Book review: Coaching Behind Bars – Facing Challenges and Creating Hope in a Women’s Prison

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Coaching Behind Bars is an engaging account of how and why Clare McGregor took her life coaching practice from business consultancy to HMP Styal (women’s prison). Having made the move from probation to life coaching the disadvantaged, troubled and troublesome myself, I was delighted by the publication of this book. Like Clare, I also believe, ‘coaching should not just be for managers and people with money to spare’ (p. 3). However, whilst Clare expresses this eloquently and with a real personal touch, I’ve found myself talking to partner agencies about this being an opportunity to develop liberation of the working classes!

The book is divided into 11 easy-to-read chapters. Clare discusses her experiences at Styal, the scope of coaching, the issues and context of her coachees and finishes by directing readers as to how and where they can get involved. The book is part of a wider series of publications written primarily for coaching practitioners. With this in mind, the series editor exclaims in the foreword:

many people will link coaching with a high value service for highly paid executives…Among Clare’s many case studies there are women you will recognise as having similar problems to those senior executives with whom you usually work. (p. xiii)

In terms of a probation readership, this is perhaps the difficulty of the book. The chapters have a great deal of content expressing what it’s like to be in a prison, and readers may feel overly familiar with this already. However, I would urge probation practitioners to engage with this element of the content all the more. Having had 13 years of experience in probation, I remember how easy it could be to become over-familiar with the context of our probationers, whereas Clare looks at imprisonment with fresh eyes. This aspect of the book provides the potential for the book to be a refreshing and grounding perspective on imprisonment for people used to working in the system.

Clare’s discussion of coaching will also be familiar to many probation journal readers. Coaching has a significant theoretical basis in positive psychology and many of the concepts are readily recognizable in the desistance discourse. Again, though, whilst familiar, Clare emphasizes the coaching perspective on the concepts which I think will be useful for probation practitioners. For example, whilst the idea of challenging probationers may be familiar (p. 84), a coaching perspective on challenge is undertaken within the context that challenge is for the coachee’s personal benefit.

Journal readers may contextually find it more difficult to work with the concept that it does not matter to a coach if the coachee is honest as, ‘it is for clients to make sense of their lives, not the coaches’ (p. 77). Whilst fundamental in coaching, probation practitioners are required to assess and analyse their probationers. However, my experience, like Clare’s, is that this unconditional positive regard (p. 78) is one of the components which makes coaching such an important and valuable approach to supporting change and the development of hope.

Summarizing, I think readers will find the difference in context between coaching and probation practice a genuine challenge. For me, this challenge was fundamental to informing my decision to move on from the probation service and start my own social enterprise. Probation practitioners who read this book may equally feel the fundamental challenge Clare lays down: ‘at the heart of our commitment is wanting the very best for every single one of our clients: not the best for the system, but the best for them as people’ (p. 19). For readers who align with this sentiment, I’ll repeat the discussion Clare and I had a few weeks before I read the book when Clare commented, ‘I want more people to join us in our world’. Reading this book might just be a prompt for some to do so. For others it is a timely opportunity to review practice values and fundamentals and re-examine their relationship with probationers.