Tuesday 21 January 2025 5:30pm to 7:30pm
Ede room, Kettle's Yard
About
Operating from 1973-1994, the unit sought to enable greater family contact and for prisoners to explore creative activities. It also challenged the prevailing disciplinarian prison culture.
A newly-published book, edited by criminology lecturer Dr Kirstin Anderson, makes use of the recollections of the BSU from former prisoners, prison officers, artists, psychologists and scholars to reflect on their experiences in the unit.
This event offers an opportunity to meet the editor and contributors of the book, and consider the significance of the BSU in Scottish penal history.
Speaker: Kirstin Anderson has taught for 22 years in schools, universities and prisons. She has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, and led the first empirical study to look at Music Education and Music Making in Scottish prisons. She has written about education and arts in prisons, public health and criminal justice, prison overcrowding, and prison abolition. Kirstin is currently working on a research project about prisoner made magazines in Scotland including The Key and STIR. She is a Lecturer in Criminology at Edinburgh Napier University.
Speaker: Mike Nellis is Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Community Justice in the Centre for Law, Crime and Justice, University of Strathclyde. Whist doing social work with young offenders in London, he was inspired by A Sense of Freedom to improve his practice and become involved in penal reform. He has a PhD from the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge and was long involved in the training of probation officers at the University of Birmingham. Mostly he has written about probation, electronic monitoring and prison movies.
Speaker: Bill Beech is an artist filmmaker and was a visitor from 1974 to 1982 to the BSU who worked closely with the community, particularly Larry Winters and Jimmy Boyle in collaboration with the American artist and writer Michael K Meyers. Bill curated exhibitions and contributed to conferences and festivals including in America and Japan. The work with Winters led directly to Beech creating the screenplay for the feature film Silent Scream. His association with the unit continues through his work managing the Special Unit Coyote Fund Archives with Caroline Tisdall and Danny Pope.
Chair: Loraine Gelsthorpe is the former Director of the Institute and Professor (Emerita) Criminology & Criminal Justice. She has a PhD from the Institute of Criminology and is also a UKCP accredited and registered psychoanalytical psychotherapist. Loraine continues to teach criminology to undergraduates and postgraduates, and is actively involved in research projects (some of which revolve around women, crime and criminal justice, and community sentences and support for people who have offended). Recent research includes a major ESRC sponsored project on the meaning and function of the arts in prison and in the community, in partnership with a range of arts organisations. She is also Chair of the Probation Institute.
Coordinator: Rebecca L Greene FRSA, Honorary Artist in Residence 2019-2024, Institute of Criminology. Duty Manager & Visitor Assistant, Kettle's Yard. Founder, Drawing Connections (...at the edges)