The Barlinnie Special Unit

In February 1973 a small unit opened inside Barlinnie Prison for men regarded as the most violent and dangerous in the Scottish prison system. Instead of tighter control, they were given more responsibility. Prisoners and staff met together as a community, decided matters jointly, and were encouraged to talk, to work through their anger and to make art. For twenty-one years the Barlinnie Special Unit was praised as proof that even the hardest men could change, and condemned as a soft option that rewarded violence. It remains one of the most debated experiments in the history of British prisons.

Why it was created

By the late 1960s Scottish prisons held a small number of men serving very long sentences who were in constant, violent conflict with staff. With the abolition of the death penalty, there were lifers with seemingly nothing to lose, and riots, assaults and long spells in solitary confinement had changed nothing. In 1971 a working party of the Scottish Home and Health Department recommended a special unit for violent and potentially violent long-term prisoners.

A purpose-built unit planned for Perth proved impracticable, so a former women’s block at Barlinnie was refurbished instead. It opened in February 1973.

How it worked

The unit was run on the lines of a therapeutic community, a model developed by the psychiatrist Maxwell Jones. At its heart was a regular community meeting attended by every prisoner and member of staff, with an elected chair, at which anyone could raise anything, including complaints about each other. Prisoners were not required to work in the usual prison sense, and could receive visitors daily for long hours without being searched.

It was small and expensive. There were about ten places, but rarely more than eight men at a time, and in 1980 the staff included a governor, fourteen officers, several of them trained nurses, a consultant psychiatrist and a psychologist. Officers such as Ken Murray, a senior nursing officer, were crucial in setting the tone of the early years, treating prisoners as people rather than problems.

Art

The unit’s first governor, George Duncan, invited the art therapist Joyce Laing to work with the prisoners from 1973. What followed astonished almost everyone. Men who had known nothing but violence began to draw, paint, write and sculpt. In 1980 the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow mounted an exhibition of work from the unit, followed by a book in 1982. In the early 1990s prisoners formed a theatre company, Cat A, whose play No Mean Fighter won a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival in 1992. Laing later gave her collection of more than a thousand works by prisoners and psychiatric patients to Glasgow Museums.

The men

The unit’s most famous prisoner was Jimmy Boyle, once described as the most violent man in Scotland, who became a sculptor and wrote the bestselling autobiography A Sense of Freedom (1977). His play The Hardman, written with Tom McGrath, was staged the same year. Hugh Collins, serving life for murder, also became a sculptor and author. The poet Larry Winters died in the unit in 1977; his writing was published two years later as The Silent Scream. In all, around thirty-five men passed through the unit.

Controversy

From the start the unit had powerful critics. Other prisoners and many prison officers saw it as unfair that men convicted of the worst violence enjoyed freedoms denied to everyone else. Sections of the press were hostile, especially when Boyle’s growing fame took him into the public eye, and police representatives spoke angrily of the "glorification" of murderers. Supporters answered that the alternative, endless cycles of violence and solitary confinement, had failed completely. The unit was debated in the House of Commons in 1980, when the government said there were no plans for a similar unit in England but that officials would visit Barlinnie to learn from it.

Results and closure

By the measures that mattered most inside, the unit worked. Research by the psychologist David Cooke found much lower rates of assault and serious rule-breaking among its prisoners than before they arrived. Several men were eventually released, and some, including Boyle and Collins, built new lives as artists and writers.

In its later years, however, the unit lost much of its energy. A study in 1992 described a stalemate in which the remaining prisoners did not want to move on, while the prison service and the Parole Board wanted them transferred. A working party recommended closure, and the Scottish Prison Service closed the unit in 1994. Its example still features in debates about how best to manage violent prisoners.

Timeline