Information For Prisons

The Trust believes that the Shannon Reading Plan only works well when all involved are doing it voluntarily.   Therefore it does not try to introduce it through normal channels of authority.   Instead, it seeks to create awareness of its Shannon Reading Plan by placing articles in media likely to be read  inside prisons.   These generate a steady flow of inquiries from prisons, coming from all sorts of people from the No 1 Governor to the prisoners.   Increasingly, interest is being awakened in prisons by the arrival of a prisoner with experience of the Plan in a previous prison.

The Trust needs to make contact with someone on the prison staff in order to get the Plan started.   It therefore immediately responds to inquirers with additional information and with literature designed to interest them and help them interest others, the more the better.   What the Trust is seeking is an enthusiast.   There nearly always is one.   It may be someone from the Education Wing, or one of the wing officers, or just a prisoner.   It does not matter what the person's position is. It is enthusiasm that matters.   It is rarely lacking but it can take persistence to find it

If the inquiry is from a member of the staff, the Trust will wait for a week or so after replying and then start to try to contact them by phone, with a view to organising a meeting.   Telephoning a prisoner, however, is not possible and therefore inmates who write are urged to talk to staff members and to send the names of any officers they think will be sympathetic.   During this stage, the Trust will also write to the POA officials in the prison to keep them informed and to seek their help in getting it going.

In responding to an inquiry, the Trust always includes two key papers about the Plan.  These are "How the Shannon Reading Plan Works" and "Installing the Shannon Reading Plan".  [See "Outline of Plan" for these papers.]   In addition, it will send handbills to publicise the Plan internally plus some articles and reports from prisons that are making good progress with it.

The Trust will try to arrange a meeting at the prison at which it will hope to meet not only its contact, but any members of staff who are interested and and inmates wishing to be mentors.   The aim of this meeting will be to explain the Plan more thoroughly, and to discuss the sorts of problems which normally need to be solved in order to adapt it to the prison's environment.   The main one is usually to decide where and when the lessons should be held but other things also arise such as how those involved should be paid, how to get the message to illiterate inmates, and so on.   It is for each prison to solve these problems in its own way, but the Trust's representative can help by describing how other prisons have done so.

The representative will also table examples of stationery which help the mentors to administer the Plan.   These were originally developed by HMP Wandsworth but other prisons have adapted them in ever more colourful forms.

Each prison is different and it may take more than one meeting to decide on the best way to implement the Plan.   Once started, however, it always seems to work.   Only one prison has dropped it and that was because the officer facilitator was posted elsewhere.   This prison intends to restart in January 2004.   Changes of personnel, whether facilitators or mentors, always need careful handling and for this reason, the Trust will never walk away and forget a prison.   In any case, the initial supply of manuals will usually only serve to get the Plan going and will soon run out   The supply of prisoners wanting to learn does not seem to, so the Representative will always be on hand to help and provide more manuals if needed.

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