In November last year, The Sun published an exposé of a prison comedy course running at HMP Whitemoor. One of the participants was Zia ul-Haq, a convicted terrorist, and the course included training in stand-up, comic drama, improvisation and scriptwriting. It was scratched after only a few days when news of the course reached Jack Straw, who wasted no time in dubbing it ‘totally unacceptable’.
No great surprise, you may be thinking, it is perhaps fair enough that the public don’t want to see a terrorist having a laugh on the tax-payers tab. This was certainly the tone of some of the comments on The Sun’s website: ‘ninjasix’ wrote ‘Glad to see all the cons are doing hard labour!!! This story must really put people off going to prison/holiday camp’.
Indeed, I must admit that I would have been fairly indifferent to this whole debacle in normal circumstances, until a few months ago that is. Having just graduated from Oxford, I started working for Safe Ground, a small charity that runs drama-based educational courses in prisons. Our two courses, Family Man and Fathers Inside, are family relationships and parenting courses taught in male prisons all over the country. They use drama techniques combined with basic literacy training to help prisoners establish and maintain a strong family support network, This is vital if reoffending is to be prevented.
The first time I went into a prison was, to my surprise, an overwhelmingly positive experience. I had gone to watch a presentation by students in a high security prison to mark the completion of a Family Man course. This was a chance for them to present the work they’d done to their families. We’re not talking cutting edge stuff here, just a few short sketches, poems, songs and games, but bearing in mind that 65% of the prison population have numeracy skills at or below the level expected of 11 year-olds (compared to 23% of the general population), it suddenly seems a somewhat more groundbreaking achievement.
In a reversal of the traditional school assembly scene, this time it was the kids sitting on the floor with their mums and grandparents, proudly watching dad reading out his poem, spurred on by friends and tutors. It was a genuinely touching event, as the smiles, laughter and tears of the audience testified.
Coming from the kind of academic background where, studying languages, I easily spent hours at a time discussing the nuances of a single adjective in a translation, it was a reality check to be reminded that for some men on our courses, writing a short letter to their wife or mother may be an extremely challenging exercise. We’re not talking about the minutiae of stylistics here but the basic structures of communication. Our courses are about giving these men the core vocabulary and grammar to communicate, and to acknowledge how their selfish behaviour may have impacted on their families lives.
And what further proof is necessary to show the need for stable, responsible parenting than the bleak statistic that 65% of boys with a convicted parent go on to offend? Imprisonment effects far more children than you might think; The Prison Reform Trust estimates that there are 160,000 children with a parent in prison each year (around two and a half times the number of children in care). They claim that in 2006, more children were affected by the imprisonment of a parent than by divorce in the family. The children of prisoners are amongst the most vulnerable in our society, with ‘approximately three times the risk for both mental health problems and anti-social or delinquent behaviour compared to their peers’; educating parents is an essential part of breaking this cycle. Here’s hoping that the children watching their dads perform that day won’t be amongst that 65%.
Knowing how effective our courses are only makes Straw’s statement all the harder to swallow. Courses like ours open prisoners’ eyes to their responsibilities, as one student told us; ‘It made me see both sides of the story. Although our families don’t see what we are feeling in prison, we do not realise how imprisonment is affecting the lives of our family.’ This is a massive realisation for some. Drama activities like role-playing are a positive reinforcement of this, allowing students to see situations from different points of view, to develop empathy and to model new patterns of behaviour.
The Woolf Report in 2001 noted that ‘The disruption of the prisoner’s position within the family unit represents one of the most distressing aspects of imprisonment … Enabling prisoners … to stay in close and meaningful contact with the family is therefore an essential part of humane treatment.’ We need to acknowledge that for meaningful contact to occur requires maturity and self-awareness, qualities often nurtured by arts-based courses. As Libby Purves put it recently in The Times; ‘I have talked over the years with inmates who certainly deserved their sentences but who then sewed, composed or performed their way clear of their narrow, angry hearts’.
Safe Ground’s courses are designed to build self-esteem and self-awareness in this often deeply scarred and emotionally damaged group of learners. They also aim to involve students’ family members in the learning process, because, as a report on reducing re-offending by ex-prisoners explained; ‘maintaining family relationships can help to prevent prisoners re-offending and can assist them to successfully settle in the community’. Currently, however, 45% of offenders lose contact with their families while serving a sentence. Here at Safe Ground, we are currently trialling a revised version of our Family Man course which involves adult ‘supporters’ – family members or friends – more fully, allowing students to apply the skills they’ve learnt on the course in a safe and supported environment.
Given that a large proportion of the prison population has consistently failed in, and been failed by, the mainstream education system, prison is the ideal time to approach learning in different ways. There is no point lecturing people who are disillusioned with traditional, formal educational settings. Our courses work because they make learning enjoyable and build a safe, supportive group environment. They ‘hook’ reluctant learners and inspire them to continue with further education.
One student’s partner sums up why Safe Ground’s work is so important; ‘He’s never written me letters like this before … Those tutors and staff on the workshops, they made him feel like he could be something more than an offender and they made me feel like there’s some hope for us as a family at last.’
