People in prison often come from a background of deprivation, exclusion, abuse and violence coupled with low self-esteem and lack of opportunity. Without constructive help, creative and purposeful activity, prisoners, ex-prisoners and offenders in the community find themselves locked into familiar patterns of negative habits and reoffending is often the result.

2makeit helps rehabilitation by offering expression through music and the arts, and individual and group mentoring on release. They learn how to collaborate and create, inspiring them to lead more productive and positive lives whilst in jail, and law-abiding lives on release.

Many people might say that prison isn’t meant to be easy.

It isn’t.

• The prison population in England and Wales is about 80,000, of whom over 3,000 are women. Scotland, England and Wales have the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe.
• 71% of women and 47% of men surveyed by inspectors in prison reported having mental health problems.
• 408 people died in prison in the year to March 2021. One fifth were self-inflicted.
• Self-inflicted deaths are over six times more likely in prison than in the general population.
• 24% of prisoners were taken into care as a child compared to 2% for the rest of the population.
• Nearly two-thirds (62%) of people entering prison were assessed as having literacy skills expected of an 11 year old - more than four times higher than in the general adult population (15%).

All data is taken from the Bromley Briefings, published by the Prison Reform Trust and drawn from Government sources.

These are the words of a prisoner participant in 2makeit’s Songbird project designed specifically to help prisoners locked in their cells for up to 23 hours per day during the Covid-19 crisis lockdown.