This week has been busy with visits to sign up men for the Sycamore Tree course starting on Tuesday next week. This is to to be the final course for the time being in HMP Wandsworth.
Signing men up is rather like delivering a surprise gift: I arrive unannounced at a cell door or in a work shop carrying my bag with the course logo across it and find the name on the waiting list and introduce myself. Typically the response is one of surprise and delight and slight disbelief; often it will have been six months to a year since they applied. Today Joe was in the brick workshop - one of my favourite locations in the prison as it has an air of purposefulness often lacking on the wings, and as the courses progress the brickwork examples become ever more complex and impressive leading, if the stay at her Majesty's pleasure allows, to decorative arches and patterned brick sets that are works of art.
Joe greeted me with a broad grin: his cell mate completed the course in the autumn and he has been waiting. He told me I made his day: I told him he made mine with his enthusiasm. That's the thing about Sycamore Tree, theoretically it is for the benefit of the offenders attending the course: in practice everyone volunteering feels they probably get more out of it!
Infact this week I spent three half day sessions trying to find the men on the waiting list: it proved more difficult than usual with some unexpected interruptions and so I will start on Tuesday having met only half of the course of 20. However, I am encouraged buy an email from the chaplain to tell me that the remaining places have been taken by men who are pleased to have a place on this final course. One of the reasons for my slow progress in signing men up was that I had innumerable conversations as I travelled the wings with men who had done the course in the last couple of years and had heard the news that it was coming to an end in the re-organisation of London prisons. They are, like us, surprised and sad, not understanding why a course that costs so little and does so much has to go. A couple of them tell me they intend to write to Ken Clarke....On a break to get a sandwich from the canteen I meet two of the men who did courses last year: both greet me with huge smiles and one is thrilled that he now has Red Band status (with extra privileges) and the job in the canteen - one of the consequential aims of the course is to encourage men to get a focus and to take practical small steps to getting life on track.
