If ever the arts were desperately needed, it?s in prisons, says Mary Stephenson. Yet prisons are the place you?re least likely to come across creative arts. This is changing and I was lucky enough to be taken on initially as part of the Arts Council of England?s writers in prisons scheme in January 1998. HMP Channings Wood is a medium security establishment for up to 600 adult men. Surrounded by Devonshire countryside, it is probably one of the more attractive jails in this country. Yet inside there are bare walls, razor wire topped fences and metal gates; it is an alien world where normal values and etiquette don?t exist. Not only did most of the prisoners (and a lot of the staff) have little experience of the arts, there was a very real suspicion of them. For them the arts meant opera houses, a pile of bricks or cows in formaldehyde. Nevertheless, in my three years there they have taught me much more about what the arts are really for. Prisoners have been encouraged to take up the arts through a number of short projects. There was Conscripts, in which 25 prisoners worked with a BBC radio drama producer to write and act in short plays which were subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio Devon. Another project was Concerto, in which a musician worked with a group of 13 prisoners, some of whom had never played a musical instrument before, to devise music for a concert at the end of the week. Another was Conversation Pieces - a week of visits by writers and poets, most of them kidnapped from Ways with Words just down the road, giving talks and workshops. And then there was Con Artists, an exhibition of paintings and poetry at the local Sainsbury?s supermarket which attracted over 200 entries in the comments book, 95% of them warmly positive. A large number of the prisoners can?t read or write, so I have had to work with all artforms to find ways to help them express their feelings. My predecessor had started a prison magazine, produced monthly by the prisoners. Three years on, we now have a recording studio which will hopefully be transmitting prison radio, Con Air, by the end of 2001.We also have Connections - a programme which studies offending behaviour in the forum of a reading group. Then there?s Contexts, a publishing project in which prisoners write and illustrate books for other prisoners learning to read and write. And Storybook Dad - a facility for prisoners to read bedtime stories to be sent home to their children on tapes which are edited with sound effects and music by other prisoners. What is really exciting is how prisoners have started to take the initiative themselves. There is now a poetry group, set up by them, in which they read each other their own poems and discuss them. They also study published poets and then express the same feelings in their own words. There is a prison band, much in demand for live concerts, again set up and run by the prisoners. It has been the most exciting time of my life and I can?t imagine a time when I am not involved in some way with the arts in prisons. Teaching them that the arts are for them and within them was like watering seeds that have lain dormant for years and then watching them blossom. 
Mary Stephenson is Writer in Residence at HMP Channings Wood. t: 01803 812361 e: mary.stephenson@virgin.net
Published: 02-07-2001