I’ve worked with murderers and drugs lords,” Imogen Walsh says pensively, sat on her sofa, with an old, beautiful, greying Vizsla at her side, a coffee table piled with paperwork and a laptop in front of her. “And no, I’ve never really felt scared in there.”

The ‘there’ in question is prison, but this is not a story of athlete transition gone bad. The former World and European champion retired as an international lightweight sculler eight years ago and her repeat prison visits – three to four times a week – are in the name of Boats Not Bars. “Now, the metric I’m chasing isn’t boat speed, it’s reoffending rates.”

Boats Not Bars (BnB) is an award-winning initiative designed to reduce prisoner reoffending rates. It is run by Walsh as part of the Fulham Reach Boat Club charity. BnB delivers six to eight week in-prison indoor rowing courses, as well as providing prisoners with outdoor rowing experiences and ‘Through the Gate’ support.

Walsh is a petite, softly spoken Scot with a fierce sense of fairness. “I get really wound up by something unfair happening to somebody else.” She grew up in Inverness and studied at Glasgow before swapping both for London to pursue her rowing ambitions. To underestimate her, particularly her resolve, determination and capacity for hard work, is a fool’s errand.

How did this ex-international oarswoman come to have an interest in the prison system? “John McAvoy,” says Walsh. McAvoy, who featured in Issue 09 of Row360, is a former high profile armed robber turned Nike-sponsored triathlete, and an absolute evangelist when it comes to the redemptive power of sport.

Walsh and McAvoy became friends at London Rowing Club, after the latter was released from prison. “I used to speak to him a lot about it. He joined London Rowing Club in 2012. At that point I was doing half the week training there and half the week at Caversham.”

She had made her international debut the year before, in 2011, and spent five years in the British team. Gold medals bracket Walsh’s career, she won them in the lightweight women’s quad at the World Rowing Championships. In between, she became European champion in the lightweight single and spent two years adding to her medal haul in one of Great Britain’s leading boats: the lightweight women’s double scull.

Walsh stepped away from life as a full-time athlete in 2016, frustrated that an Olympic Games had eluded her. “Rowing hadn’t gone swimmingly. It didn’t end the way I wanted it to. That made me seriously question why on earth I did it in the first place. What is it about sport that had sucked me in completely? From being not sporty to it being my entire life.”

Prior to rowing Walsh worked for an international development charity and volunteered in India and Liberia. After leaving Caversham she spent time coaching (“in a non-conventional sense”) and established a rowing programme in the Maldives.

“It made me realise that it wasn’t the sport part of coaching that I enjoyed, it was the confidence building part. People get this buzz when they take part in something that’s outside of their comfort zone.”

Utilising this shift is central to the mission of BnB. “The rowing session is about trying to build a sense of self worth and a change of identity,” says Walsh.

“A lot of people in prison don’t see themselves as rowers, and never would see themselves as rowers. We’re saying, ‘Well you can be, there’s no barrier to that.’ I know rowing itself doesn’t change [everything] but it’s a component part that gives people the motivation to make this big change in their life.”

At Feltham Young Offenders, where the initiative was launched in October 2019, BnB is integrated with the work of NHS psychologists. “With the younger group, a lot of it is about trying to understand their emotions and how their emotions lead to their actions and behaviours.”

The psychologists found the indoor rowing sessions enabled them to build a better bond and engage more with the participants. “It’s only eight weeks but they start to open up about their problems and worries, and better understand their own communication. For example, if they are anxious, it could come out as aggression, and then understanding the consequences of how that might play out. If you can identify ‘OK, I’m feeling anxious’ then you can choose how to act on it.”

“Part of what you are trying to build is group cohesion so that they support each other,” says Walsh, who has driven the expansion of BnB since its launch almost five years ago. It now operates in six prisons and is likely to resume work in HM Prison Wandsworth, where staff shortages made the course unfeasible. It has been a bumpy ride from the get-go.

“We’d only been going for six months when Covid hit,” says Walsh. “Imagine starting up a small business and then having to close the doors just when you are getting off the ground. For about two years we weren’t allowed back into prisons at all. It was very, very slow to pick up again. In some of the prisons a lot of the restrictions, put in place for Covid, remained even when the risk had gone. It took a long time to happen; everything takes a long time in the prison system. Getting back up and running took a long, long time.”

Drawing on her athlete mindset, Walsh found positives in the unplanned break. “It forced a shake up: what works, what doesn’t?” First and foremost, “Thinking that we were going to do a course with people and then they were going to get in touch with us – [that’s] not going to happen! We need to do a lot more work keeping in touch with participants. Just giving them my e-mail address and saying, ‘Get in touch in a couple of months time,’ Well, some do and that’s amazing, but we need to do more.”

