Arts help offenders craft brighter future
A NEW program to help offenders get in touch with their creative side would inspire positive change and help with rehabilitation, Justice Minister Elise Archer says.
Community Corrections and Kickstart Arts have combined to deliver a $400,000 three-year pilot of the Freedom Project thanks to funding from the Tasmanian Community Fund.
The program gives those on community-based orders the opportunity to engage in arts-based intervention and wellbeing programs.
“It’s a program that looks at prosocial behaviours, providing self-confidence, self-esteem to participants, and it’s specially designed for this purpose,’’ Ms Archer said.
“We know that arts can do an enormous benefit in someone’s life and someone in the circumstance of having low self-esteem, low confidence and if that’s the reason for committing crime and because they have lower support from family and friends then art can be an outlet for that.”
Kickstart Arts senior creative producer Richard Bladel said the program offered first and foremost a place of understanding.
“We’re creating a safe space, a creative space for people who are within the justice system to be able to find and develop tools to help maintain a positive mental health space, to help them develop some tools to deal with stress and anxiety,” he said.
“There’s an enormous body of research across the world that demonstrates that collaborative working in the arts really has been proven to positively affect mental health.
“Some of them just want to come and just be here because life is so difficult and unstable because they’re dealing with all sorts of problems, poverty, homelessness, stress and anxiety as well as it’s being within the justice system.”
Project leading artist Caroline Amos said the program was designed to give participants the chance to find their creative voice and opportunities to succeed.
“One of the participants said the third time that they’ve been here that it actually prevented them from using when they were stressed out, so that’s just a very honest response,” she said.
“Another participant was saying coming here brightens up her day, it actually enables her to feel happy and positive about something in her life that’s very, very complicated. And another one said that it made him feel valued coming to work with people that understand he wants to make art and he hasn’t had many opportunities to do that.”