Introduction:

As I walked through the safety corridor last Friday at Polmont Young Offenders Institution on the way to teach my Writer-In-Residence workshop, the massive construction project, currently underway, caught my eye. Cranes were lifting heavy steel frameworks rising from the cold November mud. It still boggles my mind the amounts of money and resources we spend in the US and UK each year to lock people away. Sure, some need to be. But for a moment, a ridiculous notion entered my mind: Why is this not a school?

How silly of me, to think that real education could play a role in reducing, better still, preventing crime. The real question is, does society truly want to prevent it?

Sure, we condemn the guilty and mourn the victims in earnest. But we do little, comparatively, to challenge the onslaught of commercial culture and class limitations. Great teachers I know leave the profession every year due to their inability to discipline their pupils — or actually teach, as opposed to surrendering to the memory-monotony of standardized tests. Now, as the debate over prisons as a private business intensifies, I shudder.

As an expat American, the phrase from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time comes to mind: “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.” One of the biggest factors that feeds addictions, violence and crime is despair. We can do better.

The good news: I have never encountered a more supportive, receptive and grateful group of people than the Scottish Prison Service for the particular work I do. The problem, as put to me by one of the officers in charge at Polmont is “I can bring you in here, sports, activities, business classes, all manner of things to try to change these young people, but once they hit that door, there’s nothing I can do. Sometimes, there’s nothing waiting for them on the other side at all.”

After getting a BA in New York City and my Master’s in creative writing at Edinburgh University, I approached the Governors at Polmont with a proposal for a writer-in-residence program to teach creative writing. The goal: to help young offenders develop something inside they can take back with them to the mean streets on the outside. Guess what?

It works.

What started for me as a student in New York has become a vocation in Scotland. Thankfully there are others all over Scotland, such as Theatre NEMO (www.theatrenemo.org) doing a lot of the similar work as well as Belle Chevigny in the US, who pioneered her own brand of prison writing with the anthology Doing Time: Twenty Five Years of Prison Writing.

The future of Western civilization depends on prevailing in the struggle for the minds of young people. Instead of manufacturing and consuming tabloid culture for a cheap thrill and profit, we’d better start looking at some hard truths about who is in charge. I suggest that de-fanging the tantalizing mystique of gang culture and  sobering to the reality that addiction/alcoholism is a disease would be a start.

Now what? A change in attitude across society—that’s what. The floodgates of cable television and the internet are open. Education isn’t fashionable for ‘the lads’. Kids don’t fit in school? Change the school. Kids can’t behave? Change the rules. You can’t teach children who are hungry, high, unruly or hopeless.

Some advise me not to get too ‘easy’ in my thinking. “Remember the victims,” they say. I do, respectfully, and can’t think of a better way to honor a victim than to try to prevent more.

We’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that all the work here contains no mention of actual people or situations. There’s nothing here for the tabloids except original thought and stories from some young men who’ve begun to learn about the transformative power of art and literature.

—Martin Belk, Writer-In-Residence, HM Young Offender’s Institution, Polmont, Scotland 

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