PRISON provides MBE winner Doreen Fowler with a 'wonderful' job.

That's because she gets to help some of the most vulnerable people in society.

The Lowton woman works at HMP Styal, the Cheshire women's prison that has repeatedly hit the headlines for suicides among the inmates.

And it was letters those inmates wrote over the years to the Home Office that helped her to get the award in the Queen's honours list, after she was nominated by the prison.

Doreen works in the laundry, mainly with lifers, and operates the 'kit cabin', providing free clothes for prisoners without them.

"Sometimes their family don't want anything to do with them," said Doreen, aged 59.

"When you clothe a woman with things she likes, she feels a lot better about herself."

Doreen, who attends New Life Pentecostal Church, in Radley Common, Orford, Warrington, said: "I treat them as though they could be my daughter - like 'there but for the grace of God ...'.

"I look at it as the least I can do."

Doreen joined the prison service in 1983 and is due to retire next year.