No. 10 in our blog series exploring creative approaches to transforming the criminal justice system.

Author: Laura Caulfield, researcher in forensic psychology and criminal justice

 

This year marks my twentieth year working as a researcher in forensic psychology and criminal justice. Reaching this milestone prompted me to reflect on my journey so far, how I got here, what I’ve learnt, and also to think about what the future might hold.

In 2001 I began my career as an academic conducting research into traditional programmes in the criminal justice system. I was applying my knowledge of psychology and research methods to measuring whether rehabilitation programmes were effective. Most of my work involved conducting quantitative analysis of large-scale datasets to ask questions like ‘do Offending Behaviour Programmes reduce risk of reoffending?’. While the research was interesting and valuable, I began to realise that there are issues with a ‘one size fits all’ approach and that some people in prisons and serving community sentences are just not ready – or not yet able – to engage with standard programmes and education.

Fast forward to 2007 and a colleague asked if I would be interested in applying the methods I used to measure accredited programmes to evaluating a music programme in prisons. I’ll admit that I felt sceptical, because I’d only ever thought about addressing formal risk factors in prisons, and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me how a music project could have an impact on prisoners. However, as a researcher, starting from a sceptical position can be a good thing and being curious is central to this line of work.

The project I’d been asked to evaluate was run by Good Vibrations and I embarked on a steep learning curve. I spent time in prisons with participants on week-long courses and I observed as groups of prisoners, many of whom were unknown to one another, came together with a Good Vibrations facilitator. I watched as over the course of a week they learnt about Gamelan, learnt how to play and compose, and at the end of the week performed a concert to peers, prison staff, and external visitors. What struck me most was not the musical skills they developed and the impressive nature of the performance, but what happened to individuals and the group as the week progressed. The research told me lots of things and the key messages were: participants developed social and communication skills, which is important to solve problems, talk things out, and reduces the risk of arguing and aggression. Participants were calmer, which is good for health and wellbeing as well as reducing violence and aggression. Participating also acted as a stepping-stone into formal programmes and education for some prisoners, through building confidence and learning that they could achieve.

Those first projects with Good Vibrations have stayed with me. I have had some really amazing experiences seeing people engage, connect, and be inspired. That research led on to working with numerous arts projects and organisations, including the Irene Taylor Trust (music), the Artist in Residence at HMP Grendon (a Therapeutic Community prison), Rideout (who work with range of creative arts, often drama-based), Birmingham Youth Offending Service music project, Sandwell Youth Offending Service (their innovative service wide creative approach), London College of Fashion and their Making for Change (fashion design & manufacturing) inititative with women in prison, and the Centre for Design Against Crime and their work redesigning cell furniture. I’ve been closely involved with the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance (NCJAA) in the UK, and the US-based South West Correctional Arts Network (SCAN). Overall, what I’ve been working on is developing the evidence base around the arts in criminal justice and trialling robust methods.

Over the last decade, the role of the arts, culture and creativity in criminal justice has been of increasing interest to policymakers, practitioners, the criminal justice system and researchers. In 2019, the UK Department for Culture, Media, and Sport Commons Select Committee acknowledged the ‘impact of culture … on positive outcomes in health, education, criminal justice’. There is now substantial evidence of the impact of the arts in criminal justice: indeed, between the United Kingdom and the United States, there are over 160 research studies. In 2012, the NCJAA launched the Evidence Library, ‘an online library, housing the key research and evaluation documents on the impact of arts-based projects, programmes and interventions within the Criminal Justice System’. (NCJAA, 2019c). Other countries have followed the Evidence Library initiative, setting up their own resources. See, for example, the Prison Arts Resource Project, which ‘is an online library of evidence-based research into U.S. correctional arts programs’ (PARP, 2019).

My own contribution to the evidence has involved working with a variety of art forms across the prison estate, with young people serving community sentences, and with people leaving prison and re-entering the community. Most recently, and in response to some earlier criticisms of research in this area, I published a study that really sought to push the evidence base forward. Working with girls and boys taking part in a music programme run by a Youth Offending Service (YOS) and analysing data that the YOS collects, we found that children who completed the music programme were more likely than a comparison group to engage with the YOS, and showed were statistically significant improvements in well-being and musical ability over the course of the project. The children talked to us about how safe they felt, how their confidence was growing, and about the new positive relationships they had formed.

