The Locked up Living Podcast: Surviving and thriving in prisons and other challenging environments

64. Tyrone Walker. Re-entry into USA society after 25 years in prison

Tyrone Walker entered the American prison system at the age of 19. In this candid conversation he describes where he came from, what it was like entering prison and the benefit he gained from the wisdom of a particular older peer.
After serving nearly 25 years in prison, Tyrone earned a certificate in business and entrepreneurship through the Georgetown Pivot Program. His Pivot Program internship with the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) led to a full-time position, in which he used his lived experience and subject matter expertise to effect policy changes. There, Tyrone spent two years advocating for sentencing reform and managing JPI’s projects around D.C’s Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act (IRAA) and Second Chance Amendment Act. As Director of Reentry Services with the Prisons and Justice Initiative, he supports students with their reentry needs both before and after release. He believes that helping our men and women while they are still on the inside is the most effective way to bridge the gap towards a successful reentry. When he is not working, he is taking classes online to earn his bachelor’s degree in political science.

62. Jeff Grant. What’s it like for a lawyer to serve time?

This is a moving story which gives an account of a man's travel from a position of trust and respect to drug use, criminality and prison. Through self reflection and mentoring Jeff remade his life to make a positive contribution for the benefit of others.
For more than 20 years, Jeff served as managing attorney of a 20+ employee law firm headquartered in New York City representing family-owned and closely-held businesses and their owners.  We invited Jeff onto the podcast after reading his story in New Yorker.
In 2001, after an addiction to prescription opioids he committed a white collar crime and served almost fourteen months in a Federal prison over the course of 2006/07. When Jeff left prison, he started his own re-entry by earning a Master of Divinity majoring in Social Ethics.
After graduating from divinity school, Jeff was called to serve at an inner city church in Bridgeport, CT as Associate Minister and Director of Prison Ministries. He then co-founded Progressive Prison Ministries, Inc. (Greenwich, CT), the world’s first ministry serving the white collar justice community.   On May 5, 2021, Jeff’s law license was reinstated by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York.
He is once again in private practice and is committed to using his legal expertise and life experience to benefit others.
 
Online white collar support group
https://prisonist.org/white-collar-support-group/
Progressive Prisons Ministries
https://prisonist.org
Bio
https://grantlaw.com/bio
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/30/life-after-white-collar-crime
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/380464
 

61. David Boyle. Tick Box Culture

Our guest has been described as “part writer, part journalist, part politico, part historian, part economist and mostly brains, intellect and common sense”.  He’s also been described as “the finest radical voice of this generation”.  We came across David Boyle last year when  reading his wonderfully subversive “Tickbox” which explores the “insidious philosophy of automation and the misuse of data that weighs heavily upon us”.  It’s impossible to work in the public sector and read his book and not experience a huge wave of overwhelming familiarity.  In fact, those of us who work for the NHS but within a prison are unfortunate enough to experience a double dose of corporate inefficiency.   Last yearNaomi invited David along to have a conversation at a conference the Fens Unit was due to hold to celebrate its 20th year anniversary but unfortunately Coronavirus put paid to those plans.   So I am really pleased that I’ve managed to find an opportunity for us to sit down and have that conversation today instead. 

60 25 minute cut. Gareth Ross & Lucy Reading compare culture across different prison wings of a high secure prison

Fifteenth of January, a year ago, Naomi Murphy and David Jones published the first Locked up Living Podcast. Fifty nine episodes later we return to the very first one in a specially edited version.
In this episode Gareth Ross and Lucy Reading told us about their recently published research which describes the social climate across therapeutic and non thereapeutic wings in a high secure prison. Looking back we can see the significance of the finding that a change in culture, which need not be expensive, can make a major change to the rehabilitative effectiveness of a prison setting.
 

59. Deborah Powney. Male victims of coercive control.

Deborah Powney is a lecturer in Criminal Justice and a final year PhD Candidate specialising in recovery and growth in female and male victims of intimate partner abuse, domestic violence and coercive control.  Having a particular focus on male victims, she has conducted two international studies throughout the pandemic to investigate the types, levels and impact of the abuse experienced by men across the world. A survivor of partner abuse herself, she prides herself on being an evidence-based researcher and therefore asserts that abuse is not a gendered issue. 
She also explains the intrinsic similarity of a chocolate muffin and chocolate fudge cake and its relevance for critical thinking theory.

