Clive Hopwood gives some examples of the impact that the Writers in Prison Foundation has had over the last 20 years.
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The Writers in Prison Foundation (and its earlier incarnation as the Writers in Prison Network) has delivered over 150 residencies and special projects in prisons across England and Wales over the last two decades. Its writers in residence, drawn from a wide range of professional writers (novelists, poets, screenwriters, journalists) deliver workshops and 1-2-1 sessions covering creative writing (fiction, non-fiction, autobiography, poetry, screenwriting), oral storytelling, journalism, radio, video and theatre productions, creative reading, magazine and anthology publications.
The programme is designed to be fully inclusive, accessible to both offenders and staff from those with low literacy through to Open University students. Our aim is to broaden access beyond prisons to include probation services, youth offending teams, pupil referral units, mental health and other community settings.
We have a million stories about the effects of the creative arts on people. Here is a sample from three of our writers in residence.
Discovering his love for writing gave him a starting point
“I worked with Alan for about two years. He was seriously agoraphobic when I first met him. We had to work just outside his cell, so he could get back to safety quickly if necessary. After a while he joined a group, then he read a piece at a Holocaust Memorial event, and now at another prison he helps other learners and is a member of the drama group, music group and a reading group and. He has won a number of Koestler awards, including a Gold, although he had no educational qualifications when I met him. I asked him again and again to try writing in ways with which he was unfamiliar. I pushed him and pushed him and he just kept on trying – and succeeding, despite serious illness and personal problems.”
“When I met Ian, he was halfway through a one-year sentence in a prison where everyone else was there for the long haul. Not knowing how he could piece his life back together, even the prospect of release was a source of worry. Discovering his love for writing gave him a starting point. He would never be the man he was before going to prison and what his life on the outside would look like still was not clear, but now he knew that wherever he ended up, this would be his hobby. Prison has a way of breaking people down and when you have got to build yourself back up, creativity is not a bad place to start.”
“Rarely do we have any idea of the long-term effect of what we do. However, sometimes we get to know what has happened to people whose lives we were part of for a short period. At a conference on arts and offenders I heard my name called: Paul, one of the speakers was a man I had last seen eight years before. At that time I was collecting him from the segregation unit so that he could appear on the prison stage in a play he helped write. After the performance he asked how he could continue with drama when he was released. I gave him a few pointers which he followed. Eight years later he was clean, had not reoffended and was representing a professional theatre company at the conference. Most of what we do might not have such dramatic results. It could be that the number of offences in a prison drops during the course of a two-week arts festival or a man reads a story for his child for the first time, but each time I walk through the gates I open myself up to the possibility that something positive could happen as a result of the work we do.”
And finally, an offender wrote: “You’ve opened doors I thought I’d never open into rooms I thought I’d never see.”
Note that the names of the offenders have been changed.
Clive Hopwood is Co-director of the Writers in Prison Foundation.