There is more to uncover and investigate but the value and impact of the arts is clear. At this point in my research journey it is my doctoral students whose work I am inspired by. One of my doctoral students has just completed research to help us understand more about some of the amazing people who deliver creative writing programmes in prison. Another is working to understand the training processes for actors working in prisons. Understanding more about creative practitioners and the relationships built in the spaces created through the arts will help us all keep learning and developing research and practice in the criminal justice system.

 

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Good Vibrations has worked in prisons and young offender institutions since 2003. We see the destructive effects on people of living within our overstretched, under-resourced criminal justice system. We want to understand how people can be better supported before, during and after their contact with the criminal justice system.  We have commissioned a series of blogs from a range of experts, including those with lived experience and their families. Every Thursday for the next four months, we will bring a different voice with their own unique perspective and ideas. At the end of the series we will publish a report drawing together the themes and recommendations.

No. 7 in our blog series exploring creative approaches to transforming the criminal justice system.

Author: Alison Frater, Co-Chair of Clean Break

 

How do we halt the vicious cycle of crime?

On the face of it a question about halting the vicious cycle of crime requires an answer about prevention. We need to identify what it is about our society, individuals, families and communities that creates crimes then we’d know what to do to stop it, wouldn’t we?

Examining the question more closely and especially through the lens of women’s incarceration, an area I know best (though the issues are not unique to women), I see that the author is asking a better question. It’s not the crime in this sentence that’s vicious it’s the cycle. The questioner already knows that the causes of crime are well evidenced, properly researched, findings are validated. What they want is the answer to why it goes round and round. Who on earth is responsible for this malign scrolling recurring endlessly to the detriment of perpetrator and victim – a false dichotomy for women by the way. And what, in this past, present and never-ending future, can we do to stop it.

Observing moribund, going nowhere social policy is a bit of an occupational hazard in my chosen career of pubic health. But, the repeated failure of successive governments to deliver the widely supported policy objective of reducing women’s incarceration has few precedents. The neglect of need, the un-reason, the wasted investment on interventions with evidence to the contrary sinks to a new low of moral and fiscal incoherence. Still being sentenced to imprisonment for minor crime, first offences, debt, problems arising from drug and alcohol issues, they lose their jobs, their housing, their children. Failed again and again women are forced to relive their trauma through endless public enquiries. Children, families and communities are left to roll around in a badly led, courage missing, policy churn.

Shifting your stare from the relentless pursuit of change through political influencing takes a lot for a hardened public health consultant. I’ve had to get over my disbelief  – my own vicious cycle – that surely this latest piece of research or this reshuffled administration or new Secretary of State will make the difference. For me, release, stepping out of the miserable vortex came from six years of joyous chairing of the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance.

Arts organisations don’t like to see themselves in the role of social reformers. They argue about the intrinsic value of the arts, the complexity of emotional enrichment. They don’t deny art’s transforming power but they worry that it will be diminished if pressed to the wheel of social reform. And well they might.

But for me the reveal is that the arts explain the cause of crime but also the consequences of criminalisation. They hold a mirror to society in a way that refracts its more bewildering behaviour. What you get is a way of seeing, a visible light.

Public sector organisations are now required to deliver social impact. Increasingly they’re turning to the organisations in the NCJ Arts Alliance for inspiration. What they find are cultural leaders who deliver change because they put people’s needs at the core of their work.

I co-chair Clean Break, a theatre company that provides access to creativity for women affected by the criminal justice system. From its origins 40 years ago, the founders established and worked with sister organisations who could offer help with housing, health, employment, education, social care. Clean Break delivers, mentoring, writing and theatre workshops, dramaturgy but also friendship and community. It stands with its members tackling discrimination, racism and poverty. It sees that meeting physical and mental health needs drives out the stifling impact of inequalities, frees lives, enables unique and wonderful, inspiring expression.

