In a basement studio suffused with shocking pink light, around a chic coffee table draped with plants, a podcast is about to be recorded. Being an of-the-moment show, it is also being filmed for YouTube. So sofas are angled for the best shots, microphones are set in particular places, a neon sign is switched on, and Zak Addae-Kodua, on the right-hand sofa, is checking his face for shine. Does he need powder?
“What do you think?” he asks Jules Rowan, sitting next to him. She examines him carefully. “You’re good,” she says. “I got you.”
Zak, 31, and Jules, 26, are the brand new presenters of a brand new weekly podcast, The Sit Down. Yes, it’s a chatshow – in each episode, they’ll talk to one or two guests in depth about their lives – but it’s almost certainly unlike any you’ve heard before. As Zak and Jules explain in their introduction, The Sit Down is a show where people with “some interaction with the justice system” – ex-prisoners or their families, essentially – will talk honestly about what they’ve been through.
This is their first episode and on the sofa opposite them sit their first two guests. One, Tracy, friendly, chatty, has twin sons who have spent most of their adult lives inside: they are 14 years into a 28-year sentence. “I serve the sentence with them,” she says. “I think everyone does, we serve it too.” The other woman, Hilda, warm but quieter, also has two boys who were sent to prison. One is still there. The other is out, and sitting opposite her: Zak.
“What was it like when Zak first went to prison?” asks Jules.
“It hit me like a bomb,” says Hilda. “My heart was destroyed.”
Zak was 17 when he was first sent to youth custody. “He was a clever boy, the family hope,” recalls Hilda.
“Didn’t a teacher from college call you?” Zak asks.
“Yes,” she says. “A teacher from your sixth form college called me to ask why you haven’t been to class. I said, ‘He has been sent to prison.’ And the teacher just cut the phone.”
The Sit Down is one of two new shows being made by National Prison Radio (NPR) under the title of Life After Prison. The other is Getting Out, also presented by Zak and Jules, a short-form podcast with specific, practical advice for people who are just leaving prison. The Sit Down is designed to be more discursive and emotionally honest, to get into what prison does to people, and what leaving prison might do too.
National Prison Radio, run by the Prison Radio Association (PRA), is a well-established broadcasting company that has been making audio programmes since 2009. Though some programmes, such as Radio 4’s Outside In, are made for other stations, many are made for prisoners, by prisoners. Those shows you can only hear if you’re inside (or judging them for an award – they’ve won several). NPR has two studios, one in HMP Brixton, in London, the other in HMP Styal, in Cheshire, and employs producers to work with prisoners to make a request show, a breakfast show (called Porridge, of course), various specialist music shows, a keep-fit programme, a sound clash slot and many more.
As a radio station, NPR is amazingly successful; about 99% of prisoners know about it, and more than 75% listen in. To which you might think, well, of course, wouldn’t you, if you were in your cell for 23 hours a day? But if the content wasn’t good, prisoners wouldn’t listen. The shows help those inside not only with their mood, but also with information and support as to how they can use their time in prison productively, the fine details of how the prison system works, and the best way to navigate it.
National Prison Radio is an amazing support for prisoners, then. But what happens to all that support when prisoners become ex-prisoners? Many of those who’ve been in prison say that leaving can be the hardest time. Getting Out and The Sit Down are NPR’s attempt to help them steer through the tough times outside. An extensive audition process resulted not only in Zak and Jules being recruited as presenters, but also the creation of a seven-person advisory panel – which includes Tracy – with direct experience of the criminal justice system, who will help plan shows and sometimes appear as guests.
Zak and Jules have both spent time in prison – Zak was inside three times over a nine-year period – and they know from experience that when someone is serving a sentence, it’s not just a contained, solo thing. An offence can shatter lives, and not only those of a victim and their family. Family and friends of the prisoner are also affected; and then, when the prisoner leaves, the sentence continues in a different form.
In another, less pink recording room, Jules tries to explain.
“When I came out,” she says, “I couldn’t relate to people, because I didn’t believe that anyone understood. And I didn’t know how to express what I was feeling anyway, or who to talk to about it. I felt like I was living in a world that I didn’t understand and which didn’t understand me.”
