Unlocking Value: The economic benefit of the arts in criminal justice

 In

Unlocking Value: The economic benefit of the arts in criminal justice

So begins the poem that won this year’s Platinum Koestler Award for Poetry, written by a
prisoner at HMP Usk. You may think that starting a report on the economic value of the arts
with a poem conforms to a stereotype about artists preferring poetry to numbers. But the
stunning sequence of images in the few lines above encapsulates the journey that many
offenders make through the arts. They start out as a number—their prison number, perhaps,
or just another crime statistic: they are closed and without control. The arts open up their
understanding of themselves and of the world around them. The offenders then start to make
progress, gaining structure, knowledge and skills that will have practical application in their
future lives—tangible benefits acquired to meet real needs, like pebbles collected to fit in
specific bowls.

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