https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/05/a-bit-of-a-stretch-chris-atkins-review

An acclaimed documentary film-maker was given a five-year sentence for tax fraud. He details his time behind bars in a shocking, scathing, entertaining account

If you thought you knew how bad British prisons are, you haven’t read this book. Drugs, riots, suicides, squalor, overcrowding, understaffing, dangerous criminals let out early, minor offenders kept in too long or wrongly banged up in the first place; that’s only a fraction of the story. Chris Atkins’s journal of his time in HMP Wandsworth shows why conditions are so atrocious, with four Tory justice secretaries (Michael Gove, Liz Truss, David Lidington, David Gauke) coming and going during his stretch and none of them able to cope. It’s an inside story to make you weep at the incompetence, stupidity and viciousness of the current system.

As an acclaimed documentary film-maker, Atkins was an unlikely candidate for a five-year prison sentence. He ended up there after being found guilty of tax fraud – a scam not to enrich himself but to fund his film projects. He was convicted in June 2016, the day after the EU referendum result (“I can’t help feeling that my incarceration and Brexit are somehow mystically interlinked”). Though his accountant was the chief culprit and they weren’t the only ones in the industry diddling HMRC, Atkins has no complaints: “If I’d been on the jury, I’d probably have come to the same decision.” The toughest part of it was being separated from his infant son Kit.