Is theatre still allowed to inspire the insides of prisons?

The insides of prisons have inspired playwrights for generations, you only have to traipse to the Soho Theatre to see a contemporary example of this with Clean Break’s ‘Charged’ and Playing On’s ‘Inside’ at the Roundhouse. According to the Home Office, the reverse however, is unseemly in these austere times.

Philip Osment is the co-founder of Playing On, a theatre company that laudably comprises disenfranchised young people (some with a history of jail-time). His latest production Inside emerged from a series of workshops for young fathers in Rochester Prison. Unfortunately for Osment and the rest of the company, performing the end result in Rochester Prison is now impossible thanks to the Home Office. Osment commented in The Guardian’s roundup of local art closures that he was told that "in these times of austerity it is not appropriate to let prisoners watch drama".
The idea that being in prison is a ‘cushy’ experience is a tired one, surely, made for tabloid headlines and with little basis in reality. Prison causes real, sometimes irredeemable psychological damage to its prisoners, and the number of re-offenders is still too high. Prisoners re-offending from short jail time costs £10bn a year, and the finger has been pointed by Edward Leigh, former chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, to the little effort put to make that jail time constructive.
Those who believe that the theatre work that occurs inside prisons (be it workshops or performances) is just entertainment, are probably amongst those who see prisons as an end to life, rather than a passage. If prisons are to be a way of rehabilitating prisoners into society then they have to be given the tools to do so – spending years incarcerated isn’t going to help you relate to the world better, but theatre might. Theatre humanises, it brings you outside of yourself to empathize, by cutting funding to theatre in prison, you’re cutting a lifeline too.