Cultures of Incarceration Centre

Prison Officers & Creativity; Supporting the Self & the Prisoner

Project Dates: 2023 – ongoing

This project aims to be the first in the UK to pilot creative writing workshops for prison officers, led by Dr Josephine Metcalf (American Studies / Criminology), Dr Helen Nichols (Criminology) and Dr Chris Westoby (Creative Writing). It supports employees in a role that government and academic research recognizes is “vital”, but that comes with real-world vulnerabilities in terms of mental wellbeing, exposure to violence, and, often, a high turnover of staff. The project will offer bespoke courses in creative writing that will have impact for officers and other staff in the workplace (supporting their mental health) as well improving officer-prisoner relationships (by helping staff understand prisoner demand for creativity). The workshops are running at HMP Hull and HMP Manchester and being led by poets / authors Jenny Berry and Stephen Wade. The research is being supported by the Centre for Human Factors (CHF) that has interests in measuring wellbeing in the workplace.

 

“Just Get On With It”: A qualitative exploration of the health and wellbeing of prison operational managers and Governor grades

Dr Helen Nichols with colleagues at the University of Lincoln

Project date: 2021-2022

Led by Dr Lauren Smith from the University of Lincoln, a team of researchers from Psychology, Criminology, Health and Law conducted a qualitative exploration of the health and wellbeing of governor grade prison staff. The team was commissioned in 2021 by the Prison Governor’s Association (PGA) – the professional body for prison operational managers and governor grades in the UK – to help them build a better understanding of the health and wellbeing of their members. This is particularly important because the Prison Service is not an ordinary workplace, with staff exposed to different and substantial daily pressures. Using qualitative interviews, the multidisciplinary team spoke to 63 PGA members to explore how participants described their health and wellbeing at work, what mechanisms of support were available, and how they felt about their current role. The overwhelming feedback received was that more needs to be done to support the wellbeing of prison operational managers and governor grade staff, whether they work directly in prisons or in HM Prison and Probation Service headquarters. What starts with a dysfunctional culture results in staff feeling unvalued, disenchanted and disengaged. Together, this has significant negative impacts on the home life of staff as well as both their physical and mental wellbeing. While these contributing factors had at times been exacerbated by Covid-19, interviewees reported that they were by no means caused by the pandemic.

• Project video
• Project short report

Research Team: Dr Lauren Smith (University of Lincoln), Rachael Mason (University of Lincoln), Prof Karen Harrison (University of Lincoln), Dr Helen Nichols (University of Hull), Dr Lauren Hall (University of Lincoln), Dr Gary Saunders (University of Nottingham)

 

Learning from Scottsboro: Exploring Past and Present American Racial Injustices in Collaboration with Local Schools.

Ferens Education Trust, Dr Barnaby Haran
Project Dates: 2021-2022

The project involves engagement with local schools through workshops and a poster competition in conjunction with an exhibition of photographs from the Scottsboro trials, scheduled to coincide with the university’s hosting of the 2022 British Association of American Studies Conference. The aim is to create a forum for critically examining racial injustices in the United States by responding to photographs of this infamous case from the 1930s when nine African American teenagers were convicted of sexual assault on false testimony. The workshops and poster competition will generate dialogues with sixth form students about representation and diversity in relation to the media portrayal of the Scottsboro Nine and will explore comparisons with contemporary instances.

 

Leverhulme Fellowship: English Prisons at War: Imprisonment during national crisis, Prof Helen Johnston

The Leverhulme Trust, Prof Helen Johnston
Project Dates: 2019 – ongoing

‘English Prisons at War’ focuses on a neglected period of penal history within existing research: the English prison system during the two World Wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. The aim is to explore in detail via a wide range of archival and documentary sources the impact and effects of war on the prison estate and its management; on the size and composition of the prison population; on the buildings in which prisoners and officers lived and worked; on the lives and careers of prison officers and governors; and on the everyday experience of imprisonment for those in custody.

