do is to try and tell the truth. I'm not setting myself up to make |
1:36.5 | devastating or critical or offensive remarks. No but did you make that a precondition |
1:40.8 | of accepting the job as it were that you could go where you liked and say what you liked, however unpalatable? |
1:47.0 | I was asked by Douglas Hurd, who was in the Home Secretary, to bring things out into the open. He didn't want it all covered up or hidden away and he |
1:56.7 | wanted an honest outside independent view of what was going on in the prisons because they are of necessity a closed |
2:05.6 | institutions and it's very difficult for a minister to know what's really |
2:09.1 | happening. But they were very much closed before that because of course pre- 1982 these reports on prisons were |
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