When Clean Break presents productions (and don’t miss the Summer Season 2021) increasingly to new audiences in full houses or on packed screens, it finds a society that hasn’t given up on women, but one that’s giving up on leaders who continue to condemn the vulnerable to vicious cycles.

 

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Good Vibrations has worked in prisons and young offender institutions since 2003. We see the destructive effects on people of living within our overstretched, under-resourced criminal justice system. We want to understand how people can be better supported before, during and after their contact with the criminal justice system.  We have commissioned a series of blogs from a range of experts, including those with lived experience and their families. Every Thursday for the next four months, we will bring a different voice with their own unique perspective and ideas. At the end of the series we will publish a report drawing together the themes and recommendations.

No. 6 in our blog series exploring creative approaches to transforming the criminal justice system.

Author: Chris Atkins, filmmaker, journalist and author

 

Most ex-jailbirds want to quickly forget their time behind bars, but I didn’t have that option. I’d got sentenced to five years for tax fraud in 2016, after getting involved in a dodgy scheme to fund my film. I kept a prison diary which was published a year ago, called A Bit of a Stretch, and has since become a bestseller. I’d assumed that interest in prisons would evaporate once the world went into lockdown, but it was quite the reverse. I was bombarded with tweets asking how to survive isolation, so I replied with tips about the importance of routine, breaking the day into manageable chunks, and timing your bowel movements for the greater good. I was bemused to see people directly comparing the lockdown to prison, with Ellen DeGeneres complaining in her LA mansion: “This is like being in jail, mostly because I’ve been in the same clothes for 10 days and everyone in here is gay.”[i]

But aside from upsetting Hollywood celebs, Covid-19 had a catastrophic impact on British prisons, which were already in a nightmare state. Family visits were cancelled and prisoners were immediately locked in their cells all day. The Ministry of Justice claimed that the system was under control, but official prison inspectors were kept out which prevented any outside scrutiny. Fortunately, I was already making a podcast series about prison life and in contact with several serving prisoners, so I had a unique window into this terrible phase of the prison crisis.

One inmate explained how quickly things had deteriorated. “One minute we were doing our usual education and going to work, and then suddenly we were trapped in our cells for over 23 and a half hours a day. We got ten minutes to have a shower, ten minutes to do any admin, then we were banged back up. There was a bit of camaraderie at first, feeling we were all in this together. We made a lot of noise for the clap for the NHS, everyone was banging their doors and hooting.”

Even though prisoners were mostly stuck in their cells, they were still closely mingling when accessing food and showers. One inmate said “They’d let out a whole landing at once to queue for the servery, and we weren’t standing 2 meters apart.” A resident in another prison revealed “Social distancing didn’t exist whatsoever. 200 guys were sharing just six shower heads, with no partitions, all crammed into a tiny swamp.”

Most prisons are horrendously overcrowded, with two and even three inmates sharing cells designed for one, so coronavirus ripped right through the system. A prisoner told me how most of his wing quickly became infected. “We all lost our sense of taste and smell really early on. We couldn’t taste the prison food, which was quite a bonus to be fair!” A resident at one prison said that half their residents (approx. 800 men) had covid symptoms in the first month. But despite these spiralling figures, the Ministry of Justice claimed there were only 88 infected prisoners in April 2020[ii], as hardly any inmates were being tested. In the same month Public Health England reported that the number of actual cases was at least 2,000 – twenty times more than the government’s estimate[iii].

Symptomatic inmates were soon subjected to barbaric isolation measures, in a desperate attempt to curtail the virus. “People would be locked up for two and a half weeks solid. They didn’t even get the twenty minutes out their cells, so no showers or exercise. The officers would bring food to their door, tell them to go to the back of the cell, and push the food in. Healthcare became non-existent. If you had symptoms, they locked you up, put a sticker on the door and said ‘Good luck!’.” This inhumane shielding had surreal unintended consequences. “If you said you had the virus, the security officers would take you to the quarantine unit, under restraint if necessary. So, after you’d seen that happen, if you had the slightest fever, headache or cough, you’d just pretend you didn’t. We had people pouring with sweat and visibly ill, but pretending that they were absolutely fine, just to keep their cell. It was like the legless knight in Monty Python, shouting that it was just a flesh wound.” The collapse in prison healthcare also meant that non-covid problems went untreated. One lad had a horrendous toothache but wasn’t even allowed aspirin. His mum harangued the prison’s governor on Twitter until he was finally given proper treatment.

