"The Angel's Share"

Sometimes a piece of fiction captures exactly a situation that no academic research can accurately depict. Seeing ‘The Angel’s Share’ at the cinema recently brought home to me the background and lives of many of the offenders we meet through our work on healthy prisons. In a mirror of the film’s story, the lead actor is also an ex-offender; the film’s scriptwriter  (Paul Laverty) met him  (Paul Brannigan) at the Strathclyde police unit for violence reduction. Brannigan was jailed aged 16 for four years, after being involved in a gun battle involving family members. Both his parents were drug addicts and he was brought up in a tough part of Glasgow. That he has turned into an actor, and is now involved in another film, is a fantastic success story. He commented, “It probably saved my life. I’d nowhere to turn, got a kid; who knows what I’d have done for money”. That sense of having nowhere else to turn except to do something illegal is a feature of the film. A group of people meet by chance at the courts, all having escaped custodial sentences but being required to do community service.  What they contrive to do together does involve some illegal acts but it’s a really heartwarming story and also extremely funny. It has a happy ending and remains an uplifting film. Directed by Ken Loach, it is in his tradition of an honest, gritty, almost documentary style that captures the bleakness and brutality of life on some of the poorest estates in Britain. It really did seem that for the main characters, they would have been safer in prison than on the streets where they lived. This is also a sentiment echoed by some of the prisoners interviewed over the years by us, including those in a major study by my colleague James Woodall for his PhD.

That offenders come from these kinds of backgrounds is well known. Offenders are not typical of the general population - they are more likely to be drawn from sub-sections of the population regarded as marginalized and with a complex set of needs. 27% of offenders were taken into care as children (compared with 2% of non-offenders) and the statistics for other social problems run the same pattern: 49% of male and 33%  of female offenders were excluded from school (3% non-offenders); 52% of male and 71% female offenders have no qualification (15% non-offenders); 67% of offenders were unemployed before offending and 32% were homeless. Two thirds of male and just over a half of female offenders used drugs in the year before offending.

The low educational attainment and limited life chances are evident whenever you meet prisoners. This isn’t true of all offenders and it also isn’t the case that all those with poor life chances turn to crime. However, just as some environments are salutogenic or pathogenic, so too are some environments more or less criminogenic. Life can be toxic in parts of poor Britain; children too, simply learn whatever is around them, and up to a half of people in prison also had a father who went to prison. Paul Brannigan, who could play the lead role so convincingly because in essence it was his story, said, “In Glasgow, there’s no work. There’s no ships or houses getting built. No opportunities, no hope. And when you’ve no hope you can’t get your motivation up, your self-confidence goes down and you turn to drink and drugs. It’s a downwards spiral”.

So “The Angel’s Share” is a story about the social determinants of health, about what it means when someone takes you under their wing, shows faith in you and when someone offers you a chance to make a new start, with practical help – a job, a house. It’s also a story of how people can use their own imagination, ingenuity and talent to seize that opportunity once presented. And the angel’s share is that part of the whiskey that evaporates when it’s maturing inside the barrel……