Engaging prisoners in high-quality, innovative arts activities is always going to be exciting, productive and, hopefully, a rewarding experience for inmates, prison staff and artists alike. And the Irene Taylor Trust (ITT) ?Music in Prisons? is renowned for providing unique opportunities for adult prisoners and young people in custody throughout the UK, claim Georgie Goddard and Kate Lewis. The year 2005 marks a decade since the Trust was set up to carry out quality music-based projects and to raise the profile of music in prisons as part of existing education and rehabilitation programmes. Over a range of 70 projects, the Trust has worked directly with hundreds of prisoners building an archive of publications, CDs, original music theatre scores and project evaluations that underline the fact that talent is rife in prisons today. This artistic evolution can often only be unleashed as a result of professional artistic interventions that are able to surmount the hurdles of working in distinctively non-arts settings, but how can long-term effects of these types of projects really be measured? How can the many organisations working in criminal justice settings today demonstrate that, apart from the immediate impact of producing quality work of artistic merit, the arts can and do: - provide meaningful routes into learning - challenge offending behaviour, and - help participants to leave prison with more than the stigma of having been there? The question burns as the Prison Service currently strains to incorporate the arts alongside basic key skills provision without running risk of a public backlash if taxpayers? money is seen as being used to support so-called ?soft options?. With support from the Wates Foundation, ITT was commissioned to evaluate the effects of the arts through robust longitudinal research (based on clearly laid out objectives) which took as its starting point a long-term project with young women at Her Majesty?s Prison Young Offender Institution Bullwood Hall. The project ? an original music theatre production entitled ?Fair? that took place in May 2004 ? involved 20 inmates and ITT?s project partners, the National Youth Theatre (NYT). The immediate and long-term effects of the project are currently being recorded and monitored over a period of 12 months. Pivotal to the research was that ITT?s formerly more flexible approach to measuring outcomes should aim to tie in with developments in applying more robust research methodologies, as pioneered by the fledgling Research into the Arts and Criminal Justice Think Tank (REACTT). By working in tandem with REACTT, ITT aimed to ensure a clear understanding of the expected outcomes between all parties including the project participants, prison governors, education staff, officers and artists from ITT and the NYT. Broadly, these were: - to help a group of mixed-aged women prisoners cope positively with their period of confinement through learning new skills and by providing a range of creative experiences - to help prepare the women for resettlement in society, and - to produce a quality production to benefit the prison, inmates? families and other community groups. However committed a host prison is to building the arts into their educational remit, researchers are bound to be caught up in a range of conflicts of interest. Prisons do not naturally lend themselves to creativity ? anything can and does happen within them ? and creative researchers soon learn to use tact and a wholly pragmatic approach to make full use of their presence. A grounded theory strategy is therefore ideal, allowing researchers to embed themselves within the creative process and utilise their own learning to record and demonstrate results as they arise. Conducting longitudinal research is already proving to be both highly beneficial and also frustrating. There are many unexpected outcomes and new avenues to explore. And yet ITT is still waiting for the much needed prison statistics and prison information, without which its research will be weakened. But in embarking on an intense period of research, other outcomes are also being uncovered. Amidst the questionnaires, project diaries, video diaries and interviews, a more private and poignant avenue was disclosed, at once testimony to the benefits of an arts organisation immersing itself in the research process. Whereas robust methods such as control groups, ?number-crunching? and psychometric testing became a barrier to the research process, post-project focus groups with project participants revealed that throughout the project period there had been a distinct reduction in cases of self-harming. All who contributed to this spontaneous strand of discussion felt that this behavioural shift was directly attributed to their participation in the project. Georgie Goddard is a researcher and freelance arts project co-ordinator. e: georgie@georgieg.com Kate Lewis is responsible for PR, Fundraising and Research for the Irene Taylor Trust ? Music in Prisons. e: info@musicinprisons.org.uk