58. Ben Crewe, Susie Hulley and Serena Wright. What’s it like to serve a Life sentence in the UK?

Ben Crewe, Susie Hulley and Serena Wright discuss their research on the implications of life imprisonment for young men and women. Their powerful experiences convey the deep and lasting sadness for all arising from such tragic events and the richness of their descriptions help us grasp the basic humanity of all those involved. This is quite a long podcast and may need two sittings. It is worth the listen and we found that the creative process, clearly evident in their work, was rekindled in the conversation itself.
Life Imprisonment from Young Adulthood
Adaptation, Identity and Time
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/978-1-137-56601-0
When the Advisory Committee on the Penal System reported on the prison regime for long-term prisoners in conditions of maximum security in 1968, only 168 individuals were serving sentences of longer than 10 years. Today, such sentences are bordering on commonplace. England and Wales have the highest number of life-sentenced prisoners within Europe, while increasing average sentence lengths mean that more men and women are serving longer periods in custody than ever before.Such considerations are located within relevant shifts in the penal system of England and Wales, in particular, the legacy of the minimum tariffs contained within the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, the ‘up-tariffing’ of ‘knife homicides’ and the increasing use of joint enterprise sentencing.

57. Neil Scott Gordon. Nursing and the development of KUF for OPD Pathway

Dr Neil Scott Gordon is a forensic psychotherapist and has worked for over 40 years as a senior clinician and supervisor in high secure and community settings. He has had an extraordinary career in psychiatric nursing and forensic psychotherapy. The final years of his working life were devoted to the development and roll out of KUF (Knowledge and Understanding Framework), the major training development in the field of 'personality disorder' in the past half century.
He has conducted research into the client’s view of psychotherapy and has explored how psychotherapists in high secure environments adapt their therapeutic style in a context sensitive way. He has a Professional Doctorate in Psychotherapy and holds Masters Degrees in Organisation Development & Consultancy, and in Advanced Mental Health Practice. He co developed and delivered the Schema therapy group programme at Rampton High Security Hospital UK with Dr Kerry Beckley and was formerly responsible for multidisciplinary training and workforce development in the personality disorder service.He worked as a Senior Fellow in the Institute of Mental Health, Nottingham University, where he was responsible for the development of the the National Personality Disorder, Knowledge and Understanding Framework (KUF) commissioned by the UK Department of Health and Ministry of Justice. He has published articles on a wide range of topics including: schema therapy, personality disorder, organisational change, mental health education and qualitative research. He co-edited a text book on 'Working positively with the challenges of personality disorder in secure settings' which was published by Wiley in 2010.
https://www.institutemh.org.uk/images/KUF_prospectus_Final_OU_Approved.pdf

56. Jennifer Rodriguez: Attachment theory and transgenerational trauma

Jennifer Rodriguez is an attachment-based psychotherapist specialising inattachment-related issues and trauma. She holds a special interest in how the quality of our earliest attachments impact on our health, social and mental well-being; and in the neuroscience, neurobiology, ethology, phylogeny and how it shows up in the ‘between-us’ in the therapeutic space. She believes that there is a sacred primal wisdom in the body (mostly forgotten now in our fast-paced western civilisation), and in the wholeness of the mind-body-spirit in what it means to be human. As when Mother Nature designs things that work, she then replicates it everywhere, Jennifer believes that we are a species that thrives not only in connection to ourselves but to every living being/creature on Earth as well as being of the Earth, and of being part of a greater intelligence beyond our capacity to understand it right now... .She was educated, worked and lived in Trinidad, the UK, the US and France,which ignited her interest in the ties of culture and nationhood, multi-culturalperspectives and experiences.Alongside this, and with over 30 years of international commercial and corporateexperience of advising senior professionals and their organisations, Jennifer isexperienced in coaching individuals to improve their leadership skills. She beganher career as a chartered Civil Engineer working across the UK constructionindustry.

