Kim Townsend

It always scares me how little people know about what goes on in our prisons. Here is an eye opening graphic with some worrying statistics about prison in the US. Apparently it costs the US government more to send a person to prison for a year than to fund their place at Princeton for a year. Now that would be fine if they had a state of the art prison system that transforms lives and communities, but I don’t think that is the case! It might also be more acceptable if they had a higher education system that ensured equal access to all, based on ability rather than income, but I don’t think that is the case either!

Whatever your view on crime and prisons you have to sit up and take notice of the disproportionate amount that we spend on the criminal justice system. OK this graphic is about the US, but the statistics in the UK are equally as worrying. According to a Prison Reform Trust report the annual average cost per prisoner in this country is £45,000. Do the results suggest that it is worth spending this? Have you noticed a vast decrease in reoffending rates? Do prisoners come out of our prisons feeling able to live law-abiding and productive lives? I think in a vast number of cases the answer is no.

The statistic I found interesting in the image below is that if the US released all of its prisoners and sent them to a University of California college they would save themselves £7billion. Now there’s an idea that might actually work! It can’t be worse than what we currently do at any rate.

Created by: Public Administration

Just a couple of words of wisdom that I believe to be true about the way we should treat and nurture each other in any setting: schools, communities, the workplace, families, friendships. All relationships.

I first saw this on a good friend’s Facebook wall who is a teacher in a prison in London. Good teachers know the importance of finding the genius within everyone. Effective community leaders, managers, and parents know it too.

I used to work in Brixton Prison in London where I taught offenders to make radio programmes for their own in-house radio station. In 2009 one of my students at the time, Tis, had the chance to interview on our radio station former MP, and ex-con, Jonathan Aitken about his experiences of being in prison. Tis, who’s 24 and extremely ambitious, had done such an amazing interview that he won a Sony Radio Award that year – the first ever serving prisoner to do so!

Being a motivated and enterprising type of person he has kept in touch with Aitken ever since, and now on the outside they’re good friends. On Tuesday night they arranged an event in Camden at which Tis did a follow up interview with Jonathan about what life is like on the outside.

It was a fascinating listen, they talked about their respective demises, how life was on the inside, and the struggles they faced when trying to reintegrate into society. The two men are obviously worlds apart: Tis grew up on a West-London estate where opportunities to make something of yourself were few and far between – you can imagine something of his upbringing from the big scar down his face that he was left with after a knife crime incident in his area. Aitken on the other hand, is Eaton and Oxford educated and has had a lot of good opportunities in life leading to a very illustrious career in politics.

It was clear, though, listening to them that despite their differences there was something stronger that united them – the experience of hitting absolute rock bottom, of life as they knew it falling apart (albeit of their own doing), and having their liberty taken away from them. No matter where you come from, and what life experience you have, there’s nothing that can prepare you for that.

During an audience Q&A session at the end I asked them what advice they would give to people in prison now. Tis said that in prison your liberty has been taken away from you, but you have to remember that you still have your mind, you still have the ability to learn and to change and to make something of yourself. He said you have to count your blessings and embrace your challenges in life and then you will go far. Jonathan Aitken said that you have to not blame others for your own mistakes, take responsibility for what you’ve done, and move on, taking all the opportunities that come your way.

Incredibly inspiring answers, and I think most of us could probably apply those principles and be better off for it whether we’ve been in prison or not. Learning to deal with the difficulties of life and to find your place in the world is something that we all have to do, but it’s often the case that people in prison are having to do it to a much greater extent. Indeed I often felt when teaching in the prison that I learnt just as much from my students as I passed on to them. I showed them how to make radio programmes but they showed me how to cope when everything goes wrong, what it looks like to have to rebuild yourself from scratch, what the true meaning of hope is. I could go on.

It just seems obvious to me, then, that if prisoners are invested in and given the right opportunities, they have the potential to contribute to society like anyone else. In fact in many cases prisoners’ experiences make them better equipped to help other vulnerable communities upon release because they often have first hand experience of what that community is going through.

Tis, having been given a second chance and the opportunity to learn new skills through radio on the inside has turned his life around and is now doing community media work with young people on the outside. He has not only improved his own life but he’s trying to prevent others from making the same mistakes as he did.

Doesn’t it make so much more sense economically and socially for him to be doing that than the alternative of being locked behind bars at tax-payers expense and forgotten about?

Something Jonathan Aitken said at this event sums it up for me: “We all mess up sometimes, some of us very publicly and disastrously, and some of us behind closed doors – we should recognise that as a society and give people a second chance – become a second chance society”.