As in the outside world, the prison lockdowns had a catastrophic impact on inmates’ mental health. One told me of the terrible depression and anxiety on his wing: “People are absolutely at their wits end. They’re threatening to climb on the roof and kick the shit out of people.”

When I was in Wandsworth I worked as a Listener, trusted prisoners trained by the Samaritans to prevent suicides, but this vital service was stopped during the pandemic. A resident of one prison said “There were about four or five suicides while I was there. A lad owed £400 for spice [A synthetic form of cannabis]. He called his mum and she couldn’t pay it. She got worried and rang the jail, but before they got to him he’d died by hanging.” This is not an isolated incident, in May 2020 there were five suicides in just six days across the prison estate.[iv] The number of prisoners on suicide watch has shot up[v], and self-harm in women’s prisons has hit a record high[vi].

A lot of this anguish stems from inmates being separated from their families, as most visits have been cancelled since last March. You might have little sympathy for the plight of law breakers, but these brutal measures have also irreparably harmed thousands of innocent kids. Barnardo’s estimates that more than 200,000 children currently have a parent in prison[vii]. An anguished mother told me that her son hadn’t see his father for eight months, “Our lives have been destroyed.”

When I was in jail, I was able to see my son for an hour every week, which was a vital lifeline to maintaining our relationship. But now kids have been separated from their parents for up to a year, which is unspeakably cruel. If people are lucky they can sometimes access monthly prison video calls – aka “Purple Visits” – which are loathed by families. The technology is programmed to shut down if someone unauthorised enters the shot, but this is painfully unreliable. “The video cuts out every time my son moves, which is so distressing and just upsets him further. He hardly eats and has gone off his food, it’s soul destroying.” The mother sent me a photo of her son hugging a pillow which has a photo of his dad, which reduced me to tears.

Another mother told me about a physical visit she had last September, after six long months of separation. The toddler spontaneously hugged the father, breaking the necessary social distancing rules, so the prison promptly wrote to the mother banning the child indefinitely. I posted this astonishing letter on Twitter, and the decision was swiftly overturned.

At the start of pandemic, the Justice Secretary Robert Buckland promised to release 4,000 low risk prisoners slightly early, including 70 pregnant women, to create vital space for quarantining[viii] [ix]. With depressing predictability, the authorities completely bungled the entire process. Only 275 of the 4,000 eligible prisoners were ever released[x], and only 21 of pregnant women[xi] [xii]. This is especially shameful when compared to other countries. Iran, not normally associated with progressive human rights, gave compassionate leave to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe who had been detained on trumped up spying charges[xiii].

As the first lockdown eased in late 2020, HM Inspectorate of Prisons was finally allowed to enter some jails. The watchdog released a damning report this week revealing a decline in mental and physical health, and a rise in drug taking and self-harm. The inspectorate also highlighted a collapse in pre-release rehabilitation work, making ex-offenders ill equipped for life after prison which means more will turn back to crime.

There’s no question that most prison officers have performed a heroic service over the past year, and risk their lives every day. I’ve long demanded that officers should have full key worker status, and must be high up the vaccination list. But I was appalled by a spate of tasteless Tiktok videos of officers dancing in prison yards, often in full view of incarcerated inmates who hadn’t exercised for weeks.

These stories have all come from conversations I’ve recorded with dozens of prisoners for a podcast series, also called A Bit of a Stretch. But I wanted do more to help those stuck inside, so I asked my north London media friends to hand over their spare books which I drove to HMP Pentonville. I got a lovely note from the librarian saying how these were very well received on the wings. With the help of other authors including Antony Horrowitz, Deborah Moggach and Sathnam Sanghera, I’ve started Bang Up Books and convinced leading publishers to donate over ten thousand books to twenty prisons. These should hopefully ease the appalling suffering in our shamefully underfunded prisons, and maybe encourage the inmates towards a more enlightened path.