55. Marguerite Schinkel: Imprisonment during the pandemic

Marguerite Schinkel is a criminologist at the University of Glasgow and the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. Her research has focused on the meaning of sentences for those who serve them, focusing on long-term and persistent short-term prison sentences. She is also involved in another project funded by Community Justice Scotland, along with two colleagues, Cyrus Tata and Beth Weaver at Strathclyde University. The Meaning of Sentences is a pilot project which looks at the meanings given to the sentence imposed by the different actors in the courtroom. What meaning does the judge want to communicate, what meaning does the person sentenced perceive and what role does the defence lawyer play in these processes of meaning making?
 
More recently she has explored the impact of Covid-19 and the lockdown on penal experiences in Scotland and she is hoping to explore local ways out of harm in her next project. She is the co-founder of the Coalition Against Punishment, which aims to disrupt the punishment system in Scotland: https://capscotland.com/

54. Kimberley Brownlee: The right to hope in prison

Professor Kimberley Brownlee is a philosopher. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Ethics and Political & Social Philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Prior to that, she lived in the UK for close to 20 years and was a professor at the University of Warwick and senior lecturer at the University of Manchester. Her work focuses on loneliness, belonging, social human rights, punishment, conscientious belief, and civil disobedience. She is the author of two books: Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience, and of Being Sure of Each Other: An Essay on Social Rights and Freedoms. She has engaged with senior management teams in UK prisons who are working to improve the ways they speak - and think - about the people in their care. 

53. Jacqui Learoyd. Speech and Language Therapy in prison

Jacqui is a Speech and Language Therapist at HMP Berwyn.  Hidden within the prison walls are people with various needs which are a risk to their health and wellbeing.  Jacqui works across all ages from 18 to end of life, trying to support the communication needs of this marginalised group at all stages of their prison sentence.  She has specific interests in de-escalating tense situations via communication, supporting competence in social communication and helping everyone understand that just because a person can talk, doesn’t mean that they are skilled in understanding and expression. 

52. Kerry Beckley: Using Schema Focused Therapy (SFT) in forensic settings.

Dr Kerry Beckley is Consultant Clinical Forensic Psychologist who has worked in a range of forensic hospital and community settings. She is known for her work in developing and training others to use schema therapy in these contexts, and is an accredited trainer/supervisor in individual and group schema therapy. Having spent 23 years working for the NHS, she now runs her own independent psychology practice, primarily providing expert witness reports for parole hearings and mental health tribunals, in addition to offering clinical supervision to other practitioners. One of her latest ventures is Forensic Conversations, a webinar series that she co-hosts with fellow psychologist Dr Jackie Craisatti, where they discuss a range of topics relevant to those working in the criminal justice system, sometimes inviting guests to join them. 
https://www.psychological-approaches.org/forensic-conversations.html

51. Oliver Viske of Andy‘s Man Club - How to reduce male suicide?

We have long wanted to give voice to Andy's Man Club and International Men's Day, 19th November is a good opportunity to do so.
ANDYSMANCLUB are a Men’s Mental Health Charity – Offering free-to-attend talking groups for men and challenging the stigmas around Male Mental Health. We started off as one group in the small, northern town of Halifax. That first night 9 men turned up and spoke. There was a magic in that room that everyone knew had to be shared.
We knew other guys across the country needed this same experience. We have worked tirelessly through Andy’s memory togrow our clubs. We now have 69, and we continue to grow across the UK.
Andy's Man Club is described as "a talking group, a place for men to come together in a safe environment to talk about issues and problems they have faced or are currently facing". It was formed by Luke Ambler and his mother-in-law Elaine after his brother-in-law took his own life
https://andysmanclub.co.uk/

50. Alison Liebling capturing the quality of prison life

Alison Liebling, is a British criminologist and academic. She has been Director of the Prisons Research Centre at the University of Cambridge since 2000, and Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice since 2006.
In 2016, Liebling was awarded the Perrie Award.  In July 2018, she was elected Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. 
She has written two books: Suicide in prisons and Prisons and their moral performance,  as well as many other texts.   Her work has been tremendously influential for a generation of criminologists and for the English and Welsh prison service.

49. Kirstine Szifris . Teaching philosophy in a high secure prison.

Kirstine is a criminologist with ten years experience in research and evaluation. Kirstine has been working with the Policy Evaluation and Research Unit at Manchester Metropolitan University since January 2021 and has a wealth of experience evaluating programmes in and around the criminal justice system. Prior to this, Kirstine completed her PhD at Cambridge University focusing on philosophy education in prison. She has recently published a book based on her PhD work entitled Philosophy behind bars: Growth and development in prison.  
 
