Dame Anne Owers

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2011

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway is the former Chief Inspector of Prisons, Dame Anne Owers.

A long-time human rights campaigner, she's spent years immersing herself in the problems of people on the margins of society. During the time she was Chief Inspector, the prison population expanded hugely. "The thing that saddened me greatly is that our prisons became better places but they also became places that soaked up a lot of money and into which we put a lot of people. My view is a lot of that money could have been better spent doing things that stopped people getting there in the first place and therefore prevented there being victims of crime."

Record: Handel's Messiah Book: An Anthology of British poetry Luxury: A solar powered word processor

Producer: Isabel Sargent.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. The My cast away this week is Dame Anne Ours until recently the first female chief
0:39.7	inspector of prisons. A long time human rights campaigner, she has spent years immersing herself in the problems
0:46.2	of people on the margins, those fraught, tangled and tender areas of human existence,
0:51.8	where dysfunction and often bad luck come together.
0:55.0	Born into a coal mining community in the northeast, she went on to study at Cambridge,
1:00.0	lived for a time in Zambia, and worked on race relations in Brixton when the riots kicked off.
1:05.6	Prison mirrors society, she says, and she believes the principles of prison must be that we are trying
1:11.6	to rehabilitate them, and that's for the victims as well as for the benefit of the people in prison.
1:17.0	So, Anne-Ow is crime justice rehabilitation.
1:21.0	They are areas of contention and areas of high emotion. How do you keep your
1:26.7	professional head in amongst all of that? Are you somebody who can leave that in the professional area and go home and think about other things
1:34.5	or do you take it with you? I think to an extent you've got to be able to leave it
1:38.0	behind but you also need to kind of process it as well so my husband now will often would often of of things that I would need to talk about. But you do need to keep that distance clearly and
1:57.0	you won't be any good at what you're trying to do if you're totally absorbed in it.
2:02.0	And this idea, the premise of yours that all prisoners deserve rehabilitation.
2:07.3	Of course, you'll be aware that plenty people think most prisoners deserve to rot in jail.
2:11.9	They're not so bothered about the rehabilitation.
2:14.7	Of course there are people who quite rightly will never come out of prison, but the majority of the people
2:19.3	I saw in prison had come there through a route that was explicable and that you could potentially
	...

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