Words and sentences

‘I’m not here to rehabilitate,’ says Pamela, who teaches creative writing to prisoners in Northern Ireland. She doesn’t think of her work as being about bars, bare walls and what happens when they leave jail. It’s all about meeting the prisoner as a person. She soon realised ‘how different prison writing is’. It’s much more direct, heartfelt. Jamie wrote a poem after just half an hour in Pamela’s class. He gave it the title ‘My journey in the care system’. More than a quarter of all prisoners were brought up in care, a figure that rises to almost half for those aged under 25. To Jamie it was a relief, ‘getting that finally out in the open’. Now his poem is published in the magazine Time In, which Pamela creates with her students.

She and Jamie were talking to Carlo Gebler on Inside Stories, the Sunday night feature on Radio 3 (produced by Conor Garrett). Gebler has spent almost 30 years as a tutor in the prison system and is accustomed to the strangeness of being in a cell with a high-security student. ‘Being meaningfully engaged while in prison through art or education,’ he argues, ‘is surely what every prisoner should be.’ But he, too, is adamant that it’s not about rehabilitation, about making better people for the good of society. It’s about giving prisoners the basic human right to education, which so many of them have missed out on because of chaotic lives at home, school exclusions, trouble that often begins as early as nine or ten before they’ve even left primary school.