 

[i] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/ellen-degeneres-coronavirus-jail-show-watch-a9453941.html

[ii] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/measures-announced-to-protect-nhs-from-coronavirus-risk-in-prisons

[iii] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52449920

[iv] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/28/alarm-over-five-suicides-in-six-days-at-prisons-in-england-and-wales

[v] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/10/number-of-prisoners-in-england-and-wales-on-suicide-watch-rises-steeply

[vi] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/28/self-harm-among-female-prisoners-in-england-and-wales-at-record-high

[vii] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29369970

[viii] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/03/31/70-pregnant-women-mothers-released-prison-early-combat-coronavirus/

[ix] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/04/up-to-4000-inmates-to-be-temporarily-released-in-england-and-wales

[x] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/30/we-need-far-more-coronavirus-tests-in-british-prisons

[xi] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/12/coronavirus-only-55-prisoners-early-release-england-wales

[xii] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/aug/19/prisons-inspector-england-wales-warns-of-mental-health-problems-from-severe-coronavirus-restrictions

[xiii] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/20/nazanin-zaghari-ratcliffe-stay-out-of-prison-until-iran-makes-decision-on-fate

 

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Good Vibrations has worked in prisons and young offender institutions since 2003. We see the destructive effects on people of living within our overstretched, under-resourced criminal justice system. We want to understand how people can be better supported before, during and after their contact with the criminal justice system.  We have commissioned a series of blogs from a range of experts, including those with lived experience and their families. Every Thursday for the next four months, we will bring a different voice with their own unique perspective and ideas. At the end of the series we will publish a report drawing together the themes and recommendations.

‘Hozho is not something you can experience on your own,
the eagles tell us as they lock talons in the stratosphere
and fall to the earth as one.

 Hozho is interbeauty.’

 Lyla June Johnston – Hozho

 

As a trainee Good Vibrations facilitator, my first visit to a prison was not a typical one. As I approached the grey, hunched, fort-like building, went through security, and was led through a maze of corridors, locked doors and barbed wire fence I felt my body tense up with claustrophobia and anxiety. This combined uneasily with the guilty relief that I was a visitor – not a resident – of such a place. Yet not long after this, I was in a nondescript backroom surrounded by tuned, ornate bronze Gamelan instruments resonating together in harmony, improvising and composing a unique and beautiful piece of music (listen below) with a group of smiling strangers. My nervous system was confused, to say the least.

I don’t recall exactly when I heard the expression ‘collective joy’, but I remember that satisfying sense of something being named which needed naming. In a basic sense, it refers to that transcendent feeling of connection and creative communion we can experience only in relationship with others. We need collective joy, and, after a year of lockdown restrictions and enforced ‘social isolation’, we are missing it now, more than ever. As such, we are in a better position than usual to imagine, in some miniscule way, what life might be like for the 80,000 odd people in the UK – and some nine million worldwide – who were isolated in prisons before the pandemic, and have suffered even harsher conditions since, locked up for an average of 22 hours a day.

Is there even any such thing as joy which isn’t collective? According to Jeremy Gilbert, a cultural theory academic and DJ I interviewed last summer for Good Vibrations, joy is ‘always sort of collective. You can experience collective joy sitting quietly in a library, relating to people through reading their books…’ . Yet there is something particularly important about the ability to experience connection with other humans in the flesh; the multidimensional complexity of another being responding to your own complexity in the moment.

Collective joy is in no way a given in the presence of other humans of course – in a traffic jam, say, or at a gathering at which you feel unwelcome or disconnected from, or even fearful of, the people around you. Some degree of safety (both real and perceived) and trust in the people around you is a necessary condition for collective joy. It is inevitably hard to access in an oppressive institutional setting like a prison. This is one of the main problems with the existing criminal justice system, as Gilbert puts it: ‘there’s a tendency for prison to produce people who come out more alienated than they went in, and less able to effectively relate to other people around them’.

