Dr Bill Davies, Senior Lecturer in Criminology has been awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by Advance HE.

With Bill's permission, we have published this extract for colleagues from his submission for the National Teaching Fellowship. 

A personal manifesto

In a straw poll, 90% of life-sentenced prisoners like my tattoos!

I am a senior lecturer in Criminology, and teach two undergraduate modules; The Criminology of Tattooing, taught in a traditional way, despite the topic. The second, Learning Together, which takes place within a category A prison.

What makes me qualified to teach in these areas? As an ex-prisoner with extensive visible body art, I tick both boxes. I haven’t always ticked good boxes, due to my poor educational experiences, more often I ticked the wrong boxes. I only wish that I could have experienced the transformative nature of education at a more formative stage in my life.

My story starts in 1997, 7.30 am on December 24th; I was released from HMP Cardiff, with a £46 discharge grant, no fixed abode and the employment advice of my personal officer ringing in my ear, ‘don’t worry about getting work, everybody needs their bins emptied and windows washed’. Having left school at 15 with no formal qualifications, that sounded good advice, until I started to question the notion that the labels attached to me throughout my education and through the courts were sacrosanct.

In 2004, 7 years after bouncing from job to job, I was refused insurance for my flat, because of my past. I decided that if I wanted things to change, I would have to change them, and education was possibly the way forward. I contacted my local university and got accepted as a mature student through clearing, to study criminology and gain an MA from Cambridge. Rather than my past being a barrier, it became a shield. I used my past to understand my present, and to shape my  future. It is this personal experience of the transformative nature of education that drives my work to this day.

I am firm believer that knowledge should be free, and there should be no barriers to who education is provided to. Universities can charge to validate that individuals have gained certain levels of knowledge in certain subjects, but, if that knowledge can transform the lives of those that they share a community with, then it becomes the university’s moral duty to ensure equal access. It is with this personal manifesto that in 2017 I was able to create a version of the University of Cambridge’s prison education model with the establishment of Leeds Beckett University’s (LBU) ‘Prison: Learning Together’ module. 

This became the first educational module in the country that took third year university students into a maximum-security prison to learn alongside current prisoners; with all students receiving 20 academic credits for their successful completion of the module. The module sees 12 third year students studying a module within HMP Full Sutton (FS), alongside 12 prisoners. I am not an academic who believes in taking students into prisons for one-off visits, as it becomes a goldfish bowl scenario, with the danger of students treating the visit like a day at the zoo. Therefore, it was important that entry onto the module would be on an application only basis for students both sides of the wall. Acceptance onto the module for LBU is through a process that I devised in collaboration with the careers team that was through an application process that mirrors the assessment day of many of the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) careers.

Firstly, applicants record a 2-minute video introducing themselves and explaining why they want to take part in the education provision. The applications are then sifted by me, and the careers team, with the successful applicants being invited to an assessment day. The day includes group tasks for applicants to perform, and students participating in role play scenarios with students from the performing arts degree acting as prisoners within the classroom environment. The final part is a face-to-face interview where we explore the desire of the student to engage in the process, what they hope to get from it, and more importantly, what they can bring to the process for the benefit of their peers within the prison. 

After being offered places on the module, students are required to go through the MOJ security clearance processes, which for a category A prison, is at the advanced Counter Terrorism Check level. This process can take up to 3 months and is one that other university students applying for jobs in the criminal justice system will not have on their CV, enhancing the employment prospects for those involved. Prison-based learners have also been able to include their study on the module in the sentence progression folders as evidence of participating in rehabilitative programmes and demonstrate appropriate engagement with wider society.

Recruiting students in prison

A similar process was established within the prison. Information events were held, and prisoners were invited to apply. As videos are unavailable in prisons, applicants were asked to complete a paper application identifying why they wanted to apply. The next stage was face-to-face interviews before a final decision was made on who to offer places to. A list of preferred applicants was then given to the security department at the prison who decided whether the applicants had sufficient security clearance to participate in the programme. It is customary practice for prisons to select which prisoners can apply for such programmes, but I was able to negotiate that this decision be made at the end of the process, which mirrors the ‘ban the box’ campaign which only looks at a person’s past actions after the application process and before appointment. The benefit of this was prisoners who had previous been excluded from education due to a perceived inability to be able to complete a course, were instead encouraged to apply.  All students, regardless of where they lived, were classed as LBU students, and were enrolled as such. Those that lived in FS all received acceptance letters from LBU, with their own student numbers. 

