Comedy in prisons followup

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on November 26th, 2008

A Guardian column by Mark Fisher dumps on Jack Straw for turfing the comedy classes in British prisons.

Comedy classes have been on the go in high-security prisons since 1998– presumably without dangerous outbreaks of levity– but in a knee-jerk reaction, Straw has asserted that “prisons should be places of punishment and reform”. By suggesting that standup is incompatible with rehabilitation, he seems to misunderstand not only the nature of reform, but also the nature of comedy.

Last month, I visited Polmont young offenders’ institution, where Edinburgh’s Traverse theatre was running a playwriting workshop. Prison governor Derek McGill told me he supported music and theatre in all the prisons he had worked in. He believes participation in the arts triggers behavioural change among inmates and affects the mood of a whole establishment. These are surely the criteria by which such work should be judged, rather than Straw’s undefined declaration that the courses “must be appropriate”.

Emphasis ours.

Straw was reacting not so much to the idea that comedy might be taught to prisoners, but to the idea that standup was taught to inmates of a maximum security prison (among them a member of al Quaeda who was jailed for 18 years for his participation in the “Gas Limo” plot).

Would Straw object to standup classes for folks who’d been caught jaywalking or who can’t seem to avoid being popped for possession of small amounts of coke? Probably not. But, we’re pretty sure that, as Straw implies, teaching hard core criminals (and folks who plot to blow up hundreds or thousands of Brits and Yanks) how to write and tell jokes might be a tad inappropriate.

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