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Sparks in the dark

August 01 2025
An artwork by Daren, a prisoner at HMP Guys Marsh. © Denise Harrison An artwork by Daren, a prisoner at HMP Guys Marsh. © Denise Harrison

How a prison reading group sparked a revolution. By Denise Harrison 

Earlier this year I agreed to spend 12 weeks in HMP Guys Marsh with nine men I’d never met and who I knew next to nothing about.

The idea was simple: take these men, with their wounds and their grief and their unresolved trauma and create a community rooted in addiction recovery, sustainable amidst the chaos and the craziness of daily prison life.

It was a pilot, a punt. It could have landed badly, and I and everyone involved could have been left wiping egg off our faces – only it didn’t land badly, it was incredible, and what those 12 weeks have taught me (and hopefully them!) has been life-changing.

My name is Denise. Today I’m an award-winning writer, filmmaker and published author which is all kinds of cool, because nine years ago I was an end-stage alcoholic, sleeping on a borrowed sofa.

Detox saved my life back then – or that’s what I thought at the time.

It took a traumatised, six stone scrap of a woman and it made me look like a human again. It got rid of all the nasties in my system and it gave me the time and space that I needed to process how it felt to be sober for the first time in years.

What treatment didn’t give me, though, was even a basic understanding of addiction or any of the tools that I needed to actually “do” recovery by myself. After leaving rehab and seeing good friends start to drop like flies, I realised very quickly that without these tools I’d probably be joining them.

So, I made it my mission to understand addiction, and I’ve spent the last nine years digging into trauma. Along the way I made my own recovery tools, and gradually this knowledge morphed into a book: Finding Rat Park. A book that has found its way into hostels, refuges and recovery groups.

And now HMP Guys Marsh…

To avoid the mountains of paperwork and the obligatory jumping through bureaucratic hoops needed to get this book read in prison, we decide simply to call it a reading group.

I agree to design and facilitate 12 weekly sessions (one for every chapter of the book). Then I catch a train, nine men I’ve never met before decide to take a chance on me, and the rest, as they say, is history.

To get the ball rolling I read a poem and talk about curveballs – things that knock us off track and steer us off course. I ask if anyone else has an example. One of the guys shares that his dad died of a heart attack in front of him after a heated argument and then 10 hours later his daughter was born, leaving him with a million conflicting emotions that had nowhere to go. Three months later his girlfriend left him, taking said baby as he struggled to come to terms with his grief, meaning that in a matter of months he’d pretty much lost everything. Now I think you’ll agree that that’s a fucking curveball.

We talk about trust issues. One of the group talks about childhood abuse resulting in him being taken into care. He thought it would be respite from the sexual assaults, until his social worker picked up where his family left off, a move that absolutely decimated him.

We talk people and relationships, and the importance of choosing the people around you wisely, and ‘A’ decides to share his story. Meeting a woman he liked while on day release from D-cat, he went back to hers and experienced “first night nerves”, which started with a vodka and coke, and ended with him waking the next morning in a virtual stranger’s bed to find 15 years of recovery in tatters and a message on his phone advising him to report to the nearest police station as he was now on recall and going back to C-cat. 
We watch social impact films and TED Talks (one of which we have to watch sideways, which is par for the course when you don’t have any Wi-Fi). We discuss and debate. We drink tea and eat KitKats and week by week we read a new chapter, share our stories and lay ourselves bare.  

Incredible things start to happen in this room.

Walls come down and masks are left outside the door, as one-by-one, these men with all of their banter and their bravado, start to strip away the layers and begin to find out who they really are. Some for the first time ever. Sitting in this room, bearing witness to all of their hopes and their haunts, seeing how hard they work on their recovery in this place, their bravery and resilience knocks me sideways.

We had no idea what to expect when we started this project. I was just hoping that these guys showed up. Boy did they show up. For me, for the staff, for themselves and for each other.

Week-in, week-out, over the course of 12 weeks this fledgling reading group has morphed into a close-knit community that has each other’s backs and will continue to flourish long after I leave. Between them all they’ve been writing a book, and now they have a book deal. I don’t know who is more proud about that: me, the staff or them.

They are taking over a patch of land outside the wing and building their very own version of “Rat Park” – somewhere that they can sit quietly in nature away from the madding crowd. It’s still very much in the design phase at the minute, but apparently it will have gnomes, a phoenix and very possibly a bridge.

The guys will be graduating soon. We’re having live theatre and food, the group has been busy putting on a talent show and I’m not going to lie, it’s going to be emotional. I had no idea just how invested I would become or how hard it would be for me to leave this place.

But I’ll be taking this thought with me when I go: I’ve worked with nine men who are different people now after taking this course. They have grown in knowledge and in confidence and they know now that as long as you have the right people around you, it’s ok to feel vulnerable.

These guys didn’t have an awful lot to look forward to when we met. Now they have hope and some solid plans for a brighter future. 
While they still have work to do on themselves and their recovery, if the opposite of addiction really is connection, then I think that these guys are gonna be ok, because that is one thing that they have in abundance.

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