I know what it means to have your future decided by your past. I also know what it means to discover, while serving a prison sentence, that education can open doors you never imagined walking through.
When I began studying in prison, I wasn’t simply working towards a qualification. I was beginning to see myself differently. Education gave me something that prison rarely offers: the opportunity to be recognised for what I could become, rather than what had brought me there.
I completed undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and started a PhD in criminology. But the most important change happened long before any certificate arrived – it was the realisation that I had something to contribute.
That experience is at the heart of DWRM Consultants CIC, which I co-founded with Ruth McFarlane. We make further and higher education accessible to people in prison, creating pathways that continue after release into meaningful employment and participation in society. We talk a great deal about reducing reoffending, but too often we overlook the things that people need to build a different life: somewhere to belong; something worth working for; self-belief. Education can help with all of these.
A person studying for a degree in prison becomes more than a prisoner completing a course. They become a student, a researcher, a colleague and someone whose ideas matter. That change in identity can be profound as it encourages responsibility, develops critical thinking and creates aspirations that extend beyond prison walls.
Yet the barriers remain enormous, as higher education is still inaccessible to most people in prison. Restricted technology, limited study materials, difficulties securing funding and inconsistent institutional support can make even the simplest academic task extraordinarily difficult. Recent disruption to prison education provision has made access and recruitment harder still.
