A partnership project between the Galleries of Justice Museum in Nottingham (GJM) Her Majesty's Prison Sudbury, Nottingham Trent University and the National Centre for Citizenship and the Law (NCCL) is proving to have positive outcomes for all concerned.
The GJM has been developing their work with volunteers since 2005. They have been working with HMP Sudbury to enable prisoners to undertake volunteering as part of their education and rehabilitation programme. Nottingham Trent University was then commissioned to undertake an evaluation of the project.
Economic benefits have been gained for the museum through savings made in running costs for the café and other work throughout the galleries. Ex-offenders have been able to learn new skills within a safe environment, with some going on to maintain their volunteering after release.
As Tim Desmond, Museum Director said, "Using Sudbury volunteers has been a completely positive experience for the organisation it has shown that we give equal opportunity for all; it has brought in new skills to the museum and greatly reduced the costs for us making exhibitions and running our café. For the prisoners, it has allowed them to work in a positive, accepting environment and given them an encouraging transition phase from which they move from prison to the freedom."
Increasing importance had been placed upon museums and the heritage sector to contribute to stronger and safer communities since the establishment of the Social Exclusion Unit (1997) and subsequent publications by DCMS (A Force for Our Future and Libraries, Museums, Galleries and Archives for All: Co-operating Across the Sectors to Tackle Social Exclusion, both published in 2001).
The project to employ volunteers from HMP Sudbury developed out of negotiations with HM Prison Service to take the Prison Service Collection into the GJM collection in 2005. The Home Office offered the museum prisoner volunteers to undertake some basic cataloguing of the collection.
The lack of museum skills of the volunteers meant that this was not going to be such a practical proposition. So the prisoner volunteer project quickly developed into use of prisoners' own skills to assist the organisation in other ways. The project is now heavily integrated into the organisation, to such an extent that the volunteers exclusively run the shop and café. They have also contributed to the creation of the most recent temporary exhibition and site maintenance.
The involvement of Nottingham Trent University has led to a robust evaluation of the project. A key lesson for the future is not only that evaluation must be built in from the beginning, but that it can actually enhance the quality of any project and its delivery.
The evaluation has drawn out other aspects, such as that the involvement of project participants in monitoring and evaluation would underpin the sense of ownership, but has the additional benefits of encouraging reflection, which may in itself be an important part of confidence-building. This method has been proven over the many community projects that have been undertaken as part of the same inclusion agenda.
All partners hope that the positive results of this evaluation will result in successful funding applications for the continuation of the project.
To find out more about the National Centre for Citizenship and the Law, the Galleries of Justice education website, see: www.nccl.org.uk.
For more detailed information please visit the case study section on the MLA research website.