Story by Ben Stone

In the heart of the United Kingdom’s Brixton Prison, an old, looming brick building in south London, cell-lined hallways intersect to form the operationala headquarters and studio of National Prison Radio (NPR). NPR is the latest and most expansive incarnation of prison radio in Britain, which was originally founded in 1994 as a way to prevent nighttime loneliness and self-harm among the men at Her Majesty’s Feltham Prison in west London. It remains the world’s only national prison radio network, transmitting 24/7 via satellite to the “vast majority” of television sets in the cells of the 88,000 prisoners in England and Wales. Aided by eight radio producers formerly employed by the publicly-funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and directed by the warm, sharply dressed Phil Maguire, NPR’s content is written and recorded by a group of prisoners trained in radio production. Despite winning awards from the Sony Radio Academy every year since 2009 and being named London’s Station of the Year at the 2012 Radio Academy Nations and Regions Awards, NPR is broadcasted only within the walls of British prisons. 

Ben Stone: What kind of shows air on your station?

Phil Maguire: We have the NPR book club, so we have a book that is serialized over a month and every night you can tune in and listen to a chapter. Then, at the end of the month, we have a book club discussion program where prisoners that have read the book get together and talk about it. We had The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which is a World War II concentration camp story that is very, very tough and dramatic. What we tend to avoid is crime fiction. We don’t want explicit details of complicated crimes being talked about on the radio.

     There’s our request show, our most popular show, where prisoners write to us, because they’ve not got access to the Internet or to text messaging. We take those letters and produce a two-hour daily request show where we just play songs that people have requested. We had one woman write in—she was in prison, she made a really good friend in prison, they were both recovering heroin addicts. One of them was released, and within a couple of days she was dead from a heroine overdose. So the surviving friend who was still in prison wrote to us to tell us how lost and bereft she was, but really, it was a warning call to any other prisoners. You can go to prison, you can stop taking your drugs, your tolerance level drops, you get out of prison, you go take your normal dose, but your normal dose is now a deadly dose. I think she requested one of her friend’s favorite songs, and said, ‘Could we dedicate this song to the memory of my friend?’ 

BS: Does the fact that you broadcast to a tightly controlled population affect the way you produce your shows?

PM: Almost by osmosis, we know what our audience wants, because our audience [members] are our presenters and our producers. [Our listeners are] all prisoners. Not only do we know they’ve all got that in common, but we know what time they get up, go to bed, get out of their cell, have their lunch. So we can focus our content really tightly on things that are relevant to them and their experience.

BS: Because you often work with prisoners who are serving short sentences, do you have a high turnover rate on your staff?

PM: It’s always great when we find out that somebody’s successfully been released; that they’re doing well on the outside, but occasionally it’s very difficult for us. At best, we have the same group for three months, and it feels quite stable. Then sometimes within the space of three or four weeks, we can lose almost all of the prisoners. And you can imagine what impact that has, because they’re the key to the station. They’re our talent.

BS: Do any prisoners who were involved with NPR go on to careers in radio on the outside?

PM: Getting involved in NPR isn’t necessarily a route into radio. We don’t want to unrealistically raise people’s expectations, but we definitely don’t want to keep people down.

    The skills that prisoners gain when they work with us will serve them well in whatever they choose to do afterwards. For many prisoners, studying a qualification for radio production is the first time they’ve been in a classroom in many years, and the first time they’ve ever achieved anything there and felt like they were a success. I think the most important thing that they learn is how to communicate effectively. If a prisoner is going to sit and interview the guy who runs the prison and ask him some difficult questions, if they can do that in a firm but polite and diplomatic way, he’s going to be much better equipped for a job on the outside.

BS: Your programming has won many awards on the outside. Do you wish that people on the outside could hear it?

PM: We don’t broadcast beyond the bars. I think the reason the programming is such good quality is because it’s so tightly focused. We make programs specifically for prisoners. If we were streaming on the Internet, or if we were offering our programs to anybody else to rebroadcast, it would dilute the quality of the programming.

BS: In addition to your programming, what kind of information does National Prison Radio broadcast to prisoners?

PM: We concentrate specifically on things like giving prisoners information on how they can get access to work upon release. We have programs about finding accommodations, how to deal with drug and alcohol problems, how to maintain or reestablish positive relationships with family members, and information about how to stay healthy in prison.

BS: Those are all pretty major things. How does a prison that doesn’t have a radio station communicate those things to prisoners?

PM: That proves the need for a prison radio project. Whenever you go into a prison, you just see notice boards everywhere, with posters and leaflets, many of which have been there for several years and are out of date, or many of which are badly designed, or there is too much text. Then consider that the average reading age for a prisoner is the same as that of an 11-year-old—many prisoners can’t read and write, or read and write well.

BS: Why is yours the only National Prison Radio network?

