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MICHAEL LITTLE MAY 05, 2026  As I make my way to the rehearsal space -generally the chapel- in a prison for my work with the Prison Choir Project, I find myself evaluating every interaction. Prisons in the United Kingdom are typically extremely unhealthy contexts that foster high rates of violence, and self-harm. The Prison Choir Project puts prisoners and officers alongside professional musicians to rehearse and then perform an opera, or another musical event. The chapel plus Prison Choir Project creates a new context. In it, I can breathe again. The work demands collective endeavour. Everyone becomes a part of a troupe. Adam Green, founder of the Project and Director of the performances handles the disagreements within the troupe about how scenes will play out. On the day of the performance, members of the public mix with prisoners’ families in the audience, and the music, for a couple of hours at least, tempers the mood of the entire institution. Reports for poor behaviour fall in the months following a Prison Choir Project event.  How does Adam Green and the Prison Choir Project create a safe context within a high risk environment? The last set of posts have described three sets of relationships that are fundamental to answering that question. I have seen them at work in nearly all the innovations with which Ratio has been involved this last decade. Not just in micro interventions like Prison Choir Project, but also in complex system change operating across a local or regional government area. Each relationship shapes, and is shaped by the context in which we live, work, learn and play. The first of the three sets of relationships operates through agency, our capacity to make choices, act and impose our will on the world, individually and collectively. Collective agency is the primary agent, since it shapes and is shaped by individual agency. By changing the physical environment -working in the chapel- and the people relating to each other -prisoners alongside officers and professional musicians- and the reason for being together -the disciplined and repetitive rehearsal of beautiful music for public performance- Adam Green creates a context in which participants see the potential to collectively shape their world. They may fail. But they have a sense of ‘together we can do this’.  This context shapes behaviours, and most importantly via the relationship between, on the one hand healthy conflict -the agon- and, on the other hand, behaviours that allow one person or group to restrict the agency of another, for example violence and psychological aggression. Where people come together, conflict is ubiquitous. We don’t all want the same things. You will know this from your family life. You experience this at work. It is part of community. As difficult conversations about how we live peaceably with each other give way to violence and psychological aggression, agency becomes restricted, ‘I’ begins to eat away at ‘we’, and minority groups -the rich, those brandishing historical power, those grabbing power- come to dominate. In the prison chapel, the context is one of agon.
The third relationship is between ‘we’ and ‘I’. In the prison chapel, the context is transitory. It exists during the rehearsals, and it endures for a few months after the public performance. But it can spread much more widely, and last much longer. I previously mentioned Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett’s analysis that suggests the United States became a ‘we’ society and no longer an ‘I’ society in 1925, a context forged, they say by civil society.1 It lasted until 1965, as the authors like to say, tongue in cheek, ‘at about the time when Dylan switched from acoustic to electric guitar’. These three relationships operate through context. They shape and are shaped by the context. They strongly influence our social networks. They matter when it comes to the decisions we make collectively and individually. They therefore guide our behaviour to others. As I say, this argument will manifest itself again and again in the evidence and policy examples throughout the remainder of this story. But first there is a gap to fill. At the heart of the diagram, there is a box marked ‘contexts in which we relate’. Now is the time to give this box more definition. 1 Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing, 2020
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