Creative Arts, Offender Rehabilitation, and Penal Reform

Abstract

AbstractOf all the small Special Units to manage dangerous or otherwise difficult offenders in the British prison system that have risen and fallen over the past 50 years, the Barlinnie Special Unit (1973–1996), in Glasgow, is the only one around which a legend—and a debate as to how best it might be publicly commemorated—has grown. This chapter seeks to identify what was truly distinctive and controversial about the culture of this Unit in its early years, and to give credit to key players who have been neglected in existing penological accounts of it: therapist Joyce Laing, who helped prisoners find their artistic ability; Scottish arts impresario Richard Demarco, who championed it; and German artist Joseph Beuys, whose vision of art’s socially transformative capacities was vividly, if inadvertently, embodied in it. The chapter also documents the most recent commemorative efforts and validates the Unit’s unique place in the British penal heritage.