US Elections 2012: behind the scenes

Take your first glimpse behind the scenes of Bournemouth University's US Election Coverage 2012, with the tightly contested presidency being fought for, as well as one-third of the senate and seats from the House of Representatives, it's worth waiting for...

Coverage from: November 6th - 21.00 (GMT) - November 7th - 07.00 (GMT).

Find out more at: http://us2012.bujournalism.info/

Pebble: prison pen pals

  (Featured in issue one of Pebble zine)

It’s an unusual friendship: a law student from Birmingham and a convict in California. “It’s strange how things are so simple in my life and yet everything’s so chaotic in his,” Kristy, 21, reflects. It’s less than three years ago since she first began writing to Miguel, held at Corcoran prison, San Francisco. 

 

Miguel often sketches pieces for Kristy and has even
designed her a tattoo

Curiosity struck, after she read an article about a woman who fell in love through a prison pen pal service. After he was released, the couple married and moved in together, but the romance was cut short after he refused to give up his other pen pal mistresses and she left him. “I wondered how anybody could be so attached to someone who had committed such a bad crime,” Kristy thought.

Eager to learn about life across the pond, she perused the endless list of inmates hoping for a friend
to write to. “I said I’d never write to anybody like a paedophile or a rapist. But I was really interested in writing to somebody from the mafia, having always been interested in them.” After sending out several letters Miguel replied with a brief handwritten note explaining the crimes he had committed, the structure to his day and his passion for art and tattooing. 

Miguel is locked 5,250 miles away in what the Los Angeles Times once described as ‘the most troubled
of the 32 state prisons’. Their most infamous resident, Charles Manson, now 77, still receives regular fan mail.
In the room that he shares with another ‘celly’ - as he refers to them - Miguel keeps photographs and letters sent by Kristy on a small bedside table. With minimal luxuries, his life sharply contrasts with the liberated existence of people on the outside.


Miguel - Spanish for Michael - is of Mexican descent, but was born in California. He is muscular in build, has short black hair, a moustache and dark eyes. His arms to his hands are laced with tattoos. 

"They knew he had a bad temper, and he’d react in a bad way"

“Certain tattoos he was given because of the certain crimes he committed, as that’s what they do in the mafia,” says Kristy. 

“I think he likes writing to me, because I don’t really know about his world, whereas the majority of his family have either been in prison, been part of gangs or in trouble with the law. 

“I’m not from the world he’s from; his area’s predominantly wrapped around crime and you have to be part of these gangs to survive.”

More recently, Miguel designed a tattoo for Kristy, having formerly owned a tattoo parlour before being imprisoned. “I told him that I was thinking about getting a tattoo, but I’d want a unique design, because I’d never get anything just for the sake of it, and he designed me a piece.” 

Kristy regularly receives sketches from her prison pen pal, who has a resonating passion for fine art. And in return, she sends him a letter at least once a month, giving him the companionship he’s deprived of.

As well as helping her to understand the American legal system for her dissertation, Miguel is currently studying law in prison with ambitions of getting into the profession once he’s granted his freedom.

After a while, you kind of forget about how you met, tells Kristy, “People always say, ‘Aren’t you worried because they’ve got your address?’ but then you think he’s got X amount of years in prison and I don’t see him as dangerous. You have this type of bond; a friendship.

“If I ever wanted to stop writing to him, I could tell him and he’d just stop, but I don’t think it would ever come to that.”

Kristy receives more correspondence from Miguel than his family. “I suppose I’m the impartial person in all of this; he can tell me something and I won’t pass judgement.”

Relationships give prison life normality, and sometimes instead of ink, love can flow from the tip of a pen. But being behind bars can constrain a pen pal relationship from forming into little more than a friendship. Miguel found out first- hand from briefly dating a woman on the outside. “She wanted him to have a phone-sex conversation while he was on a prison pay-phone, could you imagine it, with all the other prisoners there listening!” 

Meanwhile, back in Britain, Kristy’s been dating long-term partner Luke and has no intention of anything more than a platonic friendship. She says: “He sees me as being younger, and I see him as being older.
“He can kind of think of me as a young mind who he can talk to – he can watch me change and I watch him getting wiser and reforming.” 

Far from the sombre side of prison life, on the outside, Miguel was known to have a short fuse, often acting irrationally out of impulse and emotion. It was his tempestuous nature that led to him being arrested in 2006; Miguel kidnapped a man who had been stalking his sister.

He then stole a car with the driver still inside and drove to the desert. Once he’d got there, he gave the keys back to the owner, who drove off. He then threatened the stalker before leaving and was later caught by the police. “His family never told him [about the stalker] because they knew what he was like. They knew that he had a bad temper, and that he’d react in a bad way.” Miguel was only told about his sister’s obsessive ex after he showed up at her apartment.

Since returning to jail for the second time, Miguel’s trying to keep his head down and is mentoring younger prisoners. He has even transferred from a previous Californian jail to avoid the risk of tarnishing his record, which could push his release date further out of reach.

Under America’s Three Strikes Law, if Miguel is prosecuted again, he will be forced to serve a mandatory 25 years sentence, plus time for the crime he committed, meaning reformation and rehabilitation back into society are his only choices.

