Bouncing off the Walls: A Prison Soundscape

Footsteps on a metal walkway. The jangle of keys and the resonant clang of thick steel doors slamming.

The clamour of voices raised in conversation, or argument, or laughter… their echoes ricocheting off brick and concrete.

TVs and radios, all tuned to different stations, fighting it out with each other, overlapping and blurring into a muddle of sound.

Prison is a swirling soundscape. A cacophony of disparate elements bouncing off the walls, assaulting your ears - and your mind. And each sound has a meaning, a resonance, both to prisoners and prison officers.

Nowadays Ric Renton is a playwright and screenwriter. But two decades ago that soundscape was part of his life... day and night. In his late teens he served time, first in a Young Offenders’ Institution and later in HMP Durham. And in the twenty years since he left, he’s often thought back to the sound of those places.

In this Illuminated he considers the significance of sound in prison: its impact on prisoners in an environment where they can’t escape it; the rhythms of its rise and fall across the day; and the way sound gives you clues about the prevailing mood... whether everybody’s relaxed or whether there’s tension in the air.

Ex-prisoners Valentine, Will, Yasmine and Nassri reflect on the barrage of noise they encountered in prison and the impossibility of escaping from it.

Valentine recalls sounds echoing and bouncing off the walls. And wrapped up in the cacophony was pain and trauma... and truth too. It seemed to patrol the prison corridors, even in the relative quiet of the night when inmates were banged up in their cells. Ric Renton remembers, at HMP Durham in the depths of the night, the warders’ shout when they discovered that a prisoner had taken their own life: the sudden, chilling cry of “One off!”

And former prison officer Alex South recalls how she and her colleagues could read the mood of the wing just by listening. If the shouting had diminished and everything was quieter, if people were murmuring and watchful, then there was probably trouble brewing.

The programme is soundtracked by recordings made on location in prison: the sounds as prison officers kit up at the beginning of their shift; the cacophony which explodes onto the wing at morning unlocking: the alarms, the gates, the keys, the prison officers’ radios; the procession and accumulation of sounds which mark the passing of another day inside.

Noise, bodies and minds… bouncing off the walls.

With thanks to the Prison Radio Association, Synergy Theatre Company and HMP Berwyn for their assistance in the making of this programme.

Presenter: Ric Renton
Producer: Jeremy Grange
Executive Producer: Olivia Humphreys

An Overcoat Media production for BBC Radio 4