The Discovery Museum, Newcastle upon Tyne, home of the new HMP & Me exhibition about prison life. Photograph: PR
Like Gordon Brown, who recently announced his support for a "museum of Britishness," I believe that museums are great places.
When I was about nine years old I found an ancient looking carved stone head in a field. I loaded the "treasure" onto my little home made wooden cart and pulled it for more than five miles along busy streets and main roads to the nearest city museum. Eventually I arrived and through the great doors I trundled before announcing my find to the first adult I met who looked important.
"Wonderful!" exclaimed the woman who turned out to be an assistant director. After making a fuss that made me feel important too she promised to mount it in a display cabinet.
Sure enough when I returned a week later there it was, cleaned up and accompanied by a small plaque upon which was inscribed the date and location of its discovery. Best of all, my name was printed boldly as the discoverer. Excitedly I raced home to tell my stepmother. "Well," she said, "it's better to have your name in a museum than a prison."
I told this story to an audience at the launch of an exhibition entitled "HMP & Me" at the Discovery museum in Newcastle upon Tyne recently. It seemed to go down well. The exhibition, a chronicle of contemporary prison life, which runs until February 2008, is wonderful and includes the diaries of women prisoners, prisoner art and videos of prisoners giving personal histories. There is information on a garden project showing beautiful landscapes and border designs, and most poignantly, "garden memories." Women prisoners present a history of the suffragette movement and printmaking.
On the walls of the exhibition in foot-high letters prison language screams out - "Kanga", rhyming slang for a prison officer: kangaroo = screw. "Paddy wagon" is the name given to the vehicles we see travelling daily up and down the nation's motorways delivering prisoners (crouched behind blacked out windows) to jails across the country. "Burn" is tobacco. A "peter" or a "pad" is a cell. Prisoners address officers as "boss" or "guv." Time spent behind a locked cell door is called "bang up."
As I walked around the exhibition I was reminded of my own time behind bars and the knowledge then that in spite of the fact that a great deal was written and talked about prison life outside, for most of the time that I was inside few people outside had any real idea of the reality of the life that my fellow prisoners and I led on wings and landings.
The Discovery exhibition offers a truth that was never available in my time. A wonderful lady called Sheena spoke for a while of her work as head of Learning and Skills at the prison in which she works. Physically Sheena was tiny, I doubt more than five feet tall, but her voice carried a potent message.
"Learning is the key to success for the people we encounter," she said. She gave no quarter to those who might argue that people in prison have too good a time of it. "These are people who need our help," she said.
Sheena had worked in prison education for a number of years. "The people I meet are desperate for skills," she said. To her relief, if she had known, I am sure, I resisted the urge to hug her. Prison, in my experience had been destructive, corrosive and as debilitating as it was possible to be. Prison, for me, was a place to be survived.
Iain Watson, assistant director of Tyne & Wear Museums, had a word or two to say. "This is about community," he said. I loved the way he totally ignored the idea of "punishment." I was on the receiving end of punishment many times during my formative years - it did me not a lot of good. Iain's presentation focused on the community. "We have prisons in our community," he said. "I want to know what is going on in those places." I was behind him 100%.
A museum giving an exhibition of contemporary prison life, the "secret" life that I and thousands of others had led and were still leading, is fantastic. For centuries the British have excelled in the fields of medicine, philosophy, science, and engineering to name just a few. Lord Baker, the proposer of the museum of Britishness, has been trying for over a decade to persuade the powers that be that such a museum would be a venue where we could celebrate the role "our history" played in the shaping of the world and marvel at our rich cultural fabric.
Gordon Brown says that British history of achievement is something he believes "should always strive to go further in understanding, valuing and celebrating." Without doubt this country is great, with much to be proud of. Sadly, however, that does not include our prison system.
The Tyne & Wear Discovery Museum is standing up at last. Come on, British people - demand a prison system that you can be proud of. Not one that is so easy to condemn, and, once you know the reality, evokes shame rather then pride.
