It’s the little things that are indicative of the big stuff.
My work at HMP Manchester finished recently – a project that has seen me there for a few days a month over two years delivering a program of my design that had staff and men serving sentences participating together. And yes, that’s really not normal in our prisons.
I’ve experienced every emotion you can think of – and a few you probably can’t – and had to face questions, (often in the dark of the night) I’ve rarely or never had to wrestle with.
Some of that wrestling is still going on.
And that’s despite the successes – of which there have been many and varied and often unlooked-for.
To muddy the waters even more you can take your pick how you define the work.
Headline numbers:
15 three-day programs with a retention average of 91% attended by 10% of the total staff and 17% of the men.
Headline numbers in context: HMP Manchester Urgent Notification – HM Inspectorate of Prisons
Independent impact report of my work: Prison – Andy Mouncey
HM Inspectorate of Prisons verdict on my stuff page 10 para 1.7a: Report on an unannounced inspection of HMP Manchester by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons
The problem with Embracing Everything and recognising that every measure is a measure of Something and many somethings make The Whole Thing is that it’s utterly rational and fundamentally unsatisfying.
Can’t there just be a One Thing?
Turns out there can be and there is and it’s two words:
THANK YOU
Very rarely – before Manchester anyway – one of the men serving time would look me in the eye and say those two words. It usually came at the end of the program as I was making time to say my person-to-person goodbyes, and it always came from the heart.
‘Cos you always know when it comes from the heart.
Then at Manchester it happened multiple times – still occasionally but at a frequency I’ve never experienced before – and the men typically wanted to explain the why of it.
That was new too.
I quickly learned to pay attention when it happened not least because the ripple effects would keep, well – rippling. I’d recall on the drive home and I’d keep recalling for a long time afterwards. It was I realised, my One Thing:
VALIDATION.
My most vivid memory of this was from a young man on one of my last programs who I’d been advised had learning difficulties – not particularly unusual in our prison population – and a whole string of behavioural stuff going on too. (Again, who doesn’t?)
And he just got his head down and got on with it.
Once we figured that if he had someone to stick with and copy his maintenance requirement dropped through the floor and he became almost unrecognisable to some of the attending staff.
‘Thank you for coming in’, he said after we were all still grinning away from our graduation ceremony.
‘Nobody does anything like this for us, ‘he told me. ‘Nobody comes in and gives like you do. It reminds us that we are all human – and we all really need that in here.’
