INSIDE TIME

Inside Time - the national monthly newspaper for prisoners - was launched by New Bridge in December 1990. BBC Breakfast Time television showed the first issue being delivered to the cells at HMP Grendon in Buckinghamshire. For more than a decade Inside Time has been a voice for prisoners in British prisons, committed to providing information and comments that seeks to be informative, interesting and entertaining.

In January 2004, Inside Time became a separate subsidiary of New Bridge - in the form of a not for profit company limited by guarantee. It is run as a business but its profits are donated to the New Bridge Foundation. A Board of Directors was also appointed, with extensive and relevant experience of journalism, business and the Prison Service. The newspaper continues to thrive, with the introduction of more colour and a hugely popular 'Jailbreak' page with puzzles and prize competitions.

It has expanded from eight pages per issue to fourty-four, from four issues a year to twelve, and from 12,000 black and white copies per issue to 46,000 full colour copies. As Inside Time has grown in influence, it has expanded its prison readership to an estimated 50,000 per issue. It is distributed to every prison and special hospital in Britain.

Advertising revenue increased significantly during 2008 sufficient to enable the basic number of pages of each issue to be increased from 36 to 44.

Special supplements have included insidepoetry and insideeducation.

The extra space meant even more of the high quality and well written articles submitted by our regular prisoner writers and provided space for some of the new contributors.

Former prisoner Paul Sullivan joined the Inside Time team to work on insideinformation a project to expand the website, www.insidetime.org, pulling together all the help and advice organisations for prisoners and their families and valuable resettlement information. Input from Paul's wife and another former prisoner's family helped shape the content of the service and dictate exactly what was to be included. The launch of this massive website facility and volume 1 of the printed guidebook will take place during the year and distributed free of charge to prison libraries throughout the UK.

Over 6,600 items of mail from prisoners and other organisations had to be handled by the administration office during 2008. Articles, legal queries, poems and quiz entries from all over the UK plus readers overseas contributed. The website is getting up to 5,000 hits per day and provides worldwide free access to the pages of each issue.

'Can I thank all at Inside Time for such a really fantastic paper - even better now that it's monthly with more colour. Each issue is of massive value to prisoners and our families as it gives us a face and a voice. I find that when all seems lost, nowhere to go and applications failed,  you can turn to Inside Time and it never fails to give you that vital lift every prisoner needs, with something for everyone.

So from all the thousands of prisoners you've helped in the past, and will continue to do so in the future, please keep up the good work'.