Jonathan Asser is a prison therapist, he developed a skill for calming violent prisoners using what he calls Shame/Violence Intervention.

His experience working in prison led to him writing the script for ‘Starred Up’ a film about a father and son who both find themselves in jail.

He is a first-time screenwriter and was working as a poet and performance artist in the London and South-East cabaret circuit when he was asked to do a show at the young offenders prison in Feltham.

Once he did this, Asser became interested in the lives and problems of young inmates.

“I went through those prison gates and in a sense stayed in that world for the next twelve years.”

So his creative career was sidelined in favour of a new approach to prisoner therapy. He began working with the small minority of violent prisoners whose aggression continued and escalated while in custody, Asser traced the roots of violence to feelings of shame, loss of status and diminished or absent sense of belonging.

While working with these highly violent prisoners, Asser developed a group technique in which violent impulses are allowed to develop in confrontation with others and then are safely de-escalated.

“I was bringing together people who were theoretically too high risk to bring together and yet there was never a contact-violent incident in any session and never a contact-violent incident between sessions involving active participants in the group.”

Asser was present throughout the “Starred Up” shoot. The idea for the script came to him after a film agent read a collection of his poems and suggested his visual imagination might transfer onto the screen.

He stated that “The therapy dramatized in “Starred Up” works against the conventional prison practice, which is to separate and segregate prisoners who are currently being violent in the system. Conventional practice, in my view, merely passes the problem further down the line, because those prisoners in conflict with each other are going to meet again in another prison, on another wing, or out in the community, or they will reach each other through intermediaries.

“What I did was the opposite of separating and segregating prisoners who were having violent conflict. I brought them together, worked with the escalation and helped to de-escalate the conflict so that those prisoners could live safely together, which reduced victimization and risk.”

Asser joined Sean Moncrieff on the show: