This Small Change

2020-1

A project asking museums to offer arts material to people in prison, to help alleviate conditions they faced during Covid lockdowns.

In March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, a housemate working in a residential mental health unit was finding it tough going.

The consequences of the lockdown for his patients were becoming severe: among other restrictions, patients were no longer allowed out of the facility, even on accompanied trips. The only accessible external space was a small enclosed garden.

As well as keeping everyone safe, staff were under pressure to think of activities that could be undertaken indoors.

Rooting round the house, we put together a pack of art gallery postcards and a few stamps. The next day, my housemate offered them as a gift to patients. While not all appreciated them, a couple really did: they wrote a series of cards to their families who could no longer visit.

Encouraged by the response, I contacted Francesca Cooney, Head of Policy at the Prisoners’ Education Trust, to see if something similar would be of interest to people in prisons.

Francesca thought, given the conditions in prisons during the lockdown, it would be worth giving it a try. She explained prisoners were in their cells at least 23 hours a day; libraries and gyms had been closed; and all visits cancelled. Alarmingly, there were also reports of more incidents of self-harm.

Together, we devised a scheme to see if museums – themselves closed to the public during lockdown – could send stocks of gift shop postcards to prison education teams. The hope was that the postcards would be of interest to prisoners in their cells.

Thanks to the efforts of many people across a number of institutions, the project – between HMP Pentonville, Tate and the Postal Museum – was a success.

Despite challenges of remote working, we were able to distribute 100 ‘packs’ of cards to prisoners. Each pack included a handwritten card explaining the project, a selection of cards from the Tate, and some first-class stamps donated by the Postal Museum.

We were also very grateful to Jose Aguiar, a prisons education consultant, who worked with men in HMP Pentonville to put the packs together and to distribute them to other prisoners.

Jose said the men were really impressed with the cards, commenting that it is rare for prisoners to see anything as beautiful and of such quality as the Tate cards.

Further deliveries of cards were made to HMP Pentonville by Tate, the London Transport Museum and the Garden Museum. On joining the project, the Southbank Centre kindly sent hundreds of its ‘Art by Post’ packs to the women’s prison HMP Send.

Read more:

‘How museums can help prisoners connect with their loved ones during Covid 19’, Museums Journal, 4 September 2020