From Prison To The Newsroom: Creating A New Pipeline Of Lived Experience

The number of formerly convicted people who start a career in journalism is so small that they don’t fall within a statistic. The same can’t be said for news itself, with some studies suggesting up to a third of all reporting centres on crime. So, how could listening to more voices with lived experience of the criminal justice system add perspective? And could journalism also be a tool for rehabilitation? 

Katie Fraser is one of those stories. She’s the co-producer and editor of the magazine Still I Rise, distributed to all women’s prisons in the UK. It’s published by Women in Prison, the charity she’s worked at for 15 years. Katie tells Journo Resources she previously lived what she calls “a criminal lifestyle”, made up of petty crimes, sex work, and drug misuse. When she decided she wanted to make a change, she initially found a job at Marks & Spencer, but felt it wasn’t the right fit.

Eventually Katie found Women in Prison UK, where she embraced the cause of its late founder Chris Tchaikovsky, a former prisoner who believed that punishing some of the “most hurt” in society to “teach them how to live […] is, at best, futile”.

‘There Are Vulnerable Women Whose Voices Are Never Heard’

“I think that going to prison opened my eyes,” says Katie. “It made me realise that there are some really vulnerable women whose voices are never heard, as very often women are demonised because of the crimes they’ve committed. It definitely made me want to work within the Criminal Justice System, to try and change it in some way, for women in particular.”

Copies of Still I Rise that were distributed to inmates.

During the last three years, she’s been working with women in prisons to create editorial groups all over the UK. They organise the contents of the magazine together: choosing the topics, preparing the interviews, and writing the questions. Sometimes, when it’s possible, she tries to bring interviewees into prisons so women can interview their guests face-to-face. The team have interviewed prison governors, leaders from the shoe repair business Timpsons, and politicians such as Lord Bradley.

While expert articles on topics like health will be sourced externally, Kate estimates that “80 per cent, possibly even 90 per cent of the magazine is written by women in prisons”.  It’s something she says can be transformative for women’s journeys, as many have low self-esteem and literacy levels. Often, when she’s recruiting, she won’t mention the requirement to write.

Not only do writers go on to enjoy the process, but it helps build crucial skills in a challenging environment. Katie explains: “Reaching a consensus vote, when everybody has a different view on things, learning how to work together as a team, how to respect each other’s views… We do a lot of team building and communication. It sounds easy, but in a prison environment can be quite difficult.”

Building a magazine within the prison network will always have its limitations, she adds: “We are a magazine that is critical of the system, we’re producing a magazine in an environment that doesn’t want us to criticise it. They won’t want prisoners who are very social, self-aware, and critical of the system that is housing them, because that could cause problems. So it’s always a really fine balance of what we print, what we think is acceptable. We have this weird sort of self-censorship going on.”

‘In A Way, We’re Preaching To The Converted’

While publishing by and for prisoners is the magazine’s raison d’être, Katie also believes it’s important that this kind of work reaches wider audiences. “In a way,” she says, “we’re preaching to the converted. We’re sending the magazine to women in prison who know what prison is like.  Actually, it’s people externally who need to know what it’s like.”

It’s part of the reason The Guardian hired Eric Allison in 2003. After spending 16 years in jail, he went on to become the paper’s prisons correspondent, a job he remained in until his death in 2022. Simon Hattenstone was a close colleague of Eric’s after both attended the inquest of a young boy, Alan Rickwood. The 14-year-old had been subject to a technique known as nose distraction, which, as the pair wrote at the time, involves “a squeezing, tweaking, flicking or karate-like chop to the nose”. Alan bled for an hour and died by suicide six hours later.

“It was awful,” says Simon, “it happened to a lot of the kids in custody, to be beaten up by the officers. It wasn’t done when people were violent, but simply done for non-compliance. This was the first time Eric and I worked together. We spent around a week together and we got on really, really well.”

“It was only after Eric died that I started thinking that actually quite a lot of the stuff we did was really significant,” he adds. “For example, prisons used to transfer pregnant women in what we call a sweat box [a steel compartment measuring 860mm by 620mm]. It was a horrible, rickety, uncomfortable environment. It was unsafe for pregnant women and Eric wrote about it. After that, pregnant women were no longer transferred in sweatboxes.”

He also points to a story the pair of Mancunions wrote in 2021 about G4S, which used to run detention centres for children. Their reporting covered appalling violence, excessive force, and a 15-year-old left alone to miscarry in her cell. As a result, G4S was removed from the contract. And, in 2023, just a year after Eric’s death, the Ministry of Justice finally forbade the use of restraint techniques that would deliberately cause pain in young offenders.

A Different Perspective And Lived Experiences

While Eric didn’t have traditional journalistic training, what he did have was access to a great deal of information about the prison system, both from his own experiences and inmates who felt they could trust him. As Simon wrote in an obituary to Eric: “Eric was on call all the time to listen to the woes of those who sought his help […] Nearly all our stories came from Eric’s brilliant contacts, who were as loyal to him as he was to them.”

“He was the only British prison correspondent,” Simon tells Journo Resources. “The New York Times realised he was a significant figure and they wrote a massive obituary for him, which happens to very, very few Guardian journalists. I mean, he really was a significant figure. Anyone in prison who felt they had a story to tell, they knew that they could go to Eric.”

It was a different story for Chris Atkins. The three-time BAFTA-nominated filmmaker was sentenced to five years in prison in 2016 for tax fraud, spending nine months of his sentence in HMP Wandsworth. Far from his usual world of cameras and screens, he took solace in his journalistic background and a pen and paper, with his diaries later going on to form the basis of his book and podcast A Bit of a Stretch, about his experiences while incarcerated.

He explains: “If you’re a journalist and you call up Wandsworth Prison saying: ‘Hi, I’m a journalist, can I come and just spend a day walking around and interviewing prisoners, they won’t let you in a million years. So, from that perspective, it was quite astonishing access that I got to the prisoners. But also to the system — actually seeing inside the system. It’s very, very broken and dysfunctional.”

Chris also used his time in detention to volunteer with the Samaritans, allowing him a unique insight into the mental health crisis within UK prisons. According to NHS England, nine in ten prisoners have at least one mental health or substance abuse problem. Chris credits these direct experiences with changing his perceptions on prisons and, even though he regrets committing a crime, he considers his experiences an opportunity to create change. As well as talking about his own experiences, he also launched Bang Up Books, which has donated more than 150,000 books to more than 100 prisons.

“The prison system is a massively political issue here in the UK and it continues to be,” he explains. “So it’s an issue that constantly needs people to talk about it, so, I’m often called. I’m sort of able to use the experience for some public benefit, hopefully. A lot of people who go to prison don’t want to talk about it. For me, this is the one nugget of gold that I’ve got, so I might as well exploit it and hopefully change the system for the better.”

Those with lived experience of the prison system bring unique perspectives and insights to journalism, as well as a drive to create a better future. But, the experiences of minoritised voices aren’t platformed without meaningful intent — and they need investment.

Katie from Women in Prisons says it currently costs £20,000 to circulate the magazine across the prison estate, something the charity is no longer able to afford. Currently, The Guardian has yet to announce a replacement prison correspondent following Eric’s death. Perhaps it’s time the industry opened the doors to the industry slightly wider.