Why Jack Straw should allow prisoners on the stage

Why Jack Straw should allow prisoners on the stage

Do put our prisoners on the stage, Mr Straw

The Justice Secretary’s diktat to limit drama in jails shackles brave prison governors. Creativity — and, yes, laughter — work

By Libby Purves

It takes a lot to get me to a party conference. I am immune to their thrill. But needs must: last week I had five minutes’ ranting in a dank cellar in Brighton with battered Labourites; tonight the same in the Ruby Lounge in Manchester with Tories.

My brief moment is sandwiched between the performance poet Akiel Chinelo and an ex-prisoner called Jonny on the guitar. Around midnight Jonathan Aitken will spring from the wings to deliver his increasingly practised and passionate views on prison life; and less obviously, but encouragingly, the Shadow Attorney-General Ed Garnier promises to do a turn, after the children’s writer Anthony Horowitz.

In Brighton Jo Brand topped the bill (“Slightly disappointed to hear Gordon Brown has denied using drugs . . . was planning to try and buy some crack off him tonight.”) She was flanked by powerful playlets, a limerick, Denise Black from Coronation Street and an ex-prisoner called Eileen with heartbreaking songs by Holloway inmates.

Why such a rolling motley cabaret? Jack Straw, that’s why.

As I have reported here before, last year the Justice Secretary issued a rapid, not to say panicky, “PSI” — Prison Service Instruction to governors — after some synthetic tabloid outrage over a well-established Comedy School course for prisoners. It seems that a convicted terrorist in HMP Whitemoor was among those learning to be a stand-up, and that some people thought this was an atrocious thing to happen in prison.

Chaps should be picking oakum and eating bread-and-skilly, their only encounter with culture being an opportunity to sing Forgive our foolish ways in the coldest possible chapel.

Straw immediately cancelled all arts projects in HMP Whitemoor and issued a general diktat that all future projects must “meet the public acceptability test” and that governors must consider how they might be “perceived if open to media scrutiny”. Nothing about whether they actually work, opening hearts and minds; nothing about the possibility of rehabilitation and a window of emotional opportunity for people stuck up life’s worst cul-de-sac. At no point did most media, or the minister, stop to consider that comedy exposes absurdity, which could be the very thing to make a terrorist think again.

Nor, in issuing the threateningly worded instruction, is there any evidence that the Justice Ministry thinks that prison arts activities run and funded by dedicated charities are worth bothering with at all. Literacy, yes; plastering or IT, yes: tick the “skills” box. But drama, music, comedy, poetry, visual arts? Only on sufferance. Let there be nothing that could be deplored by a spiteful, narrow-hearted, opportunist hack.

The PSI has had depressing effects. Prison governors do a hard balancing act, walking a tightrope between security and pastoral responsibility for returning inmates to decent lives. It is unfair to add a vague yet threatening injunction to worry about ignorant journalism. Some governors are brave: not long after the PSI Wandsworth went ahead with Pimlico Opera’s West Side Story, One of its inmate stars is out now, singing in the chorus at Grange Park Opera. Other governors feel less brave: courses have been cancelled, projects sidelined, and one story doing the rounds among Arts Alliance lobbyists at Brighton was about a therapeutic family-reunion project with prisoners’ children. They’ve been told they can serve sandwiches, but not jelly for the kids. Jelly is “too much like a party” and the press might squawk. Tomorrow the Prison Governors Association conference in Buxton will hear Jack Straw; it will be interesting to see who brings up the arts. Or jellies.

The jelly nonsense is the extreme: but the reason for these fringe events, and for the Alliance’s ongoing worry and lobbying, is that the PSI — and the hard, cold Justice Ministry attitude it reveals — is a real danger to the work being quietly done, at minimal public expense, by organisations that facilitate and teach arts in prisons. Yet these things work.

I have watched a passionate Macbeth reinterpreted in Pentonville, Othello at Brixton, Chicago at Bronzefield; I have sat with big, hard men in a needlework class at Wandsworth, as they learnt delicate stitching from respectable and rigorous ladies from Fine Cell Work and carried off thread and patches for long lonely hours in their cells. I have talked to ex-prisoners who acknowledge the profound liberating effect of being given words, images, music: a chance to make or perform something interesting or beautiful. “It’s like, intense.” I have also talked to officers who agree that some particularly stroppy inmates are only led towards “useful” education such as literacy by way of irrelevant creativity.

And note, the arts are not the soft option portrayed in stupid “media scrutiny”. In rehearsal, writing or craftwork you fail sometimes, you struggle and unpick and face critical evaluation. There have been private tears shed in cells by people on these projects, never doubt it. But in the end there’s a kind of freedom, even for those few who (rightly, I’m no sentimentalist) will be inside for years. You can be bounded in a nutshell and see infinite space. You can change and, even if you don’t change enough for society, you grow. If bodies must be locked up, hearts need not.

This work must not be jeopardised just because one day, inevitably, some creep will tell the Daily Outrage that there’s a rumour Rosemary West might get a chorus part in Carousel. And remember how few Rosemary Wests, terrorists, paedophiles and calculating killers there actually are in prisons. A quarter of inmates were in care as children (half of those under 25). Two thirds are functionally illiterate; and there are now more ex-service inmates than there are current servicemen and women in Afghanistan. Then, and only then, consider whether you want to give a sour-hearted media the power to curtail their access to art, beauty, creativity, collaboration and — yes — laughter.

The oddest thing about all this is the political weather. In most previous decades you would assume that carey-sharey Labour would favour arts and rehabilitation of social outcasts, while wicked Tories waved handcuffs at the party conference. Yet a Labour Justice Secretary issued the draconian PSI-50; and a Cameron policy adviser, Danny Kruger, founded a good prison theatre outfit, Only Connect. The tectonic plates are shifting.