We must remember the lessons from Barlinnie’s radical Special Unit

Ms Widdecombe doesn’t ­normally serve as a beacon of ­understanding – ask her Strictly dance ­partner – but she did get Howard bang to rights. His conference speech that year boldly claimed that “prison works”.

Hardly.

If it did, we wouldn’t have a ­revolving door of inmates and post-release reoffending. If it did, we wouldn’t have the current prisons on both sides of the Border bursting at the seams. If it did, we wouldn’t be rushing to build more, in the mistaken belief that somehow or other they will cure crime.

What can work is detailed in a new book on The Barlinnie Special Unit (Art, ­Punishment And Innovation). In the unlikely setting of Glasgow’s Bar L, this unit opened its doors in 1973 and managed to survive more than 20 years despite attracting a pretty well relentlessly bad press.

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Any politician will tell you that there are precious few votes in prison reform and offenders’ rehabilitation. Which makes unique the story of how a unit stuffed with some of the most violent prisoners around tamed them within a ­therapeutic ­community which latterly came to ­appreciate the transformational quality of personal creativity.

The Special Unit had the guts to turn all the accepted rules of engagement on their heads. For starters, it was run as a ­community; no uniforms, volunteer ­staffers augmented by psychiatric professionals, and, crucially, regular meetings where “them” and “us” was ultimately replaced with mutual respect.

The prisoners could decorate their own cells, and receive friends and family as regular visitors – quite a change from folk wrestling with public transport to get to ­Peterhead. The latter, like the cages at ­Inverness, had a reputation for making bad men worse.

As a former governor at Peterhead, Greenock and Shotts, Andrew Coyle noted of Peterhead’s 19th-century origins: “It was the country’s only convict prison; a grim and depressing fortress, jutting into the North Sea, holding men who had been ­sentenced to prison with hard labour”.

It took radical thinking to establish the special unit in Barlinnie (Image: Newsquest) That was provided by a granite quarry and supervised by armed guards. The ­quarry has long since closed, but, as Coyle noted, anyone unlikely to conform to a “normal” prison regime or was thought to be high-profile and/or dangerous was sent to ­Peterhead. He added that from the 1950s on, it played host to “acts of violence, subversion and increasing ­tension”.

It was that violence which led to the cages in Inverness being constructed and later to the creation of the Barlinnie ­Special Unit. Having tried and failed with violence and coercion, the authorities ­decided to try therapy instead.

Working in the new unit was a big ask for staff who had been on the receiving end of violence and in some cases had dished it out too. A big ask too for the ­so-called hard men, some of whom had been ­incarcerated in these notorious Inverness cages and had smeared ­themselves and their cells with their own excrement to keep the wardens at bay. Men like Jimmy Boyle and Hugh Collins, who had been deemed beyond redemption.

Much has been written about and by these prisoners and about the celebrated art therapist Joyce Laing who managed to tap into some well-hidden talents. Then there were other pioneers like the late Ken Murray, a prison officer who bought into the idea that everyone, no matter their lurid past, could fashion a new and fulfilling future.

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Sara Trevelyan, a ­psychotherapist ­herself, remembers the late Kay ­Carmichael calling the unit “a lily in a turnip field”, which is more or less what it was. But when Boyle and Collins took to sculpture and Larry Winters to poetry, the hang ’em and flog ’em brigade were not happy. The last thing they wanted from this extraordinary experiment were success stories.

Sara, who met Boyle in the unit, went on to marry him and, after his release, joined him in setting up the Gateway ­Exchange in Edinburgh offering respite to all manner of troubled souls. Latterly it morphed into a centre for those who had become HIV positive when AIDS rampaged through the capital city’s less affluent parishes.

They divorced very many years later though still share two children and two grandchildren. Boyle, after a spell in the South of France, moved to Morocco, ­largely, you suspect because in Scotland he would forever be The Hard Man, of the eponymous Tom McGrath play.

Following the unit’s baptism of media fire, the then-governor also decided on a radical course of action – he would ­invite the media into the unit to observe for themselves. Perhaps he expected that when they got up close and personal, they would see it with new and more forgiving eyes. Mostly, that didn’t happen. Mostly the media thought the prison service had gone soft, maybe even soft in the head.

A prison officer walks through a hall in Barlinnie prison (Image: Colin Mearns) Yet the unpopular truth was that a number of violent prisoners who had themselves been subjected to ­violent ­suppression became relaxed and ­socialised under this unheard-of regime.

Neither was it the cushy number many outsiders supposed. ­Unlearning the ­mindset of a lifetime and quite ­literally ­living with “the enemy” wasn’t for ­everyone. And not everyone could cope. One of the early inmates requested a transfer to the mainstream prison; a ­decision he came to regret.

As Coyle noted: When the unit opened in 1973, “the government announced its purpose would be to treat those inmates whose potential for violence stems from some degree of mental instability, or whose length of sentence gives rise to ­difficulties”.

In plain English, the difficulties of ­coping with those who had very little to lose.

Yet by the time the unit closed 21 years later, there seemed “little evidence of the innovative energy the unit had built its reputation on” said one visitor in its ­latter years.

FOR the unit in its early years had underscored the basic principle that people are sent to prison as a punishment, not for punishment. The fact that few of the lessons from these heady days seem to have been digested is more than a little unfortunate.

If you just bang people up with no ­opportunity for education, to learn new skills, or personal development what you get is what we seem to have arrived at – throwing a lot of very angry, mostly young men into prison and dispensing with the key.

It would be unrealistic to suppose that every prison could replicate that very ­innovative unit or recruit a raft of ­dedicated professionals who would be prepared to run it on the same lines. In fact, in his last report before the unit closed, the chief inspector of prisons ­suggested that the unit had ­“become the victim of its own impressive mythology”.

But equally, it’s surely nonsense to suppose that people don’t grow up; that everyone is preserved in mental aspic ­regardless of the relationships they form. And in fact, the working group charged with finding a way ahead in the early 1990s, while it suggested closure, it also said it was just that particular facility which had reached the end of its ­natural lifespan, “not the concept or ethos of small units”.

That hope of small unit resurrection would currently seem to be a forlorn one.

As Andrew Coyle glumly said in his chapter on the unit’s lessons: “Sadly it would appear that the legacy of the ­Barlinnie Special Unit has been erased from the institutional memory of the ­Scottish Government and the Scottish Prison Service”.