This analysis is borne out by another moving interview with Good Vibrations past participant and former prisoner, Russ Haynes: ‘You’re on guard 24/7… the way I survived was to close up… you’re careful who you speak to, you’re really careful about what you say, where you go, who you interact with… and all of that happening on a day to day basis can be really mentally exhausting’. Yet even small, genuine experiences of collective joy can cultivate the ability to trust in others and see collectivity as a source of potential joy, empowerment and liberation, as he described recalling his first experience of a gamelan workshop:

‘There was something about it that was so… and this sounds really cringey but it’s the only one I can use to describe it… so spiritual. I just felt there was a sense of freedom. It was the first time I felt truly free to express how I was feeling through music. It took me away from my environment. I remember how I felt, it was so calming, it was so spiritual, it was so relaxing. That stone of anger that I had inside me was starting to break away and I was not only connecting with the guys around me, but connecting with the battle I was having inside of myself at the time. And it opened me up to experience emotions that I was suppressing because of my anger, because I didn’t want to be perceived as weak as I felt. The whole thing gave me an experience I needed at the time, which was to be able to relax and feel something. For me, it was my first step to communicating with the outside world, which before I was refusing to let in.’

Gilbert’s understanding of the phenomenon of collective joy is influenced by the 17th Century German philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In this understanding, it refers to ‘that dimension of any experience which is a product of even a microscopic enhancement of a subject’s capacities’. Collective joy is a form of freedom in other words. Not the kind of freedom associated with the rugged individual (usually male) hero, enforcing his will upon the world, but the empowered freedom you feel when you transcend your limited capacity as an individual via acting together, consensually and creatively with others. Prison in this sense restricts not just your literal freedom to move, but your ability and your natural instinct to access liberatory forms of collectivity. 

Collective joy, and the impacts of its absence, is not a topic relevant purely to the experience of prison, or even of lockdown. I think this concept means so much to me because, as someone who has experienced chronic depression since my early twenties, genuine collective joy feels like its opposite. Depression is the ultimate feeling of psychic isolation, alienation and disconnection; a prison of the soul. At its worst it is not a feeling of sadness, or even despair, but of nothingness, and it is very much a ‘disease of civilisation’ (i.e Western civilisation). Recovery and staying well for me has always been associated with an ability to reach out and connect with the people and the world around me.

The sad truth is, experiencing this kind of collectivity was, for many of us, an all too rare experience even before the pandemic.  This is not to say we crave collectivity all of the time, of course. Many of us, myself included, need and appreciate ‘alone’ time, but we are social mammals nonetheless. Forced isolation, and its associated affective state, loneliness, is not just an unpleasant emotional reality impacting our mental health, but is increasingly recognised as a devastating threat to physical health with a mortality risk impact akin to smoking.

Before ‘socially isolating’ became a public health instruction, it was mostly known as a public health problem, with increasing attempts to address it, and identify its deep root causes. Some point to the loss of community and shared spaces of collectivity associated with the decline of religion. I formerly worked as a Community Organiser for secular congregational community Sunday Assembly, founding a new congregation in the East End of London. Sunday Assembly was founded in 2013 by two comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, who wanted to recreate the feelings of community and connection they remembered from attending church in their youth, without the framing of a faith they had since lost.  They kept the basic ingredients of a church service; a reason to get up and be with others on a Sunday morning; a shared celebration of life in all its tragedy; an emphasis on community service and crucially communal singing – pop singalongs with a live band.

The first assemblies were a huge success and the idea quickly gained traction, leading to assemblies springing up around the world. Yet I remember the first time I attended an assembly, and the awkwardness and reluctance I felt – and felt others feel – when asked to stand and sing with a room of strangers. That feeling got easier to manage and bypass but never fully disappeared: though we crave it, collective joy doesn’t always come naturally anymore, because it’s culturally pretty alien to many of us. We can very quickly feel ‘self-conscious’ – worried about embarrassing our all-important individual selves. How many of us are able to dance and sing enthusiastically and freely without the aid of alcohol for instance? What does our culture do to our children – such natural dancers –  to inhibit them from doing so when they grow up?