 

British Academy Small Grant: Representing the Scottsboro Boys: Labor Defender and the Racial Politics of Radical Photography

British Academy, Dr Barnaby Haran
Project Dates: 2019-2020

‘Representing the Scottsboro Boys’ explores the ways that Labor Defender magazine used photography to represent the Scottsboro Boys, nine young African-Americans who in 1931 were sentenced to death for the rape of two white girls on

the basis of false testimony, in one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American history. The Communist organisation International Labor Defense (ILD) led the campaign to acquit the Scottsboro Boys, and ultimately helped secure their eventual release, albeit following years of incarceration. As the ILD’s organ, Labor Defender publicized the case extensively in articles, short features, and on its covers, using photographs to advance the cause. This project examines the visual rhetoric of these photographic representations in relation to the political underpinnings of the ILD’s legal representation. Dr Haran assesses the extent to which the magazine fostered racial stereotypes in portraying these young men as black victims of American racism whose plight necessitated a Communist crusade.

 

Prison Culture and Creative Writing

Arts Council England, Dr Jo Metcalf
Project dates: 2018-2020

‘Prison Culture and Creative Writing’ worked alongside ex-offenders to explore popular prison culture, as represented in films and poetry, and to co-produce creative writing with participants, giving ex-offenders an opportunity to express their personal experiences through artistic expression. A key output of the project was the poetry collection, Hope Walks by Me, a Financial Times Book of the Year (2019), edited by Russ Litten and Jo Metcalf (Barbican Press, 2019).

 

Tackling the Developing World of OCGs through a multiagency strategy

Organised crime and gangs (OCG) are increasingly treating prisons as a place for potential lucrative activities and proliferation (Campion and Mercia, 2019), such as recruiting new members (Wood et Al., 2014), creating joint ventures with other organisations and expanding their activities towards new markets (Gaston and Huebner, 2015). Accordingly, for the UK government, prisons have emerged as a new frontline in fighting organised crime, intensifying the difficulties of tackling OCG networks. The project aims to study the organised crime network in Humberside's prisons and to analyse the disruption and dispersion strategies put in place within and beyond prison walls. The project brings together criminologists with expertise in policing, prison and organised crime with CJS practitioners and officers with expertise in investigating OCGs to push the boundaries of crime prevention and criminal network disruption. Overall, the project outcomes will be:

1. To protect people at risk of becoming victims of OCG
2. To preserve community safety by reducing OCG- related serious violence (i.e. knife crimes)
3. To prevent vulnerable segments of the population from getting involved in and exploited by criminal networks
4. To prevent the association and expansion of OCG capabilities. As such, there is clear potential for further development of the project and for future deployment to other regions, opening up clear avenues for further research and collaboration.

• Sirdfield, C., Nichols, H. and Mullen, P. (2023). ‘Learning from the covid-19 pandemic: Probation’s role in providing health-related support’. In E. Johnston (ed.), Covid-19 and Criminal Justice: Impact and Legacy in England and Wales. Routledge. (Forthcoming).
• Haran, B. (2023) ‘Photography in the Big Frame: Conflicting Media Uses of the 1931 Arrest Photograph of the Scottsboro Nine’, forthcoming History of Photography, 46:2.
• Heys, A., Barlow, C., Murphy, C., & McKee, A. (2022). A Review Of Modern Slavery In Britain Understanding The Unique Experience Of British Victims And Why It Matters. Journal of Victimology and Victim Justice, 5(1), 54-70. https://doi.org/10.1177/25166069221117190
• Johnston, H., Godfrey, B., & Cox, D. J. (2022). Penal Servitude: Convicts and long-term imprisonment, 1853-1948. Montreal; London: McGill-Queen's University Press.
• Sirdfield, C., Nichols, H., & Mullen, P. (2022). Probation and COVID-19: Lessons learned to improve health-related practice. Probation Journal, 69(2), 216-234. https://doi.org/10.1177/02645505221087980
• Mottram, S. Deluge and Disease: Plague, the poetry of flooding, and the history of health inequalities in Andrew Marvell’s Hull. The Seventeenth Published online 5 December 2022. Available open access here:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0268117X.2022.2142656
• Johnston, H. (2021). Corrupting and saving: Moral contamination, prison education and prison history. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 60(1), 109-118. https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12434
• Nichols, H. (2021). Understanding the Educational Experiences of Imprisoned Men. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429323850
• Nichols, H., Young, S., & Behan, C. (2019). Editorial: Critical Reflections on Higher Education in Prison. Journal of Prison Education and Reentry, 6(1), 1-5
• Johnston, H. (2020). 'In the solitude of the cell': Cellular confinement in the emergence of the modern prison, 1850-1930'. In J. Turner, & V. Knight (Eds.), The Prison Cell: Embodied and Everyday Spaces of Incarceration (23-44). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Metcalf, J. (2020). ‘O Prison Darkness … Lions in the Cage’; The ‘Exceptional’ Prison Narratives of Guantanamo Bay'. In The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Media (67-87). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Metcalf, J. (2018). ‘It’s my Destiny’: Narrating Prison Violence and Masculinity in the Shaun Attwood Trilogy'. In Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity (133-154). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Litten, R. and J. Metcalf, eds. (2019) Hope Walks by Me: Justice and Liberty in the Lands of the Free. London: Barbican Press. ISBN 9781909954311