Long-term prisoners need to be given the space to reflect, and grow. This ground-breaking study found that engaging prisoners in philosophy education enabled them to think about some of the ‘big’ questions in life and as a result to see themselves and others differently.
Using the prisoners’ own words, Kirstine shows the importance of this type of education for growth and development. She demonstrates how the philosophical dialogue led to a form of community which provided a space for self-reflection, pro-social interaction and communal exploration of ideas, which could have long-term positive consequences.

48. Richard Beard. The training of our ‘elite‘. Repression of empathy in public schools

Richard Beard, prize winning author, describes his experiences at boarding school and considers how the emotionally bleak culture represses empathy. The reward is a pathway to a lucrative career.
Richard Beard’s six novels include Damascus, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Acts of the Assassins which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. His memoir, The Day That Went Missing, won the 2018 PEN Ackerley Award for literary autobiography. His new book, Sad Little Men, is about his experiences of boarding school from an early age .

47. Christina Straub: Love - the most dangerous word in prisons

Dr Christina Straub’s interest is centred around qualitative social research in general and prison research in particular. She graduated as a Cultural Scientist (MA) at the European-University-Viadrina, Germany, in 2009 with an ethnographic study about the construction of individual identity in the subculture of Hot Rodding (car culture).Her first post-grad employment as a Research Assistant for the Prisons Research Centre at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge led her into a high-security prison exploring staff-prisoner-relationships together with Prof Alison Liebling and Helen Arnold. The many stories and layers of the prison environment ever since continued to play a major role in her work. It included, for example, qualitative research for London-based charity The Forgiveness Project or looking into the specific pains and needs of families of people serving an Indeterminate Sentence for Public Protection (IPP) together with Dr Harry Annison (Southampton Law School) and in collaboration with the Prison Reform Trust. Currently she works with Dr Kate O´Brien at Durham University on a project evaluating the Early Days in Custody programme delivered by NEPACS. She is passionate about and inspired by multidisciplinary research (using neurosciences, psychology, sociology, and moral philosophy for example) that aims to deliver holistic insights into the micro- and macro-levels of human existence, human resilience, and sustainable ways for humanity to move forward (individually, socially, and institutionally). 
Christina's latest book is
Love as human virtue and human need and its role in the lives of long-term prisoners
https://www.amazon.co.uk/human-virtue-lives-long-term-prisoners/dp/1622739663/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1SPAAB22PM4C3&dchild=1&keywords=christina+straub&qid=1635156221&sprefix=christina+straub%2Caps%2C94&sr=8-1
And she recommends All about Love by bell hooks
https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-About-Love-Visions-Paperback/dp/0060959479/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18F5SRYGWCS8R&dchild=1&keywords=all+about+love&qid=1635156284&sprefix=all+about+love%2Caps%2C93&sr=8-1
 
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Work-Jairus-McLeary-Gethin-Aldous/dp/B075GV1KG4

46. Lydia Guthrie: probation and Crittendens Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation.

 Lydia Guthrie is a trainer, group facilitator and supervisor, working in criminal justice, mental health and social work settings. She spent ten years working for the Probation Service in a range of specialisms, including work with long term prisoners, and groupwork with men who have committed sexual abuse and domestic abuse. She worked as a supervisor and team manager, and also developed and delivered programmes for victims and survivors of abuse.
From 2008 to 2012, she was contracted - with Clark Baim - as co-lead national trainer for the UK's community-based sexual offending treatment programmes, run by the Probation Service for England and Wales. Before qualifying as a social worker, she gained an undergraduate degree (PPE) and an MSc in Social Work from Oxford University, and worked in the voluntary sector with adults with learning disabilities, adults with physical disabilities, and with teenagers in the "looked after" system.
Lydia is passionate about attachment theory, reflective supervision, mindfulness and self-compassion. As a believer in life-long learning, she has studied extensively in the Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation.

