Evolving Prisons

Paul Boggie had a heroin addiction for seven years and managed to overcome this addiction almost eighteen years ago. He went on to work for the Scots Guard and protect the Queen. Paul now goes into prisons and educates people in prison and prison officers about addiction and mental health. He speaks about his addiction, his work in prison and about the book he published in 2020 called Heroin to He...

Naman Jawaid spent time in prison in England for fraud which he tells us stems from a gambling addiction he developed. Naman speaks about his experience of prison and his difficulty of accessing help for his addiction in prison, leading us to discuss prison meeting two of its main aims of deterrence and rehabilitation. He also speaks about the people he met and how even though a person might have...

Arne Nilsen is a psychotherapist in Norway. He spent time working at Bastøy Prison as a psychotherapist and as a governor. He also has experience of working as an international advisor to prison services in different countries. Today he speaks about his time working at Bastøy and about the importance of respect and responsibility for people in prison. He discusses the 12 step change wheel he has d...

Halden prison has been featured in the media as the world’s most humane prison. Are is the governor of Halden and Tonje is the training supervisor, responsible for supporting new recruits throughout their training. They discuss the work that is happening in Halden and how it differs from some other prisons in Norway. They speak about the impact for both people in prison and prison staff of more hu...

Fritzi is a prison reform activist in the USA and founder of Compassion Prison Project (CPP). CPP's mission is to transform prisons in the USA and internationally into places of healing and education, so that the most traumatised people in our society can be cared for and supported. This is done through projects with incarcerated individuals and prison staff around adverse childhood experience...

Brian spent his entire career working in corrections in Missouri, USA. He speaks about what sets a treatment facility apart from other prisons and explains how the therapeutic community model works. Brian discusses how this type of facility can really help transform the lives of incarcerated individuals with addictions. Particularly when previously incarcerated individuals who were on the programm...

Dr David Honeywell is an academic and an author. He has also spent a number of years in and out of prison. David said that access to education and looking inwards helped him address his offending behaviour, rather than prison itself. He speaks about how desisting from crime isn’t a linear path and he feels it’s an ongoing journey of policing himself to ensure he continues to desist from crime. Dav...

Rick's experience of the criminal justice system spans four decades and he is a recognised leader in prison reform. He was appointed Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Corrections in 2013, after his predecessor was assassinated by an individual who was released into the community directly from solitary confinement. Many reforms around the use of solitary confinement occurred duri...

Dr Lukas Carey spent one year in prison for commissions he received while working for local government in Victoria, Australia. He is also a teacher, coach and academic. Lukas talks about the difficulties experienced before, during and after imprisonment. He also talks about the struggles people with convictions face when trying to obtain employment post release from prison, regardless of how exper...

John Reed seeks to reduce loneliness and social isolation in prisons in England by holding poetry workshops, telling stories through music or simply having conversations. John didn't know much about prisons until he started working in them several years ago. He feels that if he had the knowledge he has about prisons now, when he was young, his number one career choice would have been to be a p...

Brian Koehn has 28 years' experience working in corrections in the United States. For 14 of these years he worked as a warden overseeing entire prison establishments. Brian founded Social Profit Corrections this year with a vision to transform American prisons into places of reform, rather than punishment. Today we talk about the root cause of the challenges in corrections in America and how B...

Listen to this short introduction about why I decided to create this podcast and what you can expect from it.