Kathryn Blance

Doctoral Student | k.blance-2018@hull.ac.uk

Professor Iain Brennan

Professor of Criminology | I.Brennan@hull.ac.uk

Professor Trevor Burnard

Director, Wilberforce Institute | t.g.burnard@hull.ac.uk

Dr Adam Calverley

Lecturer in Criminology | a.calverley@hull.ac.uk

Dr Amanda Capern

Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Women's History | A.L.Capern@hull.ac.uk

Dr Kevin Corstorphine

Lecturer in American Literature | K.Corstorphine@hull.ac.uk

Dr Kristen Drybread

Visiting Faculty and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado | kristen.drybread@colorado.edu

Dr David Eldridge

Senior Lecturer in American Studies | D.N.Eldridge@hull.ac.uk

Dr Barnaby Haran

Senior Lecturer in American Arts | B.Haran@hull.ac.uk

Dr Emma Horrex

Honorary Fellow | e.horrex@hull.ac.uk

Professor Helen Johnston

Professor of Criminology | H.Johnston@hull.ac.uk

Dr Alicia Heys

Lecturer in Modern Slavery | A.s.heys@hull.ac.uk

Dr Michael McCahill

Senior Lecturer in Criminology | M.McCahill@hull.ac.uk

Dr Jo Metcalf

Senior Lecturer in American History and Culture | J.Metcalf@hull.ac.uk

Dr Stewart Mottram

Senior Lecturer in English Literature | S.Mottram@hull.ac.uk

+44 (0)1482 465597

Dr Helen Nichols

Senior Lecturer in Criminology | Helen.Nichols@hull.ac.uk

Matthew Thorne

Doctoral Student | m.thorne-2017@hull.ac.uk

Dr Sabine Vanacker

Senior Lecturer | S.A.Vanacker@hull.ac.uk

Dr Christopher Westoby

Programme Director, MA Creative Writing (Online) | C.D.Westoby@hull.ac.uk

Dr Rachel Williams

Lecturer in American History | R.Williams3@hull.ac.uk

Dr Catherine Wynne

Senior Lecturer/ Director of Postgraduate Taught (English subject group) | C.Wynne@hull.ac.uk

Joanne Butcher

Before coming to Hull, Joanne completed her MA in Political Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London, and her BA in Politics at the University of Sheffield. Her previous research has focussed on how political discourse is constructed and reinforced through the press and popular media. This led Joanne to a host of different subject areas like the beauty industry’s influence over female identity in Venezuela, the role of the British press in reinforcing gender and the third sector’s preoccupation with the image of the ‘crying child’. Joanne's passion lies in uncovering the modes in which media can fortify ways of thinking as well as exploring and promoting alternative approaches to see the world.

Wemmy Ogunyankin

Doctoral Student, Incarceration PhD Cluster

'Photographing the Incarcerated Flood Victim'

Wemmy Ogunyankin achieved her Master’s in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester in 2017 and has spent the years since working as a creative ethnographer with a special interest in womanhood, identity, Blackness and social justice. Her MA gave her the opportunity to explore the inter-relation between texts, images, sound as well as the importance of fieldwork and collaborative research. She completed work on gentrification, mental health, gender and racial stereotypes, observational cinema and ethnomusicology. In 2015, she completed a BA in Journalism Studies which launched her passion for photo and broadcast journalism and led to her work in visual anthropology.