45. Luisa Schneider: Homelessness, intimacy and prisons

Luisa specialises in the anthropology of intimacy, violence and law and has been conducting  compassionate, collaborative, engaged anthropological research in Sierra Leone since 2011 and in Germany since 2018.  She studies how people negotiate the space to live their most intimate needs on various levels of social and legal organisation. She is particularly interested in the friction between care and control, between rights, protections and their practical realisation that arise from the divide between private and public spheres, both through the politico-legal separation between home/house and street, and through conflicting discourses regarding which areas of life states may regulate and in what way. She is interested in what laws ‘do’ and how they interact with how people govern their lives in diverse contexts. Louisa works on social issues and tries to make theory answerable to practice which means that she collaborates closely with practitioners, politicians and policy makers and actively communicates research findings in newspapers, on television and expert platforms. 
Another cornerstone  of her research turns inward and looks at social sciences, at the nexus between ethnographic unpredictability and institutional demands and at how we conduct and navigate research, academia and the university. She have been writing about various aspects of what we could call the ugly underbelly of anthropological work (ontological insecurity, loneliness, violence, abuse). She asks what anthropologists and institutions can and should do to challenge and deconstruct violent structures, prevent harm where possible and to offer support while taking seriously the unpredictability of human interactions? 
https://research.vu.nl/en/publications/let-me-take-a-vacation-in-prison-before-the-streets-kill-me-rough
 
Sexual violence during research: How the unpredictability of fieldwork and the right to risk collide with academic bureaucracy and expectations.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308275X20917272

44. Jayne Price. How children in custody transition into adult prisons

We are fortunate that there are people looking at parts of our criminal justice system which otherwise can be easily overlooked. Jayne Price is one of those people and here she describes her work studying the process of transition for young people moving from a Young Offenders Institution to an adult prison.
Price, J. (2021). The impacts of the drop in staffing provision in the transition between the youth custody estate and young adult/adult estate. Prison Service Journal, 256, pp. 23-29. https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/sites/crimeandjustice.org.uk/files/PSJ 256 September 2021_0.pdf
Price, J. (2021) Violence, Control and Restraint: The Harms to Young Adults Particularly Upon Transition, The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12418
Price, J. & Turner, J. (2021) (Custodial) spaces to grow? Adolescent development during custodial transitions, Journal of Youth Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2020.1865525
Price, J. (2020) The experience of young people transitioning between youth offending services to probation services. Probation Journal, 67(3), 246-263. https://doi.org/10.1177/0264550520939166
Jayne joined the Department of Social and Political Science, Chester University as Lecturer in Criminology in September 2018.  In October 2019 she completed her PhD at the University of Liverpool. The project was a CASE studentship with Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The research aimed to ‘explore pathways and transitions between juvenile and adult penal institutions’. Through speaking to young people who experience the transition, key stakeholders, observations within the institutions alongside analysis of relevant literature and HMIP survey data, the research findings contribute to the on-going collective reflexive learning of policy and practise. The original research sought to establish the most effective and progressive way of supporting young people through the transition.
Brewster D (2020) Not Wired Up? The Neuroscientific Turn in Youth to Adult (Y2A) Transitions Policy. Youth Justice 20(3): 215–234.
Coyle B (2019) ‘What the f**k is maturity?’: Young adulthood, subjective maturity and desistance from crime. British Journal of Criminology 59(5): 1178-1198.
HM Inspectorate of Prisons (2021) Outcomes for young adults in custody.  HM Inspectorate of Prisons, January. https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprisons/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2021/01/Young-adults-thematic-final-web-2021.pdf
 
House of Commons Justice Committee (2018a) Young adults in the CJS: eighth report of session (HC 419). House of Commons Justice Committee. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmjust/419/419.pdf
House of Commons Justice Committee (2018b) Young adults in the CJS: Government response to the Committee’s eighth report of session 2017-19. Fifth report of session 2017-19 (HC 1530). House of Commons Justice Committee. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmjust/1530/1530.pdf 
Lancaster University Research Project http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/upmprojects/breaking-the-carecrime-connection-learning-from-careexperienced-women-in-prisondisrupting-the-routes-between-care-and-custody-learning-from-females-in-the-care-and-criminal-justice-systems(067b972d-bd2d-4e74-afcb-2867d2a80f2b).html
Transition to Adulthood Alliance https://t2a.org.uk/t2a-evidence/research-reports/