Two things recently happened to shed a bright light on the What & Why of my work in our prison system.
International Charity Alliance Of Sport did a feature piece Run For Your Life: How Physically-Active Learning (PAL) is adding value ‘both sides of the bars’ – Alliance of Sport and a very skilled professional took some wonderful shots of me doing my prison-thing.
Andy Aitchison Photographer first photographed my work in prison a few years ago when I was at HMP Wymott near Preston. It was a fairly small suite of shots but the first time I’d had a window into me and mine given that prisons generally have a NO stance on cameras and photos.
‘So that’s what I / it looks like,’ I remember thinking at the time.
Pause.
‘Not smiling much, am I?’
I really wasn’t. I even wrote blog about it Why. So. Serious?* – Andy Mouncey given I thought it was so out of character. It was only relatively recently that the penny dropped about a thing called ‘vicarious trauma’ What Is Vicarious Trauma? How To Cope and I began to retrospectively construct my own timeline in an effort to establish my cause-effects. And there was the picture from 2023: The internal wrestling match manifest as a stoic demeaner.
Oh.
Fast forward a couple of years and Andy captures me at HMP Hindley last month in the midst of orchestrating a group of staff and men on the final day of one of my programs.
This time he’s with me for longer, the suite of shots is bigger and I get to see every aspect – including my aspect – from someone else’s perspective.
What you see in these shots is a mixed group of staff and men serving sentences participating together – something that is quite rare in our prison system – as I’m helped by my mentors who I select from those who have done well on previous programs.
There’s a lot of physical Doing – I make a game and a challenge out of pretty much everything – which makes the bit Learning more fun. The hard part is to realise that it’s all so much easier and worthwhile if done in Collaboration – and we all have to come to that party in our own time and our own way.
