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"This is an important new contribution, examining how a decade of austerity policy has impeded the governance and delivery of healthcare in English prisons. Drawing on detailed health statistics, interviews with key stakeholders, and official publications, the author unravels the complex relationships between economics, prison management, and the decline in health and safety in prisons since 2010."

Professor Alison Liebling, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

"How has it come to this? The prisons crisis is most acute in the prison healthcare system and this author uses that focus to argue that the crisis is a consequence of an ideologically constructed austerity programme. Based on interviews with 87 policy makers and ranging across sociological, legal, political and economic literature, Nasrul Ismail provides a sharp and distinctive analysis of the prisons crisis that should be on the reading list of everyone trying to understand the origins of the prisons crisis and the problems that beset prison healthcare."

Professor Nick Hardwick, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom

"Drawing on an impressively wide range of sources and inter-disciplinary approaches, Nasrul Ismail has provided us with an analysis which is both urgently needed and deeply grounded. By demonstrating the pernicious effects and roots of austerity on the governance and delivery of healthcare in prisons, this book provides critical insights into the ways in which care is fundamentally undermined by the structures for its delivery and governance. This book is essential reading not only for those seeking to understand healthcare systems in prisons, but how prisons operate more generally."

Dr Mary Rogan, Associate Professor, School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Austerity was a choice. When the global financial crisis hit, governments could decide how to respond. The historical evidence, especially FDR’s New Deal, argued strongly for a stimulus. Instead, in the UK, we saw a contraction of public spending. In this excellent forensic analysis, Nasrul Ismail reveals what this has meant for the prison system, whose occupants are so often the casualties of government failures.

Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

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