How art reaches the parts the prison service cannot
Ray and Violet Donovan, photo ©Mark Johnson - www.markjohnson.eu
‘Art’ in prison constitutes more than just drawing five bar gates on walls, and in fact represents a major force for the rehabilitation of offenders.
The Koestler Trust, a charity, has spent nearly 50 years encouraging inmates’ artistic expression and emphasising to the public the beneficial role of art by holding an annual exhibition of prisoners’ artwork.
Each year thousands of works are submitted to the trust’s offices next to imposing Victorian edifice of HMP Wormwood Scrubs in West London by inmates from Britain’s prisons, young offenders’ institutes, asylum removal centres and secure psychiatric units. This year for the first time the offenders’ work has been curated by a seven strong team of members of the public who have been victims of crime, and The Big Issue found that the experience has had a profound impact on both.
Tim Robertson, the Koestler Trust’s chief executive, said that the exhibition sometimes caused raised eyebrows, with reports in the press claiming that celebrating prisoners’ art is “offensive” to victims of crime.
“It’s impossible to summarise what all victims of crime feel,” he replies. “They are all different, but no doubt some will feel very aggrieved and angry about what has happened to them.
“But I was mugged on the tube, and while I want to know they were eventually caught, the last thing I want to know is that prison brutalised them further. I want to hear they are now more sensitive to others, more aware of their actions, not less,” he says.
“Art, which is all about connecting with and communicating with an audience, is the best way of doing that.”
One artist, for example, now works for the trust. Married father-of-three Daniel Hogg spent two years in prison until this year after causing death by dangerous driving. His painting, Emptiness Does Not Exist, came to him after spending hours reading philosophy in his cell. He is now studying art at college.
Hogg believes art also provides a gateway to help inmates move toward improving their education, and so increasing their chances of reoffending. “Many people’s recollections of school might not be happy, so associating adult education with school is not helpful. Art can be a gateway, a great way to break down people’s resistance.”
Clockwise from top left: Diversity of Hope (Sizwe Dladla), Shout to the Top (anon), Winner (Rafal Boguszewski), Emotional Release (anon).
Firsttine Pierre, from Croydon, began volunteering for a witness support service after her brother was attacked outside a club at Christmas 1999. He and his cousins had just tossed out a group of men making trouble, but as he turned to go inside one hit him with an iron bar. He was lucky to escape with his life – the blow would probably have killed him were it not for his thick dreadlocks piled up on his head to cushion the blow. He suffers damaged hearing, vision and memory loss.
Witness intimidation meant Firsttine, her brother and his family had to go into hiding. “It was the worst time in my life. I was so angry. I was like, hang ‘em all. It was a big step doing this, but I felt I needed to do it,” she says. “And you know, it has brought so much peace to me.”
“Once I’d seen this I was raring to go,” says Pierre, originally from Dominica, pointing to a tropical scene entitled Everglades, by an anonymous artist from Feltham Young Offenders Institute. “I remember when I was young my dad climbed up a tree like this to get me my first coconut. It reminds me of those days,” she says grinning in reverie, “It’s really makes my smile widen.”
Picking around 150 paintings from over 5,600 was an enormous task. “But it was uplifting,” the 49-year-old says. “I looked at the art for what it was, not the fact that it was made by an offender. And once I’d done that it opened up a lot of doors just looking at it.”
“We’re all victims in a way,” she adds. “I’m a victim of crime, but they’re victims of circumstance. We don’t know the circumstances behind their actions, only the facts.”
And perhaps in some way, she says, without having gone to prison the artists would not have found in themselves the skills that are now on display.
“I can’t believe where this had taken me emotionally, mentally, even physically,” she says. “I had so much hate in me. If this art is what rehabilitation does, then I’m happy to be part of it.”
Her involvement has helped her brother too. “It didn’t hit him what I’d done at first, but he asked me to explain it to him. I told him, the anger is keeping you in prison too,” she says.
Of the men that disabled and nearly killed her brother, she hopes prison has given them time to think about how their life could have been: “It’s not about proving they’re sorry to me, it’s about proving to themselves they are worthy of more to life than a cell and being told when to eat or wash, when to get up or go to sleep.”
Two curators, Ray and Violet Donovan, experienced every parent’s nightmare when in 2001 their sons, Christopher and Phillip, were randomly attacked by a group of teenagers. Christopher, just 18, was beaten and had his head kicked “as if taking a penalty” and after being knocked into the road was hit by a car whose driver said in court she thought he “was a bundle of old clothes”.
He died in hospital from brain injuries suffered during the attack, and one man and two teenagers were sentenced to life for his murder.
Ray and Violet, committed Christians who have forgiven their son’s murderers, now work with restorative justice project Sycamore Tree, which introduces serving criminals to victims of crime.
Ray says: “We come in and tell our story, but a lot of them say: we don’t have any victims, our crimes are victimless. And we tell them about the ripple effect.
“For example, one man says he only burgles warehouses – what about the manager? The company’s insurance premiums going up? What about employees laid off, their families, their children? The effects are much wider than they think.”
Clockwise from top left: The Long Walk Home (anon), The Big Blue Door (Claude Chain), Salvation (Thomas Shanks), Emptiness Does Not Exist (Daniel Hogg).
In one of the paintings Ray selected – Salvation, by Thomas Shanks of HMP Dovegate – he perceived something he recognises in prisoners. The pastel drawing shows a figure with his head in his hands at the bottom of a pit, seemingly oblivious or unwilling to grab the rope thrown down for him.
“I see this all the time. People like us come in and tell our stories, and they feel shame, guilt, they feel worthless, like they’re not worthy of forgiveness,” he said.
Some may find it surprising that inmates feel guilt toward their actions. “Oh definitely,” Ray says, gesturing at the painting. “They might put on an act on the landings, but when the cell door closes, they’re like that.”
Art, he said, could engender the most extraordinary changes in prisoners. “I’ve seen the most hardened, violent inmates become model prisoners after time spent with a paintbrush,” he says.
The couple have been in touch with one Christopher’s killers who expressed an interest in meeting, but later backed out. “He wrote to me, saying he’d never forgive himself for what he’d done,” says Ray. “The door’s always open for him to meet us. But I told him if he didn’t forgive himself, he’d never move on at all.”
Although hard statistical research is thin, prison-based art projects that have followed up their outcomes report dramatic results – often between 50 and 90 per cent reduction in reoffending rates – in Britain and the US. Robertson is confident the new government understands the importance of targeted and properly funded rehabilitation in stopping revolving-door offending, quoting prisons minister Crispin Blunt MP, who opened the exhibition by saying there were “two sides” to rehabilitating offenders: “Changing the behaviour of offenders so that they lead law-abiding lives, and helping society accept ex-offenders back into employment, family life, and communities – the opportunities that can help people turn their lives around for good.”
[This article was originally published in The Big Issue, October 2010]
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I would like to buy a print of Salvation by Thomas Shanks .any idea where I could purchase it?
I very much doubt there are prints, but you might be able to buy the original. Your best bet is to contact the Koestler Trust.