This presentation revolves around findings from the Inspiring Futures research project, a unique cross-arts collaboration between the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance, leading arts organisations in the criminal justice system and the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology. The programme comprised 20 music and drama courses held in prisons and in a community setting between 2020 and 2022. The ESRC sponsored research studied the effects of participation in the Inspiring Futures programme as well as the broader impact of the programme for arts facilitators and organisations, for the wider criminal justice sector, and for audiences. In this paper we present findings from the mixed-method longitudinal study of participant impact. We collected qualitative and quantitative data from over 180 participants attending the courses and a comparison group of 70 prison residents. We illustrate how the courses enhanced participants’ creative, personal and social strengths and discuss how such benefits may be optimised. We also had feedback from members of audiences, some of whom had not previously witnessed artistic endeavours by prison residents or ex-prisoners in the community.

The emerging literature on ‘generative justice’ has, unsurprisingly, focused on the solidarity of reintegrative communities outside of the prison walls. The damage done by the ‘binary logics of criminal justice’ (McNeill, 2023) is highlighted in this literature, which also unquestioningly reinforces the separation of prison and community. This paper will argue that prisons, and specifically creative arts practitioners in prisons, can act as initiator and practice ground for the type of relational, reciprocal spaces that some people with convictions go on to co-create after release: that creative practitioners enable a little bit of the outside on the inside. Using the life stories of 19 creative writing facilitators with extensive experience of working in prisons, it is suggested that both practitioners and those in prison are impacted by feelings of alienation and, connected through a sense of ‘status recognition’ that finds expression in shared projects of creative practice. Moreover, practitioners do not aim to rehabilitate and participants give far more than they take, enabling a reciprocity that transgresses, perhaps even briefly transcends, the narrow confines of the carceral binary. This paper is neither an apology for incarceration, nor a rejection of abolition, but rather, a pragmatic contribution to the developing conversation on generative justice and how we can recognise and realise it, wherever it appears.

This paper shares some of the critical learnings and opportunities gained while serving as Criminologist in Residence at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT), Liverpool (2019-2024). Taking a similar form to an artist residency, this embedded research role aligned critical and creative criminological research with a participatory artistic programme in prison, Resolution (funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation). This role was designed to stimulate knowledge exchange beyond artistic workshops by inviting policy makers, practitioners, activists, researchers, and publics to encounter and then consider the role of participatory and digital artworks made with participants in prison to influence change. During the project, the role of both criminology and artistic practice were reimagined. To illustrate this claim, the paper will focus upon the first commission for Resolution, artist Melanie Crean, and the collaborative practice which supported the artwork, A Machine to Unmake You. In this project, the role of expertise, end-user and audience were shifted by inviting decision makers to participate in artistic workshops with justice-effected participants as experts. In response, the paper shares a series of developing thoughts on the role of ‘power-in-participation’ and the potential impact of creative forms of mediation on decision-making. Concluding with some personal reflections of my long journey home to ‘criminology’ - forever altered by the experiences shared in an unfamiliar epistemic land.

Drawing on empirical data emerging from the AHRC-funded Captive Arts project, this paper explores the political character of prisoner arts (including visual arts, poetry, prose, drama and music). The broader project explores the relationship between the arts and punishment, looking into how creative expression and identity are impacted by power dynamics implicated in the development and delivery of creative processes and products in prisons. This specific paper considers how we might map coping and resistance in and through prisons’ creative spaces and artistic outputs. It suggests that the capacity and urge to express within spaces defined and structured by repression, ugliness and hostility allow us to read prisoner artworks as politically significant. In particular, the paper explores the thematic tropes in prison/er arts which seek to communicate political messages about the painful experiences of punishment and the underlying politics of intersecting oppressions underpinning criminalisation. The paper also attempts to map the potential of such artful politics to reach different audiences, opening up a discussion about their utility in anti-carceral campaigns. The political stances covered draw from a diversity of art forms and artists and highlight the ultimately political meaning-making implicated in efforts to communicate structural and interpersonal traumas.