What Happens if the Art Stops? A talk by Professor Shadd Maruna at BBC Broadcasting House - March 2026

Anne Peaker, who died in the year 2000, was a pioneering advocate for using arts within the criminal justice system to support people on the margins of society. She believed in the right to participate in cultural life, particularly for those in institutional settings, and inspired the work of the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance, which hosts an annual lecture in her honour. This year the lecture was held at BBC Broadcasting House at Portland Place, Central London, with all the history and gravitas that involves.

Professor Shadd Maruna is a British-American academic at the University of Liverpool, who specialises in ‘desistance theory’. At root, this is the theory of what keeps people on the straight and narrow after having been through the criminal justice system; i.e. desisting from acts society has labelled crime. Maruna has been told by some prisons that they don’t need to keep up arts activities inside, since they are already running practices based on desistance theory. These prisons apparently failed to understand that there is no desistance theory without the arts, and that they are in fact interdependent.

“’Offender’ is a terrible word for numerous reasons” said Maruna, highlighting how the term keeps these individuals locked within a psycho-social label from which it is hard to escape. The label offender may be a part of what Maruna termed ‘condemnation scripts’, rather than their opposite ‘redemption scripts’, further deepening a negative mindset and way of being. However, despite a push to end the use of the term a few years ago, every public official from Keir Starmer and David Lammy down use the word repeatedly in their public messaging, usually to show how ‘tough’ they’re being on them.

Prison initiatives such as Men Do Dance and Changing Tunes were cited as productive ways forward, and there is plentiful anecdotal evidence that the love for music that Changing Tunes engenders in individuals is massively beneficial. When a person has been involved in crime in their past, their mind and habits may return to those ways due to having become embedded. The arts are truly absorbing to those suited to them - though that’s not everyone - and that absorption, like daydreaming or working out, leaves little time for ‘idle hands’. The joy of creation is experienced in these people too, often for the first time in prison, and the wonderful people from Koestler Arts were on hand at the lecture as lived experience of that.

Beyond the arts, the idea of ‘generative justice’, as the next step from ‘restorative justice’ was signalled, a development that seems to have much in common with the ‘zemiology’ theory of Dr Michael Naughton of the University of Bristol and Empowering The Innocent. Both zemiology and generative justice look at what society terms as ‘crime’ as a whole, and the harms and impacts of everybody involved, beyond simple binaries such as ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’. Speaking of empowering the innocent, your reporter was able to ask Maruna how desistance theory might be applied to the up to one-fifth of people in prisons maintaining some level of innocence, to which he replied that that narrative was as valid as any other, and it was important for the prisoner maintaining innocence to hold on to that.

In the social time that followed the main talk ideas were fleshed out around tables, as the 7th floor of Broadcasting house transformed into a bar of sorts, and the subject of people in prisons having access to the internet was discussed. Such individuals already feel disenfranchised from regular society, a feeling which might have taken them down paths which became illegal. While mainstream society becomes more and more online, and those who are not ‘left behind’, surely monitored internet access, to keep in touch with friends, family and current affairs, is possible by now? Allowing individuals to feel connected would serve the theory of desistance for some as much as the arts or the gym will to others.

Peter Cameron’s book Artistic Convictions was praised, as was the musical work of Maruna’s past collaborator Fergus McNeil, while NCJAA illustrator Erika Flowers was on hand, spontaneously capturing the evening in visual form. Finally, hearing from an audience member that a music teacher in their prison had recently been lost, from the seventh floor of the worldwide hub of culture that is the BBC, Maruna’s statement was clear: ‘We can’t DO desistance if we abandon the arts’.

By Sean Bw Parker

Sean Bw Parker (MA) is an artist and reporting editor for False Allegations Watch, the Falsely Accused Support Organisation (FASO) and Sussex Globe.