The Barlinnie Special Unit: Art, punishment and innovation

Edited by Kirstin Anderson

The Special Unit in HMP Barlinnie in Glasgow was unique in its day (1973-1994). It was a therapeutic penal innovation which offered transformational opportunities to some of Scotland’s most violent and notorious male offenders. It is unique today in that it is the only British penal initiative from fifty years ago that anyone in Scotland (or the rest of the UK) cares to remember – and celebrate – as a remarkable event. Its positive lessons, however, were never properly learned – not that everyone, then or now, was positive about it. The controversy surrounding this very bold experiment in minimising punitiveness behind bars is an important part of this story. 

This new book seeks to show modern readers what the Unit accomplished, how it was done, why it closed, and why it polarised opinion. Some of the contributors were personally involved with the Unit at its outset, some in its later years. Others are commentators with a concern for the range of issues raised by the Unit, not least the place of creative arts in prisoner rehabilitation. Some are both. Full disclosure: I am a contributor to the book and was on the editorial group that first set it in motion, but there is much in it that I did not know beforehand, and I commend it to Friends on that basis. 

Like many people, I first heard of the Barlinnie Special Unit when Jimmy Boyle’s memoir A Sense of Freedom was published in 1977. I was working as a social worker with young offenders in south London at the time. It was Boyle’s account of growing up in the violent culture of post-war Glasgow’s Gorbals that initially gripped me. He covered the low expectations teachers had of ‘kids like him’, and the ease with which he was further brutalised in the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. Boyle had been an enforcer for protection rackets, and I decided that, if a man as bad as he had once been could become the fiercely articulate man he now so clearly was, my work in south London really was worth doing. I resolved to become better at it, and to take greater interest in penal policymaking. I knew little in 1977 of the academic criminology that subsequently enthralled me, and if I could only pick one book that had a formative influence on the course of my life, it would be A Sense of Freedom. 

Boyle’s memoir also stimulated my interest in the place where his reform had occurred, the Unit itself. It was devised by Scottish Home and Health Department working party in 1971, whose remit had been to find a response to a small group of prisoners who were unmanageably violent towards staff in the mainstream prison system. Violent responses towards them by prison officers just kept the cycle of savagery going. A small, loosely therapeutic Special Unit was devised to address this, drawing on practice in HMP Grendon in England and Dingleton psychiatric hospital in the Scottish Borders. The Unit’s volunteer staff – officers who wanted to break with the violent discipline of the mainstream system – had preliminary training in these places. One of these officers contributes to this book, a man who once said to me, ‘what the authorities never realised when they set the Unit up to change the prisoners, was that it would change us as well’, and also, ‘if I had not had my horizons enlarged by the Unit I’d never have formed the view that I personally could become a prisoner governor’ – which he did. 

The Special Unit was a ‘proper’ therapeutic community. A regular weekly meeting was held in which staff and prisoners alike had to frankly discuss issues of living in the Unit, and resolve interpersonal conflicts with talk – initially a new experience for both parties. But the Unit’s planners had omitted to think how the prisoners would occupy their days. Quite serendipitously, art filled the gap. In A Sense of Freedom Jimmy Boyle described beautifully how Joyce Laing (a trained artist and Scotland’s first ever qualified art therapist) started coming in once a week to encourage clay modelling. Initially she got zero response from the bunch of men, to whom all things artistic could not have been more alien. But after Boyle tentatively gave it a go, and others followed suit, art was what made the Barlinnie Special Unit a legend. 

‘The Unit proved beyond argument that people who had both suffered and done terrible violence could change for the better.’

Boyle was the first of many prisoners in the Unit’s first ten years to discover that he had a real talent for art – writing, and sculpture in particular. Joyce Laing was unfazed by the company of ‘Scotland’s most violent men’ as tabloid newspapers called them, cynically doubting that they could ever be more than this. She helped many of them to flourish. She gave her last interview, published in this book, just before she died. 

Taking advantage of the Unit’s open and flexible visiting arrangements, other artists came regularly to the Unit – actors, painters, and musicians. These included Joseph Beuys, who was at the time universally appreciated as Europe’s greatest modern artist. He had a major influence on the Unit’s ethos, and on Jimmy Boyle in particular. Bill Beech’s chapter here explains this. 

Bill was himself one of the young artists who first went to the Unit (with a video camera!), and although he subsequently had a hugely successful career as an artist and academic, it has been through knowing him that I saw how association with the Unit in its early days marked some people for life. It opened their minds to new human possibilities, and gave them a mission. The Unit proved beyond argument that some people who had both suffered and done terrible violence could change for the better, using tried and tested therapeutic techniques and creative arts. And those people could speak for themselves about what it took to change: the Unit remains unique in still being better known (if it is known at all now) by what some of its residents wrote about it. These residents – Jimmy Boyle, Hugh Collins and Johnny Steele – and their writing proved more memorable than any academic or official study. Later social-psychological research, described in the book by the person who undertook it, did confirm the regime’s violence-reducing propensities.

As far as I can tell, Daphne Brooke was the only Quaker associated with the Special Unit. As a visitor, she befriended Larry Winters, the only prisoner to die there. He suffered a probably-accidental overdose, using drugs smuggled in by less scrupulous visitors. Daphne subsequently published a collection of Larry’s writing and poetry, whose title, The Silent Scream, summed up what his life had long felt like. At the same time, it reveals something of what might have been had Larry survived long enough to engage fully with what the Unit offered. Bill Beech wrote the screenplay for an award-winning movie of the same name, about Larry’s life and death. Starring a young Robert Carlyle, it is one of numerous ways in which the Unit’s work, rather uniquely for a prison, has been explored in popular culture, albeit for good and ill. 

There is more to tell about The Barlinnie Special Unit: Art, punishment and innovation, but it will hopefully inform a new generation of Friends, and spur new thinking on the art of penal possibility. 

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