Sunday Assembly East End

This line of inquiry has inherently political implications. Gilbert places at least some of the blame on the dominant political and economic ideology forced on the world over the last 50 years: neoliberalism:

‘Under advanced capitalist culture, neoliberal culture, we are discouraged from experiencing collectivity as joyful, we’re encouraged to think of any meaningful or satisfying experience as being by its nature private… we are encouraged to feel that the only truly satisfying and meaningful agency in the world is to buy something and to consume it… we’re encouraged to think of every aspect of lives in terms of something that we’re acquiring, something we’re buying, something we’re making an investment in from everything from relationships to education.’

This loss has deeper and older roots, however, and it is perhaps no accident that Good Vibrations employs a non-Western (Indonesian) musical form to facilitate experiences of collective joy. In ‘Dancing in the Streets – A History of Collective Joy’ Barbara Ehrenreich details the fascination and horror of early European colonialists when they witnessed the ‘almost ubiquitous practice of ecstatic ritual’, in which large groups of people in the cultures they encountered would ‘dance, sing or chant to a state of exhaustion and, beyond that, sometimes trance’. Such examples of collective joy and ritual ‘ecstasy’ are well known to anthropologists as universal human impulses, which have had to be heavily repressed to facilitate the strange, lonely and disconnected individual selfhood prized and developed in the West, then exported forcibly upon the rest of world over the last five hundred years or so. Even now the forms of music and dance we associate with contemporary Western cultures of collective joy, from jazz to techno, largely have their roots in the African diaspora.

Weekly ‘Tam Tam’ jam session in Montreal, Quebec

Experiences of collective joy, particularly through music, can facilitate deep healing, in the most inhospitable of conditions, supporting people who are locked up, whether in literal and psychological cell, to experience, even for a moment, the possibility of a world beyond. Yet this has lessons for our wider culture too, about what we’ve lost and what we need to heal collectively. Going further, it may even have implications for our relationship to not just ourselves and each other but the natural world. Can opening up to the world beyond our individual selfhood begin to undo the dangerous disconnection from the ecological foundations of life, which has in no small part facilitated the devastation we continue to wreck upon it?

Collective Joy in this sense seems to me to relate to the untranslatable word ‘Hozho’, said to be the most important word in Diné Bizaad, a Native American language, and described by Navajo poet Lyla June Johnston (quoted at the beginning) as a sense of ‘interbeauty’, in which we feel intimately connected to all of life. As ecological activist and philosopher, Joanna Macy argues, to truly transform our relationship to the natural world, instead of ‘caring’ for nature as an abstract other, we must ‘extend our notions of self-interest; ‘it would not occur to me to plead with you, “Don’t saw off your leg. That would be an act of violence.” It wouldn’t occur to me because your leg is part of your body. Well, so are the trees in the Amazon rain basin. They are our external lungs. We are beginning to realize that the world is our body.’

Ende Gelände anti-coal protest, 2016

This may sound like a standard hippie appeal to oneness. But the more we learn about ecology, biology and physics, the more it turns out the hippies were right, right?  Everything is connected, and, like love, this reality is only a superficial cliche to the extent it is abstract and disembodied. When you truly experience it, you know it. You feel great, you smile at the people and the world around you, and feel part of it again… yet you also open up yourself to deep grief at the violence we regularly do to each other and the biosphere. To ourselves. In this sense perhaps collective joy can only truly be accessed if we are prepared to open ourselves up to collective grief. Perhaps this is the deepest reason so many of us are resistant to it.

Perhaps it is time to open the gates and let it all in.

 

You can support the excellent work of Good Vibrations by donating to my fundraising page. I’ve taken on the huge challenge of running the London Marathon for the first time on Sunday 3 October in aid of the charity. I’m aiming to raise at least £1,500, so any help towards that target would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!

No. 5 in our blog series exploring creative approaches to transforming the criminal justice system.

