Summary
Should we place more trust in prisoners to help them change their lives? "Trust is the only thing that changes people," says Professor Alison Liebling, the director of the Prisons Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. But, asks Lucy Ash, how can we encourage trust in prisons that are overcrowded, often understaffed, and blighted by rising rates of violence? Prisoners are locked up because they broke trust, and on the wings distrust, rather than trust, is an essential survival skill.
And yet Professor Liebling's latest evidence surprisingly shows that ultimately it is only staff-prisoner relationships built on trust that ensure better outcomes. "Values grow virtues", she argues. Treating prisoners with the same values as other people - dignity, respect, trust - will help them turn their lives around.
Producer: Arlene Gregorius
(Image: A knife with a blunted point, chained to a work surface. Credit: Rene Hut, of the Dutch Ministry of Justice).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for |
| 0:02.0 | the BBC. |
| 0:04.0 | This summer we made a series for Radio 4 with Jackie Smith, |
| 0:07.0 | the former Home Secretary, about the history of prison reform. |
| 0:10.0 | It's called Rethinking Klink, |
| 0:12.0 | and you can find it on I Player Radio. |
| 0:14.0 | Now, while Lucy Ash was researching the series, she came across an idea so fascinating |
| 0:20.0 | we thought we should make a separate program about it. |
| 0:22.0 | So here it is. Over to Lucy. |
| 0:27.0 | I just should say that this is a very big knife. |
| 0:32.0 | The blade is maybe 20 |
| 0:33.4 | something. Yeah it's serrated blade and it's quite sharp. Yeah. And you use that |
| 0:39.2 | to cut onions and all kinds of things. Yeah, all vegetables. Yeah. |
| 0:43.0 | Were you a good cook before you came here? |
| 0:45.0 | No, not so much. |
| 0:47.0 | Now I had six years to practice on, yeah, I'm getting better. |
| 0:52.0 | We're not at one of those fashionable knife skills cookery classes, but in a high |
| 0:57.4 | security prison in northern Holland. It's early evening and the inmates are |
| 1:02.3 | making supper. |
| 1:04.0 | I noticed that some of them were cooking with these huge knives but they're attached to chains. |
| 1:11.0 | So you trust them with big knives but only so far. Yeah they can't take the knife |
| 1:17.0 | with them but also the knife is blunt, it's no point. There's no point. |
... |
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