At Koestler Arts

It was one of my favourite days of the year yesterday; going in to Koestler Arts to help judge their awards celebrating creativity in prisons and other secure settings.

This year, in the company of Dr Mai Musié and Dalton Harrison, we were looking at the Anthology category, where we saw a smorgasboard of poetry, prose, essays, reviews, drawings. Some entries designed and bound; some written on backs of torn out pages and scraps of papers. All with energy and a desire – a need – to be heard.

This day is important to me for a number of reasons. It's a reminder that creativity really is *everywhere*, and it means much more than just the cliché we use it as in the creative industries. It's a reminder that luck and opportunity are wildly and unevenly distributed, and so it's important to do what we can to equalise that. And it's a reminder that finding a voice and being heard is a vital part of making any rehabilitation stick.

It's also a useful corrective to the way that most of us see and hear and think about prisons, through over-heated headlines. Over the years I've been judging, I've been able to anecdotally see when there is money in the system, to help pay for classes and teaching and production of entries. You won't be surprised to hear that money has gradually thinned out over the last few years. Another reminder: a society is only as civilised as how it treats those members of it who need to be punished.

The AI bit (you knew there would be one right?): I was refreshed to spend a few hours in and around words where LLMs were in no way present. Am I sure that use of things like Claude will help people in prison who struggle with language to communicate when they come out? No doubt. But I am more and more convinced that the most important thing you can do before you engage with the tools is to find and know your own voice. Before you give the keys to it to someone / thing else.

One other thing: feedback matters. Delivering it well matters. We were reminded that a positive word, a specific example of something we like, a specific note on how to make things better, will help those starting out. Who might think that creative expression is not for them. I hope you'll remember that today.

Thank you to the Koestler team, and Mai and Dalton, for making the day fab, and Dalton especially for reminding me of the positive impact this work can have. I nicked his photo, as that mug says it all.