I’ve enjoyed recently watching a brief TV series about a project by the musician Gareth Malone. He is a dedicated advocate of singing in choirs, and over the past few years has demonstrated the enormous importance of music as a force for social and personal benefit. He began by organising choirs in schools, but has become progressively more adventurous. A few years ago he made his mark by initiating the idea of a choir for military wives, and this has now become something of a social movement.*
His latest venture has been to organise singing in a prison for young offenders, and this was the subject of the TV programmes we watched. The venue must be one of the most challenging it is possible to imagine, as it was a high-security institution housing some of the most disturbed and perhaps dangerous young men in the country. Clearly he experienced enormous difficulties in bringing the project to completion.
The result was impressive, however, and it became evident that the experience of working with Gareth to produce a shared musical project had the most astonishing impact on the lads who participated in it, not only uncovering their creative potential but deepening their self-insight and self-respect, and enabling them to engage cooperatively with both him and their fellow prisoners. By the end of the programme I was close to tears, so deeply moving was the effect that music had had on this group of young people.
I was reminded very much of the art exhibition I saw in Worcester Cathedral last year, when I went down to prepare for my own exhibition there next month. The show that was in place then was of paintings by prisoners from the high-security institutions in the region. In an earlier post I referred to the impact this had on me, and its evident importance for the people who had taken part in it.
There can be no doubt that the arts have the potential to produce a truly significant redemptive effect on those who are exposed to them. It makes me sad to realise that this kind of experience is currently so relatively rare in prisons and related institutions, where their principal function appears to be, generally speaking, simply to segregate people from society, and to diminish rather than enhance their capacity for creative expression and fruitful social interaction.
Early in my teaching career I was asked to go to Wakefeld prison, in order to interview one of the prisoners who was approaching release and who wanted to go on to university to study. I was greatly impressed by the way in which painting had become, for him, a really significant route to self-development. (He later became President of the Students’ Union.) Let’s have more opportunities for the arts to serve a redemptive function in prisons, and treat them less as scrap-heaps onto which we throw people with difficult lives and challenging personalities.
*My daughter-in-law is a member of one of these choirs, so we know something at first hand of the benefit of participation.