PM: I don’t know. Maybe the stars just haven’t been aligned at the right time. There are more and more countries asking us to help them do it, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to respond to the requests. I’ve been [to Trinidad and Tobago] twice at the invitation of the British High Commission out there. We’ve had a visit from someone who is interested in setting something up in Hungary. We’ve had a visit from a delegation in Sweden who have since set up something called Radio Fri. We’ve been to Australia trying to get prison radio off the ground there. “Prison Radio International”—I don’t know what it looks like; I don’t know how it’s funded. I don’t know how it’s going to work, but I think that there’s something there.

n the heart of the United Kingdom’s Brixton Prison, an old, looming brick building in south London, cell-lined hallways intersect to form the operationala headquarters and studio of National Prison Radio (NPR). NPR is the latest and most expansive incarnation of prison radio in Britain, which was originally founded in 1994 as a way to prevent nighttime loneliness and self-harm among the men at Her Majesty’s Feltham Prison in west London. It remains the world’s only national prison radio network, transmitting 24/7 via satellite to the “vast majority” of television sets in the cells of the 88,000 prisoners in England and Wales. Aided by eight radio producers formerly employed by the publicly-funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and directed by the warm, sharply dressed Phil Maguire, NPR’s content is written and recorded by a group of prisoners trained in radio production. Despite winning awards from the Sony Radio Academy every year since 2009 and being named London’s Station of the Year at the 2012 Radio Academy Nations and Regions Awards, NPR is broadcasted only within the walls of British prisons.

Ben Stone: What kind of shows air on your station?

Phil Maguire: We have the NPR book club, so we have a book that is serialized over a month and every night you can tune in and listen to a chapter. Then, at the end of the month, we have a book club discussion program where prisoners that have read the book get together and talk about it. We had The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which is a World War II concentration camp story that is very, very tough and dramatic. What we tend to avoid is crime fiction. We don’t want explicit details of complicated crimes being talked about on the radio.

     There’s our request show, our most popular show, where prisoners write to us, because they’ve not got access to the Internet or to text messaging. We take those letters and produce a two-hour daily request show where we just play songs that people have requested. We had one woman write in—she was in prison, she made a really good friend in prison, they were both recovering heroin addicts. One of them was released, and within a couple of days she was dead from a heroine overdose. So the surviving friend who was still in prison wrote to us to tell us how lost and bereft she was, but really, it was a warning call to any other prisoners. You can go to prison, you can stop taking your drugs, your tolerance level drops, you get out of prison, you go take your normal dose, but your normal dose is now a deadly dose. I think she requested one of her friend’s favorite songs, and said, ‘Could we dedicate this song to the memory of my friend?’

BS: Does the fact that you broadcast to a tightly controlled population affect the way you produce your shows?

PM: Almost by osmosis, we know what our audience wants, because our audience [members] are our presenters and our producers. [Our listeners are] all prisoners. Not only do we know they’ve all got that in common, but we know what time they get up, go to bed, get out of their cell, have their lunch. So we can focus our content really tightly on things that are relevant to them and their experience.

BS: Because you often work with prisoners who are serving short sentences, do you have a high turnover rate on your staff?

PM: It’s always great when we find out that somebody’s successfully been released; that they’re doing well on the outside, but occasionally it’s very difficult for us. At best, we have the same group for three months, and it feels quite stable. Then sometimes within the space of three or four weeks, we can lose almost all of the prisoners. And you can imagine what impact that has, because they’re the key to the station. They’re our talent.

BS: Do any prisoners who were involved with NPR go on to careers in radio on the outside?

PM: Getting involved in NPR isn’t necessarily a route into radio. We don’t want to unrealistically raise people’s expectations, but we definitely don’t want to keep people down.

    The skills that prisoners gain when they work with us will serve them well in whatever they choose to do afterwards. For many prisoners, studying a qualification for radio production is the first time they’ve been in a classroom in many years, and the first time they’ve ever achieved anything there and felt like they were a success. I think the most important thing that they learn is how to communicate effectively. If a prisoner is going to sit and interview the guy who runs the prison and ask him some difficult questions, if they can do that in a firm but polite and diplomatic way, he’s going to be much better equipped for a job on the outside.

BS: Your programming has won many awards on the outside. Do you wish that people on the outside could hear it?

PM: We don’t broadcast beyond the bars. I think the reason the programming is such good quality is because it’s so tightly focused. We make programs specifically for prisoners. If we were streaming on the Internet, or if we were offering our programs to anybody else to rebroadcast, it would dilute the quality of the programming.

BS: In addition to your programming, what kind of information does National Prison Radio broadcast to prisoners?

PM: We concentrate specifically on things like giving prisoners information on how they can get access to work upon release. We have programs about finding accommodations, how to deal with drug and alcohol problems, how to maintain or reestablish positive relationships with family members, and information about how to stay healthy in prison.

BS: Those are all pretty major things. How does a prison that doesn’t have a radio station communicate those things to prisoners?

PM: That proves the need for a prison radio project. Whenever you go into a prison, you just see notice boards everywhere, with posters and leaflets, many of which have been there for several years and are out of date, or many of which are badly designed, or there is too much text. Then consider that the average reading age for a prisoner is the same as that of an 11-year-old—many prisoners can’t read and write, or read and write well.

BS: Why is yours the only National Prison Radio network?

PM: I don’t know. Maybe the stars just haven’t been aligned at the right time. There are more and more countries asking us to help them do it, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to respond to the requests. I’ve been [to Trinidad and Tobago] twice at the invitation of the British High Commission out there. We’ve had a visit from someone who is interested in setting something up in Hungary. We’ve had a visit from a delegation in Sweden who have since set up something called Radio Fri. We’ve been to Australia trying to get prison radio off the ground there. “Prison Radio International”—I don’t know what it looks like; I don’t know how it’s funded. I don’t know how it’s going to work, but I think that there’s something there.