But with a further ten years to serve until he’s up for parole, regrets plague his mind: “He feels guilty about not being there for his daughter while she goes through school and his son who’s just about to go into prison.”

 "She wanted him to have a phone-sex conversation while he was on a prison pay-phone, could you imagine it"

Seeing past a person’s crime is essential while writing to someone in jail, having the empathy to understand that a criminal is not necessarily a bad person but someone who’s made a bad decision or action.

“It’s kind of like when you get a big crowd of people, they lose their individual identity. You just see them all as prisoners. But then, when you write to certain people, you get the idea that they’re not a bad person. [Take Miguel], he’s done this specific crime for certain motives. And you start to see them for who they are rather than the crimes they’ve committed. So the more you write to them and the more you hear about their life and family, you start to sympathise.” 

In the past few weeks, Kristy filled out a visiting form, so that one day she can meet face-to-face with her friend from afar. 

“He’s said our friendship has made him think about things in different ways, to make a change and want better things out of life.” 

Featured in Pebble zine

Pebble: breaking into the comedy industry

  (Featured in issue one of Pebble zine)

Arron Ferguson, from the rising comedy couplet NOT The Adventures of Moleman, jests about performing alongside a man too tall for buses, 2am satire fried chicken and generally talking funny...(tumbleweed), perhaps we’ll leave the puns to him

NOT the adventures of Moleman
Illustration by Guy Larsen

 


The act
I just do what makes me laugh. Mainly, I work as part of a double act for sketches, but away from the sketches is kind of like one-man variety show kind of thing crammed into five minutes, if that makes any sense. When writing, we tend to start with everyday stuff, then take the bits that are odd and keep adding to that until eventually it ends up funny.

The secret to being funny
I don’t know why you’re asking me that; ask someone successful! I think, ultimately, it’s just, a) making sure you do what makes you laugh and don’t worry about other people, not even the audience, because ultimately, the thing people respond to the most is seeing someone having a good time. And, b) the key - making sure you have your own style that no one else is doing, which is impossible to master unless you keep gigging. So many great acts on the circuit, but all of them, including myself, start off being too much like their favourite comedian.

The chalk and cheese comedy duo
Arguably, the best person to pick to be in a double act is someone you get along with, but at the same time is someone who pisses you off a bit. Then you’re providing different stuff. I can happily say Richard, who I’m in a double act with, is definitely a better actor then me, but then he’s not so good at things like handling hecklers, improvising around stuff that may go wrong, and that’s what I add. I can be the one who knows what to say when a prop breaks in the middle of a show.

How to get paid
You have to hunt online to find pubs that do open mic nights, and then you hope that eventually one of the people running them will like you and start helping you out with it a bit. That’s what we were doing, really. Going on Twitter, and people come back and say they’ve done a good

gig here, it’s nice. Also, there are lots of good Facebook groups, one called the Comedy Collective, where people will post: ‘I run a club, come every Wednesday and get a slot’.

Tips to newcomers
This is massively a product of the era that we live in, but try and provide content in a million different mediums. I think comedians starting out now, for a chance to make a living out of it, need to perform live, they also need to be actively hilarious on twitter, they need to be making YouTube videos, they need to be making podcasts. I think that’s the best way to succeed, hit every single market you can.

The Edinburgh Free Fringe
Doing theatres in London, people are paying six pounds to come in,
it massively changes someone’s mindset. They put six pound over a desk when they walk in, then they’re prepared to enjoy themselves and they go for it. Whereas if someone just wanders in for free, then there’s a ‘f***ing entertain me’ attitude, ‘I can leave, I didn’t pay for this.’ We were lucky and ended up getting invited to start five-ten minute slots at variety nights. One of them was on a bus, which was pretty awesome. The other half of my sketch act is very tall, he’s six foot three and he couldn’t sit on the bus!

Taking his audience to KFC
No one can prepare you for what the Edinburgh can do to you. It does change you. I mean, despite being quite a sensible, grown-up young man, the second I had three weeks built up of festival atmosphere, I just kind of snapped and improvised. And said, “Who in the audience wants to go to KFC?” and they all came. We were just there at two in the morning, drinking champagne and eating chicken from a bucket. It got really weird, but that’s what happens. It’s incredibly strange but you should just trust it.

Featured in Pebble zine

Pebble zine - Issue One

Check out the efforts of myself and many talented others' work in introductory  online publication...

 

 Pebble zine

culture  |  fashion  |  features  |  lifestyle  |  music

 

Pebble zine editors  | photography Joseph Kent

 

Meet the editors (clockwise) : Joshua Saunders (features), Tazz Gault (fashion), Sally Rose McCormack (music), Georgia Scarr (lifestyle), Beth Price (beauty) and Nick Reilly (culture)

Pebble zine logo

Issue 1: Intimacy

" Pebble is launching its first issue. We explore the beauty of bare faces, the tour rituals of Dry the River and the letters of a long distance friendship. We seek answers on our emotional connection with food, the secrets of locations at home and abroad, and shine a new light on the clothing we keep to ourselves."

Visit the link above or comfortably flick through our pages below...

 

 
Keep an eye out for the next edition. In the meantime visit www.pebblezine.com ; like Pebble zine on Facebook and follow us on twitter.