Prison is supposed to be the means by which a convicted criminal pays his or her debt to society. In reality, most of what prison entails is a corrosive, destructive, costly waste of time. Great news, then, that Vicky Pryce is writing a memoir covering the eight weeks she spent behind bars out of her original eight-month sentence for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Her time inside may have been relatively short, but it would have been long enough to give her a strong flavour of what imprisonment means for a woman in modern Britain.

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