Crafting Identities: Imagining Futures through Making and Co-creation with Prisoners

This chapter explores and expands on the global case made by criminal justice evaluators that creative education can significantly improve the lives of prisoners. It focuses specifically on fashion and design to argue that incarcerated individuals who engage in making and co-design processes experience unique rehabilitative benefits, including access to transformational learning and imagining new futures.

In prison environments, where identity and self-expression are often suppressed by security protocols, uniforms, and institutional routines, individuals are frequently reduced to ID numbers and made to wear identical clothing, which can erode their sense of self. Within this context, making and fashion education opens a new space for dialogue and self-discovery. Through the co-creation of fashion items and accessories, inmates are given the opportunity to reclaim and reshape their identities in meaningful and constructive ways.

The chapter discusses this process through two flagship University of the Arts, London initiatives: Makeright and Making for Change. These projects engage incarcerated men and women in UK prisons in designing and producing fashion products, including bags, clothing, and accessories, within collaborative studio spaces established in partnership within male and female prisons. In doing so, they illustrate how fashion education and co-design pedagogy can reconfigure the wider ecosystem of prison education by opening up new avenues for identity formation and personal agency. They demonstrate how creative co-design pedagogy in prison can foster identity development, build valuable skills and resilience, and even create pathways to future employment for motivated individuals. Additionally, this work explores how fashion-focused co-design in prison education can improve well-being, nurture empathy, and support desistance from crime.