Wemmy currently works as a poet, freelance documentary filmmaker and photographer and recently won an Arts Council DYCP grant to complete a multi-media ethnographic project called How I See Myself and How Others See Me. She had a successful exhibition in Sheffield and is looking to continue the project on an international scale. Wemmy regularly holds writing and photography workshops with various collectives and minoritised/marginalised groups as part of her collaborative practice. As a researcher, she focuses on people who are often overlooked and under-considered and prioritises challenging the canon of people as subject matter. She uses her technical knowledge to explore the relationship between visual modes of representation and social justice and is keen to explore this further through her American Studies PhD.

Mary Rehman

Doctoral Student, Incarceration PhD Cluster

'‘Shut up’: Pandemic Lockdowns and Health Inequalities, 1600 to present day'

Mary Rehman is the holder of both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in History, which she obtained at the University of Hull. Her research has largely centred around early modern British history, and she has a particular interest in highlighting the attitudes and lived experiences of individuals and communities who are often neglected in historical literature and scholarship. Her most recent project, which formed the dissertation element of her MRes, was entitled ‘Men and Brothers: Idealistic Manhood and the Problem of British Slavery’, and explored how involvement in the institution of slavery and its abolition affected the masculine identities of eighteenth-century men of both British and African origin.

Mary has also worked in partnership with Historic England and Hull Culture and Leisure, for whom she contributed to the ongoing Hull Whitefriargate Heritage Action Zone project by researching, writing-up and presenting a number of stories relating to the people who lived and worked in Hull’s historic Whitefriargate and surrounding areas between 1730 and 1830.

Belinda Sherlock

Doctoral Student, Incarceration PhD Cluster

'Creative Practice & Incarceration: Writing Maternity Diaries'

Belinda Sherlock (she/her) is a creative practitioner, dramatherapist and PhD candidate based in London and Hull. She specialises in creative and therapeutic practice in forensic settings, and with other communities and individuals with experience of trauma and marginalisation.

Belinda has a BA in English Literature (Cambridge, 2008), an MA in Dramatherapy (Roehampton, 2014) and professional diplomas in Creative Supervision (London Centre for Psychodrama, 2021) and Embodied Psychotherapy (Institute for Embodied Psychotherapy, forthcoming in 2022). She has spent 8 years working in the NHS as a creative therapist and facilitator in forensic mental health, and in 2022 completed a film project – Creating Change - with NHS staff, sharing their experiences of the workplace through theatre, music and spoken word.

Belinda also runs Playful Wellbeing - providing therapy, supervision, consultation and workshops to teams and individuals – and is a member of London Playback Theatre Company, which enables audiences to bring their stories to life through spontaneous, improvised theatre.

Belinda is excited about her forthcoming research into creative practice with incarcerated women and mothers. Her previous research has explored use of creative autobiography in secure mental health settings (2014; 2018; 2021) and in response to political events in Zimbabwe (2008). Belinda has also provided editing and consultation support to a number of publications, including Sir Lenny Henry’s memoir Who Am I Again? (Faber & Faber 2019) and children’s novel The Boy With Wings (2021).

When not working, Belinda loves doing tai chi, walking long distances, clowning, cycling and cooking.

Laura Skinner

Doctoral Student, Incarceration PhD Cluster

'Modern Slavery in Literature: Searching for the Subaltern'

Laura Skinner is a doctoral candidate in the Cultures of Incarceration Centre. She completed both her BA and MA in English at the University of Hull and, over the course of her studies, developed a keen interest in postcolonial theory, the diversification of literature, and the moral imperative not only to acknowledge, but to amplify the voices of subjugated individuals. Laura’s research to date considers the frequent misrepresentation of the women of Afghanistan, in contemporary diasporic literature, as a homogeneous, victimised group and interrogates the similarly reductive portrayal of Afghan women in a range of life-writing published post-9/11.

During her time at the University of Hull, Laura served as President of the English Society, Assistant Editor of the university’s creative anthology The Hull Scribbler, as well as Course Representative and Subject Ambassador for the Department of English. Recently, Laura was appointed to the role of Graduate Ambassador and regularly represents the university at national higher education events. She is also currently working as a Research Assistant, within the Cultures of Incarceration Centre, on a cutting-edge initiative which seeks to advance the ongoing collaboration between the University of Hull and HMP Hull by providing educational content for the prison’s pioneering in-cell television service “Hull TV”.