At Ease Poetry Workshop Project - Introduction

I have worked with The Prison Radio association a few times previously. From an award nominated and radio times pick of the week BBC 4 radio documentary to a few stints on their variously produced podcasts.

They knew my background, ex military, former prisoner but crucially a passion or one could say an obsession with poetry and writing as a whole. I was delighted and surprised to be asked if I could design and deliver three poetry workshops for male veterans. These pieces of work would then be broadcast for remembrance day on At Ease, the regular show for veterans in custody on National Prison Radio.

This was at once a thrilling and terrifying opportunity. I said yes immediately before I had a chance to properly think about it. I am a published and accomplished poet but have never done anything like this before.

I had once run a creative writing workshop for a local charity in Rotherham some years previously, however this was completely new territory for me to take responsibility and ownership of building something from the ground up

I mean I love poetry, but could I help someone else to love it too? Also, we often take our ability to read and write for granted. I read a statistic a few years ago during my own sentence that said close to 70% of prisoners read at a seven year-old level.

I personally was an avid reader from a young age, books were my escape from some of the more difficult parts of my abusive and chaotic youth and quickly became the same escape from reality during my sentence. A prisoner is usually allowed 10 books per week and I worked in the prison library so had access to an unlimited amount of reading material. I would often read those ten books and more each week I was inside.

It was also through the library that I had the privilege of becoming something that could help me immensely in the future. Not just for the NPR workshops but my day job as a peer mentor too.

The Shannon trust is a wonderful literary charity set up to combat the epidemic of illiteracy within the prison estate. It developed a programme called “ Turning pages”, a peer led reading and writing mentorship scheme. After an initial training course facilitated in the prison library these prison reading mentors would teach other prisoners who expressed interest in improving their literacy skills.

I remember one moment whilst working with a particular individual. A foreign national who like myself had committed serious and violent offences. We sat at the window as a weak spring sun was rising above the clouds briefly illuminating us both. We were both hugging each other as he had just read the first four lines from an English language children's book for the first time in his life.

He was going to be able to write letters but more importantly for him, read a book to his daughters. Two men, in prison greys sitting in a moment of sunshine in the dark and gritty world of the uk prison system. Sharing a moment of great emotional vulnerability and triumph together in a world where such things are not only unusual but often dangerous.

All of this was in mind on the day of the first workshop, and as we approached the prison my nerves began to tinge on feelings of anxiety & fear, unexpectedly triggered by my previous experiences.

When one thinks of a typical men's prison what does the mind conjure up?Large sprawling U.S style complexes, as the movies or shows we like to watch depict? HMP Berwyn feels exactly like that on the inside. Mainly in that it is in fact a sprawling and impossibly large facility, the largest prison in the UK.

Every effort had been made to make it feel more habitable and less stark, prisoners art is displayed on the walls and the interior and grounds are spotlessly clean and well maintained. This felt a far cry from my own time inside. At least one of the prisons I resided in was often ankle deep in waste thrown from prisoners' windows in the tiny postage stamp exercise yards.

I always tried to dump my rubbish in my bin bagged up but when we take away the “privilege” we have on the outside of being able to dispose of our own rubbish one must improvise, and unfortunately for those allocated the job to clean up this often wasn't just food waste either.

Imagine a sweltering hot summer night, you have had curry, a tuna salad or some other pungent delight from the “ a la canteen” menu. Your cell, or “ pad” is stinking and you have but a small plastic bucket as a bin in your tiny cell. Instead of dealing with the smell one would unceremoniously stuff it out the two inch gap in the window and leave it for the rats and pigeons to fight over. In contrast, Berwyn was remarkably clean and lacking these rubbish waves beneath cell windows.

Getting through security was the usual formality of showing identity documents and searches . This was a new one for me too, a quick pat down and running my property through metal detectors and x ray scanners. Not the usual occurrence of the rare time you leave prison as someone serving time, handcuffed to an officer for a hospital appointment or court date.

One would have to strip naked and squat on the ground in front of an officer and be ordered to cough. This ensures that anything secreted in one's “prison pocket “ is forced out by the body's positioning and the coughing. I always hated this, I understand why it's necessary but always found it embarrassing and demeaning, especially as someone who experienced sexual trauma in their youth.

It struck me however that after a few months even I had acclimatised myself to it, and would without a second thought drop my pants and squat and cough if ordered to by an officer, then just go to work or chapel or whatever I had on that day. I was so desensitised whilst inside that I didn't expect to have the stark flashbacks I experienced when I re entered a prison as a visitor

Meeting the veterans in custody officer we began the long trek through the facilities, through multiple locked gates and up and down stairs until we found ourselves in a nondescript room adjacent to one of the wings. We sat for a few minutes while we waited with hope that someone would actually turn up…