My Time Inside

I've spent quite a lot of time in prison.

Never fortunately as a permanent inmate, but always as a visitor, with the opportunity to leave at the end of the day.

My reason for spending time in numerous prisons around the country has been in the pursuance of my work for Opera North's education department, and later in a similar role for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

And in addition to this, because the kind of work I did was undertaken by relatively few organizations, those of sufficient scale to have full-time education departments and with funding from the Arts Council that gave them the remit to spread an understanding of their artforms as deep into the community as possible, I would occasionally get invitations to see the work of colleagues in prisons.

On one memorable occasion, I went into Wormwood Scrubs prison to see a professional performance of Sweeney Todd, which many people may have seen a least in its screen version with Johnny Depp in the lead role.

It has been a genuine privilege to be able to visit and work in prisons, and it has left me with the humble wish that everyone at some stage in their life could see the reality of life in prisons.

If for no other reason than to recognize simply that prisoners are in the main exactly like every other citizen. There but for the grace of God, and perhaps a decent education, go I.

I suppose my experience of prison life has been limited by the fact that I have only been able to work with those prisoners that were engaged already in activities taking place in the prison education wing, and the work that I was able to undertake through the intervention of specialist artists was with people selected as suitable for such work.

Leaving this aside, the work I have been able to become involved with has been enormously enriching, demonstrating that the spark of creativity lives in every human being, whatever their circumstances.

It is unfortunate that for many people their first reaction to the idea of persons serving prison sentences having access to intense work with highly skilled creative people might be a that this is not what prisons should be concerned with, that they should be concerned with punishment.

This is a very shortsighted view, and one that is failing to recognize that it is through new and different experiences, and through education in particular, that dysfunctional behaviour might best be challenged. And hopefully be replaced by something that contributes to society, rather than is destructive of it.

I have been fortunate enough to have been educated well, and perhaps for this education to have taken place in the context of a loving home.

It is far too easy to take it for granted that every person has this same start in life, and that the choice to commit crime is in many cases a conscious one.

When spending time working with inmates, staff are always careful to stress that we shouldn't discuss the reasons why prisoners or where they are.

But human nature makes it impossible not to discover something of the circumstances of the people that soon become friends, in so far as to spend time with anyone makes this process inevitable.

There is a lot of talent in prisons, is a phrase that remains with me from those visits. If only it can be refocused, and that can often mean overcoming unbelievable obstacles that have been at the root of behaviour most of us will never countenance nor encounter.