Jack Straw bans prison comedy course

[faceless]

Jack Straw bans prison comedy course
21/11/2008

Justice Secretary Jack Straw last night banned a prison course teaching lags to be stand-up comedians. Mr Straw branded the lessons at a top-security Whitemoor jail "totally unacceptable" and vetoed plans for an inmates' comedy club. The 18 cons at the category A Cambridgeshire prison were signed up for comic drama, improvisation and scriptwriting. They were set to put on their own shows if they passed.

The clampdown came after the Government was alerted Zia Ul Haq, an al-Qaeda extremist who had plotted to bomb London, had put his name down for the course. Last year he was sentenced to 18 years after being exposed as a member of a cell run by British al-Qaeda chief Dhiren Barot.

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I'm sure there's a terrible pun in this story about the comedians bombing, but I'll not go that low... apart from that, what the hell is the problem with inmates learning how to express themselves in non violent ways? Straw seems to think that having them pent up their frustrations is more conducive to society...

[nekokate]

It's a shame it got stopped - I heard that al Qaida guy had some explosive material...

I'll get me coat

[faceless]

Stand up for comedy in prisons
Mark Fisher
guardian.co.uk,
November 24 2008

They say Tony Blair was obsessed with how his government was perceived, but his legacy appears to live on: what else but tabloid headlines could justice secretary Jack Straw have had in mind when he pulled the plug on a standup comedy course at HMP Whitemoor last week?

Comedy classes have been on the go in high-security prisons since 1998 – presumably without dangerous outbreaks of levity – but in a knee-jerk reaction, Straw has asserted that "prisons should be places of punishment and reform". By suggesting that standup is incompatible with rehabilitation, he seems to misunderstand not only the nature of reform, but also the nature of comedy.

Last month, I visited Polmont young offenders' institution, where Edinburgh's Traverse theatre was running a playwriting workshop. Prison governor Derek McGill told me he supported music and theatre in all the prisons he had worked in. He believes participation in the arts triggers behavioural change among inmates and affects the mood of a whole establishment. These are surely the criteria by which such work should be judged, rather than Straw's undefined declaration that the courses "must be appropriate".

I'm reasonably certain the minister would not have deemed the five plays I heard in Polmont appropriate, reflecting as they did the inmates' experiences of knives, drugs and broken homes. However, the act of writing gave the young playwrights a moment of freedom and a sense that they could change their world. That experience is invaluable.

Even if it were vaguely possible, do we really want to forbid the UK's 90,000 inmates from laughing? A better suggestion is that Jack Straw takes a look at the Comedy School website, where he can find eminently sensible comments from inmates and prison education managers, describing how such courses foster cooperation, self-esteem and confidence. Or would he rather we had a prison system that damaged the inmates even further than they have been already?

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