Playing for Time Theatre Company: Perspectives From the Prison (2019) McKean, A., & Massey-Chase, K. (Eds.)(Preface by S. Busby)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Playing for Time Theatre Company: Perspectives from the Prison is an edited collection of 12 essays that reflected upon a decade of theatre productions in Her Majesty's Prison (HMP) Winchester, England, between 2003 and 2014.The collection encompassed a multiplicity of voices that allowed readers to consider the phenomena of prison live theatre from the perspectives of the director, creator, historian, criminal psychologist, and inmate.Clearly written by deeply committed practitioners, the book is a powerful and inspiring reminder of the vital role that the arts can play in the rehabilitation of offenders.For Canada, where efforts to integrate the arts into prisoners' lives lag behind those of prisons in the United States and the United Kingdom, the book provided a "wake-up call" regarding the potential for the arts to have a positive impact on the lives of prisoners, rates of recidivism, and society as a whole.Annie McKean was a senior fellow in Knowledge Exchange at the University of Winchester and the artistic director of Playing for Time Theatre Company.She was the editor of the collection and author or co-author of six of the 12 chapters.In the introduction, she clearly and capably provided the context for all that follows, highlighting the importance of the drama work that she led, and the arguments in the book.McKean briefly described the sudden and bewildering changes to the management regimes of HMP Winchester; these changes ultimately led to the cancellation of the theatre project while outlining the grim state of the UK prison service as a whole.The statistics that she provided support her portrayal of the system's "state of crisis" (p. 6) at the time of writing, which was at the end of 2017.The theory that "prison works," she wrote, has led over the last 20 years to a doubling of the UK prison population to a nearly 85,000.Meanwhile, budget cuts have led to smaller prison staffs and corresponded with a rise in destructive behaviours among inmates cooped up in overcrowded cell blocks: "Drug use in prisons in the United Kingdom is at epidemic levels and violence and self-harm have increased exponentially" (p. 6).Meanwhile, McKean reported, "almost half of all prisoners are reconvicted within a year of release," and the cost of reoffending by former prisoners "is estimated to be up to £15 billion a year" (p.8).Against this disturbing national context, McKean defined the meaning of the word desistance, which is "generally understood as a process involving change that will lead from an offending lifestyle to one of non-offending" (p.8).Among the contributing factors to desistance is a shift in identity construction, in which the development of "self-expression, reflectivity, empathy and imagination" (p.8) all provide offenders with new ways of presenting themselves
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".