Beating Time

Improving mental health, building social inclusion, finding and creating employment for people serving prison sentences. We run two prison programmes aimed at helping people put prison behind them and build lives they want to live. Through Choirs Beating Time, we create prison choirs that serve their communities whilst preserving mental health. People who feel excluded and have poor mental health cannot find, or make, work. Inside Job is an in-prison recruitment consultancy and matches work-ready prisoners with employers. Prison affects huge numbers of people in the UK: the 89,000 inside, the 70,000 released each year and the 320,000 children with a parent in prison. We are spending millions building more prisons when other countries are closing theirs and cutting crime. Prison, as we do it, does not reduce crime and damages our society. All our programmes reinforce non-criminal identity, whether as singers, songwriters, performers, entrepreneurs, workers or parents. The people we work with know we believe in them, because we invest in them creatively, emotionally and financially. We create the opportunity for them to contribute, on lots of levels: to their prison community as performers, to their families at our Family Days, to the workforce, through Inside Job. By retaining a sense of self and creating opportunities we generate hope and motivation. Twitter: @Beating_Time