Soft cell?
Don’t tell the leader writer of the Daily Mail, or John “punishment is not a dirty word” Major, or Michael “austerity” Howard, but I had a rather enjoyable day in Wandsworth recently. The first part was pretty awful, stuck in a drab waiting room wondering how on earth expenditure of £22,500 per prisoner could have produced premises that made the average DSS office look like the Dorchester. But things improved rapidly after that.
Wandsworth is reputed to be a tough prison. Large men with cropped hair and tattoos stand menacingly behind tall gates. And they are just the officers. I had come to see a group of inmates repenting their sins at a revivalist meeting in the chapel, confessing to a lifetime of crime and debauchery. No, not the latest Home Office initiative but a rehearsal of Guys and Dolls, which touring company Pimlico Opera is staging at the prison with a mixed cast of professional singers and, since they were caught, rather less professional criminals.
The greatest compliment I can pay to them is that it took a while to work out who was who. Nicely Nicely Johnson could have been a burglar doing 10 for GBH until he opened his mouth to sing Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat in a majestic tenor voice that reverberated round the chapel, a voice of such purity that even the two officers overseeing proceedings had to put down their Suns and gawp.
There was something rather uplifting going on here: these guys were inmates of one of Europe’s biggest, hardest jails and they were acting and singing in a musical about the criminal underworld on New York. Not just that, but they were fully aware of the ironies, were clearly loving every moment, and were throwing themselves into the show with a fervour that suggested they weren’t just there for the tea and chocolate biscuits the director had thoughtfully provided.
Guys and Dolls is Pimlico’s third prison production involving inmates: it did Sweeney Todd at Wormwood Scrubs in 1991 and West Side Story at Wandsworth last year. Standards are remarkably high considering the endless cast changes necessitated by court appearances and prison transfers. The director Syd Ralph was already on to her third Big Jule – so called because the character is about 5 feet 2 – and rehearsals had hardly begun.
Ralph treats the show like any other. “There are no rules, apart from working,” she insists. “When you first go in they are embarrassed. But once they relax they become human beings. You’re there to do a show and that’s all that counts. I’m not worried about why somebody’s in there. I would never dream of asking what they did: they might tell me but I would never ask. I’m just interested in them performing.”
Pimlico’s founder, Wasfi Kani, sees joint productions as a “great meeting of cultures” which benefits everyone. The prisoners’ self-esteem is lifted, the professionals have to respond to special demands, and the public have a rare opportunity to enter the prison. According to Kani, audience approval provides a huge boost to the inmates. “Participating and being applauded at the end of performances by two or three hundred members of the public is very touching for them,” she says. “Last years, some of the real butch guys cried.”
Touching is the word for her story of one young man who joined the cast just before the opening last year. He was starting a 15-year sentence for armed robbery and, having anticipated something shorter, was very depressed. His cellmate was in the cast and taught the newcomer all the songs and dances virtually overnight to get him in. The production, Kani believes, offered hope at the beginning of what must have seemed an interminable sentence.
She rejects romantic notions of criminals as Genet-like heroes and free spirits, but believes that in some cases art can effect a change of attitude, citing the case of one man who had acted in West Side Story last year and has since embarked on a full-time stage career. “I have to believe it is possible that a man’s life will change,” she says.
Pimlico is unique in terms of scale – it will cost around £70,000 to stage Guys and Dolls – but it is far from alone in its quest to take theatre into prisons. English National Opera has embarked on a long-term relationship with Brixton Prison and staged Kurt Weill’s Street Scene there in July, while the Birmingham-based Geese Theatre Company is undertaking similar work. Unlike Pimlico, Geese’s explicit purpose is to rehabilitate, “using images and metaphors to encourage a look at one’s own behaviour and promote the will to change”.
The governor of Wandsworth, Graham Clark, enthuses over Pimlico’s work and says the quality of last year’s production of West Side Story stunned everyone. But not all the staff are quite so positive. According to Kani, “The view, by and large, among the prison officers is that my kids don’t get this at school, so why should the cons get it?”
