…and immediately you feel a little more relaxed, your stress levels fall and your concentration improves as a result. That’s what stories do; they relax people, they put over a point in a non-threatening way, their message is easy to assimilate and often infinitely more memorable. It’s why Jesus told parables, and it’s probably why newspapers call their articles ‘stories’. And it’s why the Crime, Community and Justice group have chosen to use this method for their latest work.

If prisons were a drug they would never have got past NICE, having failed on any test of cost effectiveness; and they would probably be banned on the evidence of their side-effects. We are collecting stories about those side effects.

We’re looking in particular for the stories of people who went to jail or were affected by a jail sentence served on someone they know. For many people, this may be the only chance they get to tell their story. We want to know what it was like to be subjected to the court process, what effect the sentence had upon the story-teller (the effect can often be worse for, say, families of the offender than for the offender ). We’re asking what was worst about it all and what – if any – positive outcomes there were. We’d also like to explore what might have made things better for all those involved. And then we’re going to look for patterns in those stories, for the messages behind the parables.

Why did we choose this, rather than going for something more academically rigorous, less subjective, less anecdotal? First, we don’t have the resources to embark on a major piece of research. Second, what we want to do is to put qualitative meat on others’ quantitative bones. For every recorded imprisonment there will be a victim, at least two families and one community or more affected. There will be at least one story to tell by people whose voices are rarely heard, yet the echoes rebound for years around them. Third, a story, even badly told, gains more willing ears than any academic tome, be it ever so beautifully argued and brilliantly presented.

So we need your help, Friends. We need you to do what Quakers do best: to get involved, to offer support by listening, and to share with us what you have heard. There is a pack that explains how to do it, and leaflets that invite Friends to participate and they are available from Paula Harvey at Friends House. We’ve had stories so far from eleven different Area Meetings and a lot more enquiries for packs. Those you speak to can be assured of anonymity, not confidentiality, because their stories will be told to others, but without the details that enable individuals to be identified.

Here is one story. A nursery teacher discovered one of her children was being sexually abused by his father. He seemed fine; no violence, no hysterics; Social Services took over, and later, she read in the paper that the father had been jailed. The child was never the same after that; he became withdrawn, fearful, uncommunicative; and he stopped smiling; and to this day (over a quarter of a century later) that teacher still feels guilty – not that she reported the abuse, but that by doing so she set in train events that did even more damage to that child than had been done already. She had no option; but there were alternatives to prison that others ignored, and she still feels the responsibility.

That’s the ripple effect of a malfunctioning system; and I don’t think you’d pick up that kind of data without collecting personal narratives.

So it’s over to you, Friends…