Author: Charlotte Wise, Occupational Therapist based at HMP Stoke Heath

 

The role of an occupational therapist can vary depending on the area of practice but occupational therapy takes on a whole person approach to both mental and physical well-being in order to enable an individual to achieve their full potential (Royal College of Occupational Therapy, 2020).

I found occupational therapy when I was working in a medium secure hospital. The occupational therapists always appeared happy and keen to engage individuals. They offered the patients a variety of opportunities to participate in meaningful occupations including assessing self-care tasks, developing domestic skills, increasing leisure activities with an aim to encourage service users to be more independent and develop a positive daily routine.

The profession provided me with the opportunity to fulfil my passion – I had always been keen to work with individuals with mental health issues and a forensic history. I was keen to know why people commit crime, what leads them to these decisions in life, and to think about how I could help them rebuild their lives.

Over four years ago, I started working in the secondary mental health team at HMP Stoke Heath. I was keen to think about how I could apply my occupational therapy skills to the service users in the prison establishment and make improvements to their lives.

Much of the work I started and still do with the individuals on my caseload involves psychological interventions such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or Compassion Focused Therapy. This has great benefits to the individuals I work with, as being able to recognise and manage emotions more effectively can impact on their thoughts, feelings and behaviours, which will hopefully keep them out of trouble.

As my role developed further, I was keen to be more focused on the occupational therapy element of my practice and I started to introduce some new interventions to service users. This included a Recovery through Activity weekly group programme and working with the Good Vibrations team to offer a week-long intervention. These offered service users opportunities to engage in new occupations and make them think about activities that they used to enjoy.

Feedback from Recovery through Activity project indicated positive benefits for all participants involved. One patient reported that he had started to engage more in physical activities, and as a result he was sleeping better at night and getting up earlier. Following the Good Vibrations project, individuals reported that they felt better about themselves, felt happier, were feeling more confident, had improved relationships with others, improved listening skills and started taking part in more activities and groups.

At the present time, there are increased COVID restrictions in the prison establishment, meaning that prisoners are in their cells for long periods of the time, often up to 23 hours a day. During this time, I wanted to continue to utilise my occupational therapy skills, encouraging individuals to maintain a positive daily routine and engage in meaningful activities.

For the past 12 months, I have reached out to a significant number of prisoners to offer them additional distraction materials including colouring, puzzles, board games, relaxation activities, in-cell workouts and competitions. This has been a great opportunity to spread the work about my role and how we can help others even in the restrictions which are forced upon us.

The occupational therapy service is available for all the prisoners who reside at HMP Stoke Heath, they can be referred via a healthcare professional, prison staff or self-refer. However, there is only me, and there are 700 prisoners in the establishment, so as a result I am unable to help everyone. I hope that, in the future, there will be an opportunity for the employment of another occupational therapist to assist with providing further meaningful occupations to the prisoners here, and add to what is already available through education and vocational opportunities.

I feel the role of the occupational therapist can have a significant impact in the prison environment, offering individuals additional chances and opportunities which they may not have experienced in the community. Occupational therapists will look at the person as a whole and address what the person would like to achieve, their goals and their ambitions. Encouraging individuals to focus on what they would want to achieve, as opposed to what they are being asked to do in a sentence plan, makes this more person-centred. Increasing the focus onto the individuals can encourage empowerment and hope, increase their self-esteem and self-confidence. Developing these skills could assist individuals on leaving custody.

It is difficult to know whether occupational therapy has an impact on reoffending rates. However, I can only presume that if people have other occupations to engage in, feel more motivated to engage in pro-social activities and feel more positive about themselves, this can only have good effects on their physical and mental well-being.

 

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Good Vibrations has worked in prisons and young offender institutions since 2003. We see the destructive effects on people of living within our overstretched, under-resourced criminal justice system. We want to understand how people can be better supported before, during and after their contact with the criminal justice system.  We have commissioned a series of blogs from a range of experts, including those with lived experience and their families. Every Thursday for the next four months, we will bring a different voice with their own unique perspective and ideas. At the end of the series we will publish a report drawing together the themes and recommendations.