Book Review: The Prison Doctor by Amanda Brown

Prisoners Exercising, Vincent Van Gogh (1890)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Evie Robinson reviews Amanda Brown’s book The Prison Doctor and examines whether we should be able to sympathise with criminals.

We, as a generation, are fascinated by true crime. Perhaps because it seems almost other-worldly, apart from our everyday lives when none of us could possibly be capable of cold-blooded murder. Or maybe it’s the scary fact that none of us really know the lengths we would go to in order to defend ourselves, or to protect those we love. Whatever the reason, it’s a genre of literature, film, and documentary television that has captivated our attention. 

It is shocking that the scariest and most disturbing crimes are those committed by seemingly ordinary, down-to-earth people. It is for this reason that reading Dr Amanda Brown’s The Prison Doctor, an account of her work as a prison GP, really struck me. Brown treats her patients as exactly that; patients. She refuses to question them about their crimes, or why they committed them, and spends her fifteen-minute appointments with the inmates discussing only their current ailments or health-related troubles. Yet even when trying to block out their criminal tendencies, Brown seems troubled by how she should react to her prisoner patients.

Brown sets the scene in her role as a GP at her own private practice in Buckinghamshire, where she has been for over twenty years of her working life, regularly seeing the same patients and relishing in their individual development and improvement. However, she recalls becoming increasingly disheartened by the new regulations for GP practices introduced by the government in April 2004, which she felt expected GPs to make money rather than make a difference to individual lives. Brown takes a leap of faith when she transfers from her small GP practice to working as a doctor in a youth detention centre. From this moment, she spends the rest of her medical career playing a whole different ball game. Working at Huntercombe prison and then Wormwood Scrubs (“The Scrubs” for short), Brown meets inmates ranging from cold-blooded killers to volatile and vulnerable teenagers, treating them for anything from a blister to an attempted suicide. 

When moving to Bronzefield prison, now the UK’s most high security female prison, the tone of the book begins to shift dramatically. Perhaps it is Brown’s own sex and experiences as a woman that lead her to become so emotionally attached to and involved with the women she treats. She certainly seems to be the most affected by the stories she hears at Bronzefield, being moved to tears by the heart-wrenchingly vulnerable women sat in front of her, begging for an increase in their dosage of medication to combat withdrawal symptoms from a life reliant on drugs to simply exist. 

Many of these women experienced trauma in their childhood or early teens, and subsequently became homeless and addicted to drugs. They tragically felt that prison was their only safe-haven, and so repeatedly offended in order to end up back inside. You can really feel Brown’s maternal side appear towards the end of the book as she sympathises deeply with these women, contributing to the profoundly emotional tone of the final pages. At the end, I was slightly disappointed not to hear more about Brown’s time in HMP Bronzefield, but was then thrilled when I discovered she was releasing a sequel in June 2020, entitled The Prison Doctor: Women Behind Bars.

What is most jarring about Brown’s book is the way it makes you feel about criminals. Usually, we are conditioned by the media to loathe any criminal we see, to view them as non-functioning parts of our society. But Brown imposes a different perspective on us, she treats her patients as human beings irrespective of their crimes. She treats them as people who are just as deserving of basic healthcare and a chance at changing their lives as those on the outside of prison walls. Although she rarely gives her own opinions on the efficiency of our prison system in achieving the aims of criminal sentencing, they are implicit in her work. 

Brown leaves us with an abundance of questions; has prison become merely a way of punishing people who are really in desperate need of help and guidance? Is it fair to place a woman who steals to feed her family in the same cell block as a woman who kills for the thrill of it? And most crucially for Amanda Brown, do prisoners deserve access to the benefits of modern healthcare; at what point, in the eyes of society, do they cease to be human?