They say crime doesn't pay. But actually, it does - about £1.30 a day. When Lou Myx was sentenced to forty-four months for embezzlement, she entered prison with absolutely no idea what was waiting for her. What followed was a year inside two very different British women's prisons - first Bronzefield, then the open prison at East Sutton Park - living alongside murderers, fraudsters, drug smugglers and women whose lives were far more complicated than the crimes that had brought them there. Crime Doesn't Pay: A Year Living with Murderers, Fraudsters and Other Women is Lou's candid, sharply funny and deeply human account of what prison is really like once the courtroom doors close. There are fights, friendships, terrible underwear, questionable plumbing, baffling rules and extraordinary acts of ingenuity and kindness. There are moments of fear and loneliness, but also moments of such complete absurdity that sometimes the only possible response is to laugh. From arriving in handcuffs and discovering the indignity of a pee bag in a prison van on the M25, to navigating closed-prison life and eventually experiencing the strange freedoms and contradictions of an open prison, Lou takes the reader into a world most people will never see. But this is also a book about the women behind the offences. Without excusing crime or minimising its consequences, Lou looks beyond the headlines at friendship, family, ageing, identity, rehabilitation and what it means to start again when your old life has disappeared. Funny without being flippant, honest without asking for sympathy and compassionate without becoming sentimental, Crime Doesn't Pay is a very British prison memoir - and probably not the prison book you're expecting.