The gatehouse at Wormwood Scrubs

The chapel of Wormwood Scrubs prison is a piece of unexpected beauty: Grade II listed, arched in the Romanesque style, its Portland stones white against the massive brick walls and crenellations of the rest of the Victorian site. It was drizzling steadily last night, and a hundred or so of us—visiting civilians, who had spent the last half-hour being carefully processed through the layers of security and thick-walled rooms required to enter any category B prison—stood outside it for a few minutes, waiting for the guards to count us, eyeing the metre-high rolls of barbed wire on every outside wall and fence around us.

We were there to watch the first night of a play organized by Only Connect, an arts company working with prisoners, ex-offenders and young people at risk of offending. Its founder, Danny Kruger, writes a monthly column for Prospect telling