Edinburgh Napier University

  Podcast Description on Website:

'In this episode our host Rachelle Cobain talks to Dr Kirstin Anderson about a new book she’s edited called ‘The Barlinnie Special Unit: Art, Punishment and Innovation’.

Kirstin is a Lecturer in Criminology at Edinburgh Napier University and has spent a large part of her career teaching music in schools, universities and in prisons. She’s now turned her attention to the history and legacy of the Barlinnie Special Unit, which was a small therapeutic unit that opened in 1973 as a way of managing long term prisoners and violent offenders. Dubbed the world’s most ambitious penal experiment, it was loved and loathed in equal measure during its almost 22 years of life, until its eventual closure in the 1990s.

We talk about the stellar cast of contributors to the book including former inmates Jimmy Boyle and Johnny Steele, prison officer David Croft, as well as the therapists and artists that helped shape the unit such as Sarah Trevelyan and Richard Demarco.

And we talk about the unit’s controversies, why it closed and what legacy it leaves behind.'