Session 4: Arts Projects in Prison
Chair: Diana Medlicott

Jean Trounstine - Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women’s Prison
Author, actvist, director, and Professor of Humanities at Middlesex Community College, Massachusetts, USA

In this paper, I will share stories that come from my ten years of teaching and directing plays with women behind bars in Massachusetts, USA, stories about the possibility of change. My thesis is that art has the potential to transform lives and that it is one of the most under-utilized tools we have in the criminal justice system.

I will share stories about women I met in prison and the writing and theatre that they produced as they grew behind bars. Dolly - a grandmother who brought her knitting to classes, started a battered women’s group and earned her Associates Degree while incarcerated. Bertie - a young Jamaican beauty with sass who wore hats to class even though she had nowhere to go. Mamie - a large African American woman, the prison gardener, who brought dried flowers and made cards for her family, got cancer and told me after they shipped her to a prison hospital, “I have my own room, a window. I look out on a patch of green. It’s almost like being free.” Rose who wanted to be onstage because she needed to get away from the HIV which haunted her daily - and in 1986, we knew little about HIV - Rose who felt feared and shunned by guards and inmates alike, said she wanted “to be someone else, even if just for a night.” Even Kit - the class clown, an Irish-American considered ugly, scraggly, more a homeless woman than an inmate, who told me that her kids were taken away and that she came to class to ease her pain and “to learn another way of living than the streets.”

I will tell stories of how I came to the prison to teach them English - to give them skills - and I did, but it was a shock to find women who bared themselves, who shared their troubles, their mistakes, their flaws,and women whose yearning allowed them to find hope and solace through art. Finally, I will tell stories of the creative process behind bars, of producing plays, the adaptation process, rehearsing and improvising, of the kinds of transformations I witnessed in spite of the oppressive environment of prison.

Mary Stephenson - A Distant Voice in the Darkness
Playwright and Writer in Residence, HMP Channings Wood, UK

Soon after starting in January 1998 as Writer in Residence at Channings Wood, a medium security prison for adult men in Devon, UK, I realised that to focus only on writings, I would be turning my back on prisoners with literacy problems. My paper looks at how prisoners may be given a voice through all the arts, not just the written word. I will provide examples of the projects we have undertaken:

ConCerto - the music project in which a group of men devised music inspired by prisoners’ poetry on the theme of childhood. Translating those stories, so many relating to experiences of abuse, into music and song for a concert before an audience of visitors and prisoners.

Journey Through Drugs - residents of the Drug Therapeutic Community relating their own journeys from first experiment through crime and incarceration to new hope. Using their music, improvised drama, poetry and reminiscences, the men and their families worked with BBC drama producer Shaun MacLoughlin to create three 20minute episodes for radio.

The Spare Phone Card - when Allyn killed a man in a fight it was the start of a life sentence for murder. His son Rhys was born 4 months later and in the following years father and son built a very special relationship over the telephone. In collaboration with Allyn I wrote this radio play to dramatise the situation so many imprisoned mothers and fathers find themselves in. Allyn himself took the lead role, supported by a cast of prisoners and actors.

Con Air - the prison radio station that now enables all men at Channings Wood to tell their own stories.