Lane Fox helps jail dads with reading

Martha Lane Fox, co-founder of Lastminute.com, has turned her considerable talents – not to mention fortune – to helping those detained at Her Majesty's pleasure. Her small grant-giving charity, Antigone, which she says was formed "partly to stop me spending all my money on shoes but mainly to champion unfashionable causes", has just financed a project called Storybook Dads, which she describes as "a breathtakingly simple idea which allows fathers in prison to record bedtime stories for their children".

In her weekend Financial Times diary, she wrote: "This project has a double effect: it gives a creative focus to the men involved, many of whom are learning to read as part of the process, and also maintains the link between separated and faraway families. In addition to reading, the men had also started to film the stories and there was not a dry eye in our meeting room when some of the short films they had made were shown."

Her involvement with Storybook Dads has made her think about the general failure of the prison system. "It baffles and angers me how we can be locking up more people than we were a hundred years ago without appearing to have made a single significant policy leap capable of combating the issue. Sometimes I play out the rather anarchic thought that it could be more effective just to give a person a proportion of the £100,000 a year it costs to keep them in prison. I wonder how that would affect the cycle of re-offending." ·