Life in his House or wing is not a laugh a minute like Porridge but then neither is

Life in his "House", or wing, is not a laugh a minute like Porridge, but then neither is it One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: 64 cages or cells are arranged in a circle, facing inwards On top are another three tiers of cages A guard in the middle of the circle can see into every cell. Lack of privacy is one problem, the noise level is another, boredom is a third.Despite the constant threat of violence, prisoners here are not much more at risk than on the streets where the majority come from. The diarist finds the local news, watched on his in-cell TV, to be particularly depressing: "Most of it about the activities of people who are on their way here." And he doesn't mean as visitors. The idea of reforming prisoners is comparatively recent; it looks as if it is now being forgotten.Stateville is at least a small advance on the 13th-century French nick known as an oubliette. Its name suggests that this is where they forgot about prisoners after locking them up and throwing away the key; in fact, the warders remembered them only too well, making an extortionate nightly charge, and there was neither key nor door, just a pit into which they were lowered.British prisons followed this financial example. Not only were debtors imprisoned but ordinary prisoners, being charged for their meals, were not released until they had settled their bills, even if found innocent. A full-page woodcut illustrating Sen McConville's chapter on "Local Justice" shows an inmate allowed out briefly from the Fleet prison in London to beg from the passing gentry.There was even a plan to harness the treadmill, which I once came across in a exhibition on early forms of transport.

The idea was for prisoners to turn it pointlessly, like hamsters in a cage. The wheel was connected to a device that pumped casks full of compressed air. These were to be stored at intervals along trunk routes and used as the fuel for a new generation of air-powered vehicles. The sales of air would have rapidly put the entire prison service into profit.

This environmentally correct device was never invented and the petrol engine came along instead.Yet it would be foolish to laugh too hard at the private-enterprise prison system; Michael Howard is still at large, doubtless dreaming of the penal equivalent of the student loan, to be paid back on release. And watch out for the Harriet Harman prison, in which governors are allowed to select their intake.If Robert Maxwell had not gone for his early morning dip, he would presumably be lording it over an open prison, buying up the phonecards of his fellow inmates and making a takeover bid for the cons' football team. Money talked even more loudly in the 19th-century prison, which in some ways was like a run-down hospital, without the medicine. The impoverished lived like tramps but the well-heeled inmate could book a decent cell and have gourmet meals and prostitutes sent in from outside. He could even wander round the nearby streets, if he paid for the services of an official minder.As a young teenager, Charles Dickens was sent out to work during the day and returned in the evening to the bosom of his family, in the debtors' prison. This ghastly experience made for the strongest theme in Little Dorrit, with Mr Dickens Senior as the institution's most respected and venerable inmate.

In Great Expectations the incredible "hulks", the prison ships moored off the Norfolk coast, cast a long shadow over the hero's childhood.A "writers' wing" could be filled with wordsmiths who personally researched life behind bars. John Bunyan wrote Grace Abounding, and had the inspiration for The Pilgrim's Progress, while in Bedford gaol, one of the few nicks to be constructed on a bridge. Oscar Wilde became a graduate of Reading Gaol, e e cummings was interned in France in 1917 and Robert Lowell served five months on charges of draft evasion during WW2. When still a young man, Jean Genet was an old lag.The literature of confinement is rich and rewarding, which is more than can be said for "The Literature of Confinement", W B Carnochan's chapter in the Oxford History.