For the few readers who don’t know which mainland local authorities have no railway stations, they are: Midlothian and Scottish Borders.
The world of the children 1
Kenneth Roy
The world of the children 2
Angus Skinner and others
The world of the children 3
Maggie Mellon
Last September I spent a pleasant afternoon sharing custard creams and cheese puffs with an arsonist, a rapist and a murderer. They were really interesting men – intense, engaged, open and insightful, and when the gate locked behind me I was left unable to reconcile the evil crimes they had committed with the men I’d been joking with only moments earlier.
This is the appeal of HMP Grendon: prisoners undergo almost constant therapy resulting in men who want to talk to you about their experiences and are proud of the work they are doing to improve themselves. Opened in 1962 as an experimental psychiatric prison providing treatment for prisoners with anti-social personality disorders, Grendon is the only prison in the UK run entirely as a therapeutic community. There should be many more.
A therapeutic community (TC) can be described as a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week, 52-weeks-a-year commitment to analysing your behaviour to try to gain insight and understanding into why you ended up in prison. Inmates live in five separate communities where staff and elected prisoners run group therapy sessions which challenge prisoners’ offending and institutional behaviour. Prisoners have a significant involvement in decision-making and the practicalities of running the units – a structure deliberately designed to encourage personal responsibility. It differs greatly from the normal prison existence in which prisoners are stopped from doing anything for themselves.
The media have persuaded the public that prison is like a holiday camp. You’ll read things like ‘prolific burglar Ryan Smith enjoys spending his days playing Xbox and watching tv, this is how society rewards those that terrorise our communities’. As if putting an Xbox in a bleak box-like cell, designed for one man and holding two, suddenly negates the fact that it’s a holiday camp you cannot leave. But that’s another argument.
The point is that at Grendon you aren’t locked up for 20 hours a day rotting your brain in front of a tv screen. Engaging with Grendon’s intensive regime of group therapy is a challenging process. Living in therapy, as it were, and playing an active part in it raises difficulties for every prisoner. The men I met on my visit last year all told the same story. They knew that you had a better chance of progressing your sentence if you’d been to Grendon, so they thought they could breeze through it only pretending to take it seriously. But after the first few weeks they realised you can’t fake it, you really do have to open up to your group, deeply assess what has happened in your life to lead you to this point. Despite the more relaxed approach to many aspects of prison life, prisoners often view Grendon as the most testing establishment in which they’ve spent part of their sentence.
It would be easy to blind you with statistics of reoffending rates broken down by offence, length of stay, number of previous convictions and so on, but the simplest thing to say is that men who spend 18 months or more in Grendon are 60% less likely to commit crime after prison. With reconviction rates at an all-time high across the spectrum, this is hugely impressive and surely a case for creating more therapeutic prisons.
Unfortunately the opposite is happening. The future of Grendon is greatly threatened by budget cuts, most notably the reduction of staff. Cuts to staff numbers have resulted in the cancellation of groups on an increasingly regular basis, and residents spending more and more time in their cells. Staff-prisoner relationships are at the core of any successful prison, but no more so than at Grendon where staff facilitate therapy sessions and gain the trust and respect of inmates who have often spent years battling authority.
In a study into prisoner perspectives, one man said of addressing his problems that ‘this was possible only because of the special relationships which exists between staff and inmates and between inmates themselves – it makes you feel like a human being again’. Thinking of yourself as a worthy, active member of society is often cited as crucial in choosing to desist from crime.
Cumulative budget cuts mean that the prison’s capacity to deliver an effective therapeutic regime is being eroded year on year. The government argues that it is committed to a rehabilitation revolution, but in the case of HMP Grendon it may be missing a trick. While there are many offenders for whom a stay in a therapeutic community would not work, surely it is cheaper in the long run to spend money on proven successes which result in less crime and, one would certainly hope, a much smaller prison population in the future.
Grendon is widely praised for providing a safe and caring environment for some of our most serious offenders. Although around 90% of prisoners at Grendon are serving an indeterminate sentence for a violent offence, the reports of the chief inspector of prisons routinely commend its humanity, decency, safety and quality of staff-prisoner relationships – something you wouldn’t expect from a prison population of high-risk, psychologically disturbed offenders with complex needs. In contrast with most penal regimes, there is an inherent optimism in its functioning. There is a fundamental belief that people can change and therefore the prison sets an agenda that looks for the best in people rather than one that anticipates and looks for the worst. One prisoner said:
What surprised me was how warm and friendly the inmates were. I had been expecting the normal cold, hostile prison welcome but these men were friendly and actually made an effort to talk to me. It was a million miles away from the harsh prison regimes, violence and mass paranoia that I had experienced in every
other prison.
I believe Grendon is a beacon of hope for the prison service and should be protected, supported and replicated many times over to allow hard-working prison staff to continue reforming and rehabilitating those who want to turn their backs on a life of crime.
Emma Wicken works for the Prison Reform Trust. She presented this paper at a recent course of the Young UK and Ireland Programme, organised by the SR team
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