It was also clear the initiative needed to go beyond offering only an in-prison delivery (“it’s got to be something longer than that”), and that there were opportunities to tailor each course to the needs of the respective prisons.

“Making it bespoke, so at Feltham there’s psychology; elsewhere we offer coaching certificates or rowing on the water for ROTLs [release on temporary license prisoners]. That kind of thing can seem kind of fluffy. Why would going out and rowing make a difference to somebody? It’s about building a sense of hope and acceptance and feeling like you can be part of something. You are not going to be a pariah. Actually, somebody values you and probably a world that you might not think would value you.”

A typical week involves a half-day visit to each of the prisons and additional work for day release rowing sessions at Fulham Reach Boat Club. “It doesn’t leave much time to do the admin side of it.” Hence the stack of paperwork on her coffee table.

Walsh’s never ending to-do list includes collaborating with other organisations, compiling impact data and statistics, funding applications, and helping participants with for example job referrals and accommodation searches. (“Some prisons literally give them a tent when they leave because they know that there’s not going to be anywhere for them to stay.”) To impact policy change, she has listened to research and offered insights at the House of Lords and contributed to an All-Party Parliamentary Group on sport and criminal reform.

Funding is an ever-present concern. It costs in the region of £100,000 a year to run the initiative. “Our financial year runs until the end of August. We are currently running at a loss for this financial year, so we need to fill this and then start funding for the following year.”

What motivates her to keep going? “I believe it shouldn’t have to happen to you for it to matter to you. Just because I’ve never ended up in prison, or someone I love hasn’t, doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.”

“People told me this at the beginning: there won’t be a huge number of success stories but when you get them it will be worth it. When it has clicked with somebody, or you get a message saying, ‘Just to let you know I’m doing well,’ or ‘I’m out of prison and I want to make a go of it’. Those are real chinks of light.”

Has the work hardened or disillusioned Walsh, or changed her views? “It hasn’t changed my view of the prisoners themselves. There are many factors that play into somebody being there. I recognise now that there are so many stars that need to align for somebody to not go back. We need a system that works better, together, to help prevent that from happening.”

One of Walsh’s biggest frustrations is the prison service itself. “Unfortunately, the more I get to know about the prison service the more I get frustrated by it. It is so slow. Often it knows what the right thing to do is, but it won’t action it.

“They have all this data that says if we do this, this and this, people will be less violent, better behaved and less likely to reoffend, but they won’t do any of it because they are worried about voters’ perceptions. Everything is done on a vote winning basis. That’s the big frustration.”

With a UK general election looming political rhetoric is set to get louder. “We need to stop the messaging that the way to fix this is to be harsher and to build more prisons. Politicians say that because that’s what the public want, but the public want it because the politicians say it. It’s circular. We need to change the narrative.”

“What we want is for people to not reoffend and if we could understand that better – how that mechanism works – then I think we wouldn’t need more prisons because there would be fewer people going back to them.”

“The cost of reoffending is £18.1 billion per year. If people looked at the Norwegian system and saw what their reoffending rates were, they’d see it as a no-brainer. From either a human potential or economic loss, either one should be enough to make you think we need to change this.”

Walsh admits that increasing the support offered by BnB, “would be easier if there was a change in public attitude towards it, which goes hand in hand with political voices”.

Societal perceptions differ beyond UK borders. In a conversation with the governor of a prison in Belgium, Walsh learnt: “People there think that if someone has gone to prison it is because society has failed them in some way, whereas we think that if someone has gone to prison that individual has failed in some way.”

For Walsh it is important that society does not lose sight of the individual “human stories”, rather than having “a blanket image that everyone in prison is evil”.

“People need to realise that most people in prison are going to come out at some point. At some point in time, you are going to be walking down the street past them, living next to them, or driving behind them. So how do you want that person to behave? It’s wasps in a jar analogy: shake it up and they’ll come out angry.”

“[We must] find the balance between punishment and reform and understand that just going to prison is the punishment. You don’t need to further degrade them once they are in there. It is very easy for people to want more punishment than what is going to produce the outcome that they seek.”

We’ve been talking for a couple of hours, and an impatient Vizsla is overdue his walk. It prompts one final thought from Walsh.

“All the things that I love, that make me feel good, like open air and nature, [this work] makes me grateful to be able to come home, take the dog out and appreciate freedom. Prison can be a dark place: grey, concrete and metal. Being in such a grey environment would be soul destroying. It’s designed to be bleak. You don’t need to completely destroy someone’s sense of hope. The environment does that.” 

This article featured in Issue 52

Issue 52

April | May 2024

Out of Stock