A sentence can never tell the story of a life
In this reflection, our former scholar, Will Pendray, now a published poet, describes the experience of going back inside a prison and running a creative writing workshop in HMP High Down. The participants were all on IPP sentences – they have no release date. He describes how that injustice shaped what emerged in the session.
It always feels strange, that first prison gate closing behind me. No matter how many times I return, there is always the familiar clang of metal. The clatter of keys. The shuffle of heavy black boots across solid floors. The sounds and smells that all prisons seem to share. For a brief moment, I’m no longer a visitor carrying a bag of books. I’m the boy, and later the man, carrying the weight of my mistakes.This time, though, I was returning for reasons bigger than my own story. I was returning to spend the morning with 12 men whose sentences were never meant to last this long.
For many people, IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) is little more than an acronym. Within criminal justice, it has become shorthand for one of the biggest sentence policy failures in modern British history. For the people living it, however, it is neither policy nor politics. It is everyday life.
The human cost has been immense. At least 94 people serving IPP sentences have taken their own lives. More than 200 are currently detained in secure hospitals. United Nations human rights’ experts describe the continued detention of many IPP prisoners as psychological torture.
Facts and people
The statistics were impossible to ignore, but they told me nothing about the men I was about to meet. As I made my way through the corridors, a member of staff asked whether this was my first visit to a prison. She wished me luck in a tone that suggested I might have my work cut out. I smiled because it wasn’t the first time I’d been asked that question inside a prison. Only the people asking it had changed.
I was quietly confident. Not because I imagined poetry could undo the reality of an IPP sentence, but because I had seen what happens when people are given permission to write honestly. My confidence wasn’t based on optimism alone. During my MA in Creative Writing at the University of Brighton, supported by a Longford Trust Scholarship, I explored the relationship between nature writing and well-being for people in prison. I became interested in a simple but often overlooked reality: prisons are designed to separate people from the natural world. Many people also arrive carrying trauma.
Research shows that separation from nature can deepen psychological distress, while indirect contact with it through poetry, writing or art can help restore a sense of connection and wellbeing.
Conversations rather than conclusions
That research shaped both my poetry collection, Overgrown, and the workshops I now facilitate. Thanks to the generous support of the T. S. Eliot Foundation and the Longford Trust, I have been able to take those ideas back into prisons where they can become conversations rather than conclusions.
That morning at HMP High Down, I wanted to share how nature writing can be the window that prison so often closes. From the moment the men entered the room, they brought with them a generosity of spirit that immediately changed its atmosphere. They arrived with warmth, they were polite, curious and ready to engage.
People often assume that the facilitator is the one who carries the energy. My experience has been the opposite. The most meaningful workshops become symbiotic. I offered the structure, the prompts and the space to write, but the men brought humour and honesty. Their openness elevated my facilitation, just as I hope the workshop elevated something within them.
To begin, I asked the men to call out individual words that we would then shape into a collective poem. It came as no surprise that the first responses reflected the reality of prison: institutionalised, frustrated…. I wanted those words in the room. They were honest, and they deserved to be heard.
But, as the workshop unfolded, the language slowly began to change.
Ocean.
Tree.
Bird.
It wasn’t accidental. Through a series of exercises, I wanted to move the room, gently, from the language of confinement to the language of the natural world.
‘I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck’
Creative writing can’t shorten an IPP sentence, nor can it open a prison gate, but it can remind someone that they are more than the sentence they are serving. As the session unfolded, we explored metaphor as a way of approaching difficult emotions. One man described anger as a wrecking ball, another man described freedom as a bus stop.
I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck. The image stayed with me. A bus stop is a place of waiting. You know there is somewhere else you want to be, but you have no control over when you’ll get there. It struck me as a quietly devastating way of describing the uncertainty at the heart of an IPP sentence.
By the end of the session, the men shared poems about home. They spoke with honesty about loss and hope. They listened to one another with generosity and supported with applause the writers who shared. For a while, they weren’t defined by offences or tariffs, but by the words they had chosen to write.
‘Listening is only the beginning’
As I walked back towards the gate, I heard the familiar clatter of keys once again. The gate opened and daylight spilled through. I couldn’t help thinking how fortunate I had been. I was one of the lucky ones. For the 12 men I had just left behind, that same walk through the gate remained uncertain.
When IPP was abolished in 2012, the sentence disappeared. Its consequences did not. For years, the voices of people jailed before 2012, and still serving IPP sentences, have gone largely unheard. That is beginning to change. Families, campaigners, charities and an increasing number of parliamentarians continue to press for action. But listening is only the beginning.
Real change will come when we stop seeing people serving IPP through the lens of tariffs and risk assessments, and start recognising them as people with futures worth investing in. If prison taught me one thing, it is that a sentence can never tell the whole story of a person’s life. If writing continues to teach me one thing, it is that no story is finished while someone is still willing to imagine another ending.
I hope the next time those 12 men, and all those still serving IPP sentences, walk through the prison gate, it is for the last time. And when they do, I hope they are met not by suspicion, but by opportunity. May we be ready to see them not as people who have survived prison, but as people whose experience can deepen our understanding of hope and humanity.
With financial support from the TS Eliot Foundation and the Longford Trust, Will Pendray delivers creative writing workshops in prisons. If you would like him to come to your prison, contact Sara in the Longford Trust office.
