She spent her placement year with the Prison Advice and Care Trust (Pact) and was based at HMP Gartree in Leicestershire. As a student family engagement worker, she was involved in arranging family days for prisoners, creating activities for their children, doing casework and overseeing courses.
Hana also came up with a mood board so the children could express their feelings using superhero characters. Her initiative proved so successful that it could now be used by Pact in other prisons across the country.
Going into a prison was nerve-wracking at first. But she soon realised she was making a real difference to families’ lives.
The 21-year-old said: “I chose the placement because I wanted to see if that environment was one I wanted to work in. It definitely is. It opened my eyes and taught me a lot.”
Hana was supervised on the placement, but also had quite a lot of responsibility. It included writing up reports from meetings, marking prisoners’ coursework and giving them certificates for passing the courses. The most rewarding aspect was working with families.
“There was one prisoner who hadn’t seen his son for 20 years. His son contacted us as he just wanted to know if his dad was there. They were reconnected,” she said.
As a category B prison, Gartree has many prisoners serving life sentences. They can struggle with family ties.
Hana added: “There are around 250 prisoners at Gartee who don’t get any visits at all. It can be quite hard, especially when they want to reconnect and the family member doesn’t. You have to tell them it’s not going to happen.”
But when families were reunited, prisoners were often grateful and thanked Hana for her efforts. She would talk to them, call their relatives and help arrange the family days. Activities included puppet shows and crafts. Through donations, Pact also arranged for the children to get Christmas presents from their dads, uncles or grandads who were behind bars.
The placement has now inspired Hana’s career ambitions. She hopes to become a psychologist in a prison, working on parole cases.
She said: “This year, we are doing a lot on prisoners on my course. The placement has shown there are different sides. Obviously, the prisoners had done some horrible things and you had to keep that in mind. But they are just people at the end of the day.”
Hana’s work so impressed her manager at Pact that she has now won a national award. She was presented with Pact’s Student Placement of the Year award at a ceremony attended by Princess Anne.