Inside the gates

Bidisha is a broadcaster, presenter, and journalist working with Koestler Arts in 2026 as our Creative Writing & Spoken Word Officer. She specialises in the arts and culture as well as current affairs and human rights and provides cultural diplomacy, arts critique and political analysis tying these interests together on screen, mic, stage and page.  

As she settles into her work here at Koestler Arts, developing our work with creative writing and spoken word, she took some time to share her personal reflections and views on more than a decade of engaging with writing in the criminal justice system, independently and with other charities. 

I first began doing prison work in 2012. Like all journalists, curiosity was my driver.  

Anyone who lives in the capital can walk past Wormwood Scrubs in West London, Brixton in South London and Pentonville in North London. You’ll see staff in uniforms, delivery drivers, lawyers and visiting family members — but you won’t see any prisoners. The air around prisons is dense and quiet and locals, who pass these institutions every day, soon learn to ignore and unsee them. Prisons exist in full public view while simultaneously being intensely secretive, rejecting curiosity and concealing their activities behind locked doors and high walls. You’ll see barbed wire topped walls and bricked surrounds, you’ll see hundreds of barred windows, but you’ll never see a face looking back. 

Prisons are large and deliberately designed institutions with campus-like facilities that could sound luxurious in theory. If you heard about a holiday resort that featured gardens and walkways, plentiful security features, a gym and special spaces to work, sleep, study and eat, you’d be impressed by the way the organisers had thought of everything.  Instead of the ease, status and reward of a holiday, prisons deliver grindingly repetitive consequences stripped of special treatment, to remind those inside that anyone can be subject to the conventions of guilt and punishment if they do something wrong.  

Since 2012 I’ve gone into British prisons, detention centres and charities which help people who’ve left such settings. I have offered performance, writing and critical reading workshops. My work has aimed to create a space for people to listen, talk, create and think together, following the principles of respect and self-respect, control and self-control, awareness and self-awareness. For an hour a week, these projects aim to create a mini community and model a vision of the world as we’d like it to be: thoughtful, considerate, peaceful, accepting. I’ve seen my students start off in a place of resistance and cynicism, with little faith in their own and others’ ability to transform, and slowly open up and change.  

“People always want to know what goes on inside the gates,” said the woman showing me round on my first day in a women’s prison fourteen years ago. I asked so many questions that day, she begged me to stop. Closed institutions have always fascinated me: Victorian ‘asylums’, venerable boarding schools, corporate City headquarters. All conceal deeply embedded conventions and rituals, often with their own lexicon, slang and euphemisms. All leave a mark on those who interact with them, whether as staff or as subjects of the system. 

Prison forces you to confront hard social realities, cruelties and injustices. It’s where you end up when there’s nowhere left to hide, and it’s where you’ll see the worst and best of people, the conflicts and prejudices they can’t escape and the inner determination that comes forth when all else is lost. All the world is there, and the people in prison I meet often have a counter-example: the person who committed the crime alongside them but who didn’t get convicted or sentenced because they had more money, or better representation, or a better narrative, or a better image or the judge was in a good mood that day.  

As someone who has the liberty to interact with the prison world and go home afterwards, trust is at the heart of it: trust in oneself and trust in the people around you, without turning a blind eye to people’s differences or pretending that we’re all in the same situation, with the same resources and advantages. People check out of any system or society that they don’t trust and which doesn’t trust them. People don’t invest in a world that doesn’t invest in them. Working in prisons has forced me to think about the endless potential of human behaviour, for good as well as ill, as well as the ambitions we have for the grand themes we understand society by: justice, peace, virtue, evil, guilt, sin. In the accepting circle of a weekly outreach group in a prison library, working together to encourage someone who’s never acted before to perform something they wrote themselves, we build that trust back, word by word.  

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Artwork: Hands, HM Prison Wandsworth, Drawing, 2019