Clean Break presents
by Chloe Moss
30 July 2008 - 5 December 2009
Author: Chloë Moss in Time Out
'If you spend time with women in prisons and hear their stories, as I did, it has a massive impact. About 60 or 70 percent of female inmates are in prison for non-violent crimes. About 90 percent have children. And the reason they're in prison is poverty and drugs. Those problems should be addressed in a different way than having custodial sentences. The money it costs to keep someone in prison could be ploughed into looking after these vulnerable people in the first place. Otherwise you have children going into care, and it becomes a cycle.
The thing that struck me most when I ran writing workships in prison was how important the relationships formed in prison can be. Arriving in prison, a lot of people just want to get their heads down and get on with it. A lot of people feel vulnerable and afraid. So to find someone you can trust and have a friendship with is difficult. And even if you do, you might then be moved to a different prison; told to get your stuff together in 30 minutes then neither say goodbye to, nor ever see again, the person that you've spent every single day with for the past few years.
My play This Wide Night is about looking at those relationships out of context. Can you sustain a relationship that was based on you both being locked up 20 hours a day? How can that exist when you're both free? When my two characters, Lorraine and Marie, are released, the outside world can't help but crash in on them. The things they avoided before, like alcohol, or other people, or just life - it all bursts in between them and there's nothing they can do to stop that.'
'If you spend time with women in prisons and hear their stories, as I did, it has a massive impact. About 60 or 70 percent of female inmates are in prison for non-violent crimes. About 90 percent have children. And the reason they're in prison is poverty and drugs. Those problems should be addressed in a different way than having custodial sentences. The money it costs to keep someone in prison could be ploughed into looking after these vulnerable people in the first place. Otherwise you have children going into care, and it becomes a cycle.
The thing that struck me most when I ran writing workships in prison was how important the relationships formed in prison can be. Arriving in prison, a lot of people just want to get their heads down and get on with it. A lot of people feel vulnerable and afraid. So to find someone you can trust and have a friendship with is difficult. And even if you do, you might then be moved to a different prison; told to get your stuff together in 30 minutes then neither say goodbye to, nor ever see again, the person that you've spent every single day with for the past few years.
My play This Wide Night is about looking at those relationships out of context. Can you sustain a relationship that was based on you both being locked up 20 hours a day? How can that exist when you're both free? When my two characters, Lorraine and Marie, are released, the outside world can't help but crash in on them. The things they avoided before, like alcohol, or other people, or just life - it all bursts in between them and there's nothing they can do to stop that.'
