'Have you heard of StandOut?'
From ‘Officer Whites’ to StandOut Orange
After two years’ working in HMP Pentonville as a prison officer through the Unlocked Gradudate programme, John Sampson reflects on his first six months as our Lead Coach in Pentonville and delivering StandOut’s first face-to-face workshops since the pandemic began.
‘Have you heard of StandOut?’ my colleague said to me as we walked down the landing.
‘No I haven’t’, I replied.
Immediately he said: ‘they’ve just started working here, you should check them out, they’re right up your street’.
John Sampson- Lead Coach HMP Pentonville
It has been nearly two years since that brief conversation and more has changed in that time than I could have ever imagined. The world has been turned upside-down by a global pandemic and I have swapped my officer whites for StandOut orange.
My first six months at StandOut have blazed past in a whirlwind of learning. As an organisation, it has been a period where we have transitioned from our Covid-19 Helpline service for people leaving prison back to our more traditional model based on delivering workshops in prison with individuals coming up for release. At HMP Pentonville, we have now delivered four of our two-day employment preparation workshops with twenty-five men.
For well over a year, the regime in Pentonville has been starved of purpose for men in custody and cut back to the bare essentials of daily exercise and showers due to social distancing restrictions. Our workshops have been amongst the first classroom-based activities to return to Pentonville and it has been a privilege to be part of the effort to breathe purpose back into the regime. The impact of which was summed up perfectly by one of our trainees last week:
‘It’s been great to be back in the classroom, it’s the first time since I came in that I’ve felt like I haven’t been in prison’.
Sadly, as an officer, you rarely get to see the inside of a classroom and it is only in my time at StandOut that I have truly begun to appreciate the power of the classroom in prison. It provides a respite from the pressures of the wing and is a space where people can be open, expressive and vulnerable. Classrooms provide the perfect vehicle for our workshops and enable us to create an environment where people can learn, exchange and train. One of many wishes for the prison service is that it gets officers into classrooms more often and allows them to be a part of the learning and understanding that happens in those spaces.
There have been so many highlights from our first four workshops, and it has been incredible to work with such a diverse range of individuals, who have all brought their own experiences and insights to the table. The workshop lays the foundations for all the work that we will do with people leaving prison and it has been amazing to see how the guys have taken the material and run with it. Whether it has been discussing the pros/cons of paying tax, being realistic about the impact that Covid-19 has had on the job market or knuckling down to write CVs that reflect their qualities and skills, the guys have brought so much intelligence, energy and enthusiasm to the workshops. It has been a pleasure to be involved. One trainee recently said after Day 1 of the workshop:
‘it’s the best day I have had since being in prison’.
The workshops have certainly been some of my best days in prison. At the end of each workshop, individuals have told us they’d like the workshops to be made longer. We fully share this desire to spend more time in the classroom with each group. It is our hope that we will soon return to our full four-week delivery as we progress out of the pandemic. Though our workshops are shorter than we would like, the end of a workshop only marks the beginning of our support for our trainees going forward and we could not be more excited about continuing to work with the people we have met over the past two months.
These past two months have been full of conversations and beginning to build relationships with people as they prepare for release. I look forward to continuing those conversations in the community and supporting men to achieve their goals and aspirations. I am also excited about everyone I am yet to meet on the landings and asking:
‘Have you heard of StandOut?’