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Whenstone Cohen and I carried out some research in the maximum security wing of Durham

prison in the 1970s, we found that the most pressing concern among those who had been sentenced to very, very long periods of imprisonment,

members of the Richardson gang, accomplices in the great train robbery, was a fear of the

mental and physical deterioration which might affect them over the coming years.

And they had a shocking example close at hand.

There was an elderly fellow inmate who could now only stumble around the metal landings muttering to himself.

He was, in the words of another lifer doing nothing else but waiting for death.

Well, the latest statistics suggest an ever-increasing number of male prisoners who may not be similarly broken, but who realistically have to face the prospect of dying in jail.

The reasons of various, the longer prison sentences, the mandatory life sentences,

and the revival of formerly closed cases through DNA matching,

and of course the much publicized recent examples of historic

sexual abuse.

The implications of this trend for the prisons themselves were made clear to me when I met up

...