Meet the Christians transforming UK prisons with poetry, theatre and theology

In the midst of Britain’s prison crisis, Christian organisations are pioneering creative approaches to rehabilitation, offering much needed hope and transformation to inmates. Emma Fowle reports

Recent news stories about the prison system in the UK make for grim reading. Despite spending more than £7bn each year on locking up nearly 90,000 people, our prisons are “overcrowded, understaffed, and under-resourced”, according to the Prison Advice and Care Trust (PACT). In their Picking Up the Pieces report, the Christian charity describes our teetering system as being “characterised by high levels of violence and mental health need, with much of the estate housed in ageing buildings not fit for purpose”.

England and Wales have one of the highest imprisonment rates in Western Europe. The number of inmates has risen by 93 per cent in 30 years. We are incarcerating more people for longer, yet reoffending rates are not dropping. An independent review recently noted that overcrowding meant the system was days from collapse on three separate occasions between autumn 2023 and the summer of 2024. As a result, more than 26,000 prisoners were released early under emergency measures. Yet despite thousands of criminals walking free, ministers have already warned that jails in England and Wales will hit capacity again within a year. In Scotland, the number of people in prison has already risen back above the level which previously sparked the early release.

In the midst of such crisis, the Prison Reform Trust concluded that Britain’s jails have “lost all sense of their primary purpose, which is to create order, predictability and the opportunity to reset”. Instead of rehabilitation, they have become places where traumatic experiences are compounded, addictions increase and a punitive system keeps criminals locked into a cycle of crime. 

A redemptive arc

Dr Gwen Adshead has spent much of her career working in prisons and secure hospitals. A forensic psychiatrist of international renown, Adshead delivered the BBC’s Reith Lectures last year, a four-part discussion on the nature of evil and the process of rehabilitation. She is highly critical of the punitive nature of Britain’s justice system, arguing that it is “incoherent” to expect punishment alone to bring about change – a point of view that is backed up by “decades of evidence”, she says. 

That isn’t to say, however, that Adshead is soft on crime or thinks compassion alone can…