Oliver Letwin sent to jail to see 'life on the other side'
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Your support makes all the difference.Oliver Letwin, the head of the Conservative's policy review, is to go inside the high security Belmarsh prison, which has housed a number of suspected terrorists, to see what "life is like on the other side of the fence".
Mr Letwin, educated at Eton and Cambridge, is setting a week aside in his diary next month to experience mentoring work for the charity Belief. Belmarsh, a modern prison in south London, has a capacity of 915 prisoners, with most forced to share cells.
Mr Letwin, who will spend four days doing charity work in March, had a brush with crime when two men conned their way into his house saying they wanted to use the lavatory. They stole his wallet, mobile phone and his wife's jewellery.
He visited Belmarsh when he was shadow Home Secretary but the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice, organisers of Inner City Challenge, said this would be "completely different".
His itinerary includes staying in an ex-offender care centre, joining a group support session for offenders preparing for release, and bricklaying, wallpaper hanging, and carpentry with 16- to 19-year-old offenders in Reading.
The charity said it wanted to ensure Mr Letwin encountered "the personal realities of life for those in and out of custodial sentencing".
Mr Letwin said: "It will be very interesting. This is not about trying to get some specific policy out of one visit. That would be naive. It is about making sure there is a collection of people in the party who have a serious feel for what the people - whose lives the Social Justice Centre are trying to lift out of the multiple traps - are going through.
The shadow Constitutional Affairs Secretary, Oliver Heald, will start a week's attachment to a 24-hour hostel for homeless men in Sheffield today. Other Conservative MPs doing attachments include Justine Greening, the MP for Putney, who will start a four-day stint working for the long-term jobless today.
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