Hello, welcome to my blog... I've never really done this before and am a bit of a techno-phobe, so apologies that this isn't the most exciting or dynamic site ever.
I would like to take this oppertunity to explain why I am writing this, and why I am about to embark on a wee adventure halfway around the world.
From 2008 - 2010, I had the amazing experiance of being a Lecturer in Performing Art based in two Scottish prisons, HMP Shotts, which is Scotland's maximum security prison for adult men, and HM YOI Polmont which is the Young Offenders Institution for young men aged between 16-21. Polmont houses young men serving long-term and short-term sentences, as well as those on remand. While working in Polmont I did a lot of work with protection prisoners. They are kept seperate from the rest of the prisoners, either if they have committed a sexual offence, or if they, or the prison feel that they would suffer harm should they be in with the main prison body.
For a small country, Scotland has a very high prison population with over 60% of released prisoners reoffending. In 2008 (I think) more children had a member of their family go to prison, than had their parents divorce. A large number of the young men that I worked with in Polmont had family members currently, or who had served time in prison. It very much seems to me that what happens when people are in prison is very important.
I very much believe that access to the arts is an important thing for everyone. The average reading age for a prisoner in a Scottish jail is 7, therefore participating in a project that involves doing, opposed to reading and writing is valuable. When working with mainstream prisoners (as opposed to protection prisoners) they were often mixing with people that they had not worked with before. When we put on performances, we made sure that those involved were able to invite family members, and we had food and tea and coffee for them afterwards to celebrate the work that they had done. I also ran the Storybook Dad project in Shotts, where we filmed prisoners reading stories that their children liked, or in some cases stories that they had written especially for them. They were then put on DVD and the book and the DVD were sent to the child.
I worked with a group in Polmont to write a script for a Show Racism The Red Card competition, and it came in second place, which is a fantastic achievement. This competition was open to schools and Further Education estabilshments throughout Scotland, and the boys had entered through the college that provides education in that prison, the people who were on the judging panel did not neccessarily know that the boys were in prison.
At this point, I was the only Lecturer in Performing Art based in prisons in Scotland. There are amazing theatre companies and artists who go in to prisons and do projects, but nobody else was in every week, as a member of staff, doing the kind of work that I was doing.
I decided to apply for the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship in 2009, and I found out that I was lucky enough to have won a fellowship in 2010. This is a fantastic charity that allows anyone of any age and background the oppertunity to travel to another place in the world to learn more about something that they are passionate in.
On the advice of Simon Rudding, who is the Artistic Director of Theatre in Prisons and Probation (TiPP), based at the University of Manchester, who taught me when I was in my 4th year at the RSAMD, I applied to go to New Zealand to learn how they use arts in prison, and arts as a means to rehabilitate prisoners.
Due to several different factors, it's taken me up til now to organise my trip. I leave in August, and will use this blog as a means to document what I am doing while I'm there and what I am learning.
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