At last!  The day has almost dawned that I have been anticipating since June!

​

I woke up at 4.30  because I was presenting my degree project, One Year, to the International Carceral Geography Conference in Melbourne, Australia.

​

I was thrilled to have been asked to send in my abstract in June, and ecstatic in October when I was told it had been accepted!  Who would have thought that at 72, I would be presenting to an international academic audience for the first time??  Dr Eleanor March knew about my work after the SW Prisons Residency in April where she had delivered a talk on cultural representations of prisons.

​

In preparation for my presentation, I asked our current MAFA tutor Dr Laura Hopes, if she could listen to my presentation and give me some pointers on how to improve it.  Laura suggested replacing some slides and give a more academic slant to the ending.

​

The presentation this morning went well inasmuch as I did not forget any of the information I wanted to put across.  there were a few questions one of which, posed by one of the organisers, asked me what I had learned.  On the spot I spoke about how unseen the rehabilitation practices in UK jails are, and how ordinary prison life can be.

​

Since then I have had time to reflect further & the following thoughts came to mind:

* I was humbled by the quality of the presentations I heard.

* Put in a Conclusion to the presentation to firm up my ideas mainly.

* Why do we put so many people in jail?Remember to give the prison stats for 2017!

* So much is done for & by the prisoners that is simply not covered by the press that people are not aware of it all.  Do they know that therapeutic prisons exist in the UK?

* How can we encourage a more inclusive approach to ex-offenders?  

​

I managed to watch a presentation by 2 prison lawyers who started a correspondence with male prisoners who have been sentenced to death in India.  These are some of their slides that I found most useful, although they deal with male prisoners: