A comic strip about effective prison recall…

In 2025, I had the honour of working with prison reform charity Switchback UK. Their Reshape Release campaign called for more holistic and tailored forms of probation and recalling methods.

I am a staunch believer in reform working towards the eventual abolition of the prison system. I believe that lending my experience to a project like this is a civic, social and political duty.

Over a single session, I consulted and collaborated with Switchback’s EBE board and a young parent currently in the probation process. From this meeting I developed a comic strip that expressed positive and negative experiences of probation processes. This was coupled with possible outcomes of good practice that could occur with in the recall process. After some more collaboration and implementing the board and charities ideas, the comic was drawn up.

The campaign has been published and was displayed at events and spaces that policy makers were present in. As far as cartooning goes, the opportunity to perhaps influence policy is rare and I found myself folding in the influence of storytellers like Hogarth to tell this story of injustice in Britain.

The EBE board’s generosity in communicating their experiences and sharing ideas on character design, tone of voice and the insight into the aims of the campaign have made for such as special project for me.

View the campaign and the two page comic on Switchback’s website.