The fear is that such views now hold sway in the Home Office. A leaked policy memorandum from Michael Howard’s office last August indicated a shift away from more progressive prison regimes. “The Home Secretary”, said the memo, “inclines to the view that prisoners should spend more time working and less time on activities most people would regard as leisure.” Add the current lock ‘em all up policy, which has raised the prospect of army camps and prison ships being pressed into service, and the future looks bleak. Better conditions and more constructive use of time – of which artistic activities are an example – cost money. But so do prison riots born of boredom and frustration, like the one at Wymott in September that caused damage estimated at £20m.
It is ironic that one of the original champions of more creative use of prisoners’ time was another Conservative home secretary, Rab Butler, who in 1961 helped Arthur Koestler to set up an awards scheme and exhibition for prisoners’ art. Thirty years on, the scheme – run by the Koestler Trust – has grown to incorporate not just art and craft but poetry, prose, playwriting, ceramics, calligraphy, commercial design and music. This year, it attracted 1,600 entries from 120 prisons, and around a quarter of those were awarded small cash prizes and displayed at an exhibition at Smiths Galleries, Covert Garden.
The chairman of the Trust is Judge Stephen Tumim, the chief inspector of prisons and a champion of reform. For him, the starting point is that courts punish – by denying offenders their liberty – and that prisons should seek to educate. His vision of what the arts could achieve is far broader than the present rather haphazard set-up which depends on local initiatives. “I would like arts centres in prisons,” he says, “scruffy places where you can do what your eye is into. The majority of prisoners are social failures, not professional villains, and the arts in prison have a key job in helping them to find themselves and discover self-respect.” The Trust operates on a shoestring and is about to launch an appeal to raise £250,000 to consolidate its work. Last year it opened a new national centre at Wandsworth, paid for by the prison itself, and another indication of the governor’s determination to change its dour, authoritarian image.
Language, like art, can have a redeeming power. When I visited the Guys and Dolls rehearsal, one of the cast came over and thrust a notebook into my hands. It was filled with his poems, written in a spacious scrawl, telling of the dangerous life he had led and his desire to go straight after his release. Ken Smith, who spent two years as writer-in-residence in Wormwood Scrubs, discovered that writing was a central part of many prisoners’ lives. “Many people write,” he says.” Sometimes it is no more than a diary, sometimes it’s letters, though more often than we think it’s poetry. Some men have journals they keep only in prison, picking up where they left off on the last sentence. Sometimes a poem is for a particular occasion, for a particular person, or the only handle on a crisis. Trauma, the thought of loved ones, and time in which to reflect all come together in prison. Writing poetry is not considered off at all.”
A report produced by Anne Peaker and Jill Vincent, at Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Social Policy, in 1990 demonstrated the value of the arts in prison. Amid the academic language and statistical appendices were some telling conclusions: “It is possible to lose any awareness of self or sense of self-value when contact with the outside world is broken, and prisoners feel they are in limbo. By creating something tangible, prisoners can confirm their existence in their own eyes.”
If sociology fails to convince, there is always Jimmy Boyle’s testimony in A Sense of Freedom. Convicted of murder and branded “the most violent man in Scotland”, he proved untameable in conventional prisons, attacking a succession of governors, prison officers and fellow inmates. Only at the special unit at Barlinnie did he discover his humanity, by being treated as a human being, encouraged to take responsibility for his actions and allowed to express himself through art. “Sculpture took on a vital importance,” he wrote, “not only in the sense that it was a medium to channel all my aggressions but a medium in which to build up and repair the damage to my inner self … I was purging myself of the past.”
Not every prisoner is Jimmy Boyle, eager to embrace art, literature and an Open University psychology course. But the lesson – that a positive, creative prison environment can break the cycle of violence and despair – can be more generally applied. Whether the government is ready to learn it is another matter. Does art have a place in the new austerity?
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