Jules served two-and-a-half years for GBH. She worked hard in prison, using the time to get fit, marching up and down the wing whenever she was allowed out of her cell, doing hundreds of squats and press-ups when she was locked up. She achieved NVQs in personal training while she was in there, to help her find work when she left. But, once out, she struggled. Her family (she’s the youngest of four sisters) were supportive, but Jules felt she’d missed out on living; the birthdays that she’d spent inside played on her mind. She couldn’t cope with having too many people around her, or with getting too much input from others. And she didn’t feel she could be honest with people. Her clients would say to her, “Oh you’re so passionate about fitness, why is that?” or “Where did you learn?” and she felt she had to lie.
Worst of all, she didn’t know how to talk about any of this, not even to explain that she just wanted to be alone sometimes, let alone express her deeper, more difficult emotions. Even now, a few years on, she’s still learning to open up. While filming the podcast, something makes Jules cry a little. She says: “I only started crying a few months ago, I couldn’t do it for ages.”
* * *
Zak, who was given three different sentences for robbery and drug offences, decided he wanted to change his life after he came out of prison for the second time. “My mind flipped,” he says. “I changed my circle of friends, I changed the area I was living, I was legitimately working and starting my life again. A complete mindset overhaul.” But his previous life caught up with him when police investigated an old offence and he was sent to prison once more. A difficult time.
Still, he tried to “change the conversation”, he says, to talk to the guys inside about different things, about what they might do when they got out, how they could use their talents instead of going back to the same way of life. He points to the lack of realism in the celebratory “fresh home” videos on Instagram and TikTok, where people make films of themselves getting out of prison, being picked up by friends in a car. “It’s like, ‘Wooh, he’s back home, everything’s all nice.’ But that skips out the whole prison thing and how that’s affected him, his family, his relationships.”
Zak knows that once you leave prison, you have to be realistic. Money might not come quickly, or easily, in regular life. His first job was stacking shelves (“the pay was quite decent, you can’t expect to be making £30k straight off”); later, he worked for Sainsbury’s, but when some money went missing, he was immediately suspected. “That made me feel like, What am I doing, changing my life, and I’m still getting that? That can affect you.”
Now working supporting social enterprises in Newham, east London, Zak is convinced that many of the skills he learned as a so-called roadman are transferable. “It’s about understanding the construct of it,” he says. “You were managing cashflow – all you got to do now is put it in a spreadsheet! Understand that this is what the government’s gonna take off you, put it aside, no problem. You’d put rainy-day money aside before, it’s the same. You just need to know it’s within these bounds.”
Prison podcasts are a successful audio niche (US show Ear Hustle is huge; The Secret Life of Prisons from UK charity the Prison Reform Trust is also very popular), but for Zak and Jules, the new show is about building a community of understanding. A community of people who understand what it’s like to serve time and then to start again: whether through their own experience, or that of their family, or just because they’re interested in knowing what prison does to people, both inside and out.
“Talking to people with stories and information, it’s a blessing,” says Jules. “Everyone is doing it for the same reasons, bridging the alone feeling, slowly starting to feel you’re not the only one with these feelings.”
“It’s not super-common that you’ve been to prison,” says Zak. “Who can relate to you? You can’t speak to your old friends about it. I do speak to them, but it’s not the same, once you’re not a part of that world any more, it’s like you’ve left the army and now you’re a civilian. Who can relate to that, understand that experience? You need a strong mindset, and you need a reality check as well.”
For Hilda and Tracy, and other people who are serving time outside as their family members serve time inside, The Sit Down is a place where they can hear what it’s like for people like them, too. “It was the saddest day of my life when Zak was sentenced,” says Hilda. “I had no hope at all.”
“You can’t turn round to someone in Asda and say, ‘My kids are in prison’,” says Tracy. “You feel completely alone. But there can be little moments of what I call collateral beauty, and this show can be part of that.”
The Sit Down and Getting Out will available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube from 13 October