The 12-week module included 6 in person seminars and 6 support sessions. LBU students attended an induction day at FS for orientation and security briefings. The FS students were given an induction day by me and an academic librarian from LBU. From here, every fortnight there would be a lecture/seminar held at FS with all learners in attendance. At the conclusion of the module a graduation event was held at the prison, with each learner being able to invite one guest. This was held within the visitor centre at FS and was presided over by our Deputy Vice Chancellor Professor Phil Cardew. The event was a celebration of the hard work of such a diverse group of learners, that ranged in age from 20 – 75, and covered a broad range of ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds.

“I actually felt like a human for the first time”

The first running of the module was on the topic of criminology, in a broad sense, with guest lecturers from Cambridge University, the Open University, and criminal justice practitioners providing a wider range of academic content for the students. The module was very well received:“…and I actually felt like a human being for the first time in a long time. I was really sad actually, well, back in my cell in the evening, I lay thinking about it, I just burst into tears like. I hadn’t felt like that for a long time, you know, like a human. So, it was really nice to have that and it was lovely, for me, my personal view is that it was really nice to have the students coming in. I wished they could have come in more often in all honesty because it was just so normal, you know? For a change, some normality kind of thing, in your life. So, for me, it was brilliant.” “Well, if you look back on your life and you think something that you’ve done wrong, to be known as that is very limiting. And the students taught us actually that it doesn’t have to be like that. If you create dialog, you create understanding.” (Young, 2017:7)

But that is not to say the subject matter was one that the students would have chosen themselves. One example of this was when I gave a lecture on the impact of long-term imprisonment to someone who is in the initial stages of a 40-year sentence. Future module delivery included more sociological discussions that were asked for by the FS students. In addition to this, the programme was expanded from 6 lectures to 8 lectures, with the students being able to choose which 6 they wanted to attend. 

Since the beginning of the Learning Together module, more than 40 FS students, and 60 LBU students, have gained 20 university credits. Of the 40+ FS students that have engaged with our educational provision, 25% have now completed more than one module with us. An additional 10% have signed up to study for Open University degrees, 1 (that already had an undergraduate degree) has begun studying for a Master’s degree, and I facilitated the provision of a fee waiver for a prisoner to study for a PhD. It took the student 5 years, and 3 typewriters, but this year they successfully defended their thesis to become the first person serving a sentence in the high security prison estate to gain a PhD. 

I have supported and facilitated the acceptance of a newly released prisoner to register as a full-time student at LBU who has since graduated with a 2:1 degree in Criminology. 

Students ready for careers in the criminal justice system

LBU graduates of the programme have taken employment in the criminal justice system, including probation, police, prison officer, and non-governmental organizations are amongst those roles. Once such student who now works as a probation officer, stated, “From completing Learning Together and getting to know Bill, I decided to fulfil a career in rehabilitation. Bill has been a constant positive reinforcement in my life and career, and I honestly don’t believe I would be in the job that I am, helping people daily if it wasn’t for him”.

In my context statement, I described a module which explores tattoos, it was during the first educational session on the module in 2017 that discussions led to tattoos, and their perception in society. One FS student had visible tattoos and was often stigmatised; I relayed a story of being asked to leave a public bath in Japan for having visible tattoos, a campus-based student stated that they had been turned down for jobs because of their hand tattoos.

The prison-based student asked if tattoos and crime were taught at university, I replied that it was not at LBU but that, going forward, I would write a new module on it. The ‘Criminology of Tattooing’ module, unique to British universities has now been running since 2018, with over 500 students having passed it. Its success means it has been expanded to be available to students on other joint programmes in Psychology, Sociology and Law.