RUN FOR REFORM: RACING INSIDE UK PRISONS – Runner’s World/Men’s Health, March 2026 issues
They call her ‘the marathon woman’ when she arrrives at the gates. ‘The marathon woman is here again.’ But recognition doesn’t exempt Tara Benedetti from the standard security rigmarole for any visitor to one of His Majesty’s Prisons: name checked off a pre-approved list; phone, headphones, smartwatch all passed through a slot beneath thick glass to be stored in a small locker; the metal detector; coat and bag sent along a conveyor belt X-ray scanner as though she is getting ready for departure from a bleak local airport. A long list of forbidden items can be perused while waiting in the inevitable queue. It includes the obvious, such as alcohol and weapons; the more esoteric, including Blu Tack, tissues and open-toed sandals; and, perhaps outlawed more for reasons of taste than public safety, musical ties and socks.
As a programme support officer for the Prison Reform Trust, a UK charity that works to improve treatment and conditions for prisoners and their families, Tara is well used to these protracted entry processes. Once inside HMP Brixton in south London, she is met by Charlie Benson, head of PE for the past 25 years and a fixture of Brixton prison life for the past 37. Progress between the 19th Century buildings remains slow despite Charlie’s fast-fingered way with a large bunch of keys. Movement is paused regularly while he unlocks a door, unlocks a second interior door, allows her to pass through, relocks the first door and finally relocks the second.
Together, these two have been planning a race. Two days before the 2025 London Marathon fills the streets of the capital with 56,000 people, nine more runners gather to complete a half marathon back and forth along the only piece of London tarmac they are permitted to be on: 36 times along three sides of a square four metres wide and just 600 metres long, beside a high brick wall topped with spools of razor wire, beneath a sea of draped netting designed to catch thrown contraband.
The nine people serving their sentences in HMP Brixton have committed to a 16-week training plan to get this race done, building up their distances on the line of treadmills on the back wall of the prison gym. The event is called Run for Reform, a fundraising opportunity for the Prison Reform Trust as well as a chance for the men to learn what’s possible when they band together with a shared goal. ‘It’s a great example of what we try to do at Brixton: providing a place of meaningful improvement on a personal level,’ says Mia Wheeler, who has been the Governor running the prison for the past three years. She takes part in the race herself, alongside around 40 additional runners including prison officers, the PE team and volunteers from community running crews. They include Gerard Williams of Westside Runnas, Sabrina Pace-Humphreys from Black Trail Runners, Andre Coggins from Mafia Moves and Hermen Dange from Made Running. The latter set up his Manchester club after being released from prison in 2020.
With this many runners coming in from the outside, plus three DJs along the small course and one masochistic man completing the entire half marathon with a large speaker strapped to his back, the run feels like a party. It’s very different from a standard race, of course. There is chip timing but this is a challenge for the tech people with no internet access, and with no watches allowed, all the runners can do is try to keep count of their laps.
It’s also very different from a typical day in prison. Tara says: ‘I said to the guys that when they’re on the route I want them to look around at the people running alongside them, and supporting them, and know that when life gets a bit dificult they can look back on this day and see that there are people that care. There are people that are cheering them on.’
One of the running residents describes his experience afterwards: ‘There was a unity and togetherness that came out of this from the training right up to event day. In those two hours I felt free. I felt connected to everyone beside me. I am proud of myself. My family are proud of me.’
If this story sounds a bit familiar, it’s partly the doing of Runner’s World. Tara began thinking about training a group of men to run a long distance race within prison grounds while out on a run herself in early 2023, mind wandering while her feet trod mechanically on a familiar stretch near her west London home. When she shared the idea with her father, he produced a copy of this magazine, specifically our feature on the 1000 Mile Club – a running group for men serving long sentences inside California’s San Quentin prison – and the documentary 26.2 to Life, about a marathon that 13 men ran around that prison yard in 2017. ‘Reading it was a turning point; it showed me that this idea could become a reality,’ she says.
When I was researching that article, I couldn’t find much that was publicised about similar things going on in UK prisons, with volunteers coming in from outside to mentor prisoners using sport. There’s a rugby programme known as the 3Pillars Project, and more than 30 prisons across the UK, Ireland and Australia now have their own Saturday parkruns. HMP Brixton is currently a Category C training and resettlement prison, which means it is focused on giving people the skills to find work upon their release into the neighbouring community.
On the chilly November day I visit with Tara and Charlie, there appears to be a remarkable amount afoot. The first thing I am asked on my arrival in the cramped security office is: ‘Are you here for the opera?’
Sure enough, four members of London Festival Opera are here in the large timber-beamed chapel, singing Puccini’s Nessun dorma and hits from Les Misérables for dozens of seated men in grey sweatshirts. Outside, three young men from an organisation called Steel Warriors have come in to lead a calisthenics class using exercise bars that they have created from melted-down seized knives. I get a quick tour, but sadly no lunch, at The Clink, a high-end restaurant within the prison walls where the food is cooked and served by men working to earn qualifications in Food & Beverage Service, Professional Cookery and Food Hygiene. Meanwhile in the gym, Imogen Walsh, a former Team GB rower, is coaching four men who are taking part in Fulham Reach Boat Club’s 8-week rowing machine training programme, known as ‘Boats Not Bars’. We also pass the studio of multi-award-winning National Prison Radio, which broadcasts programmes made mostly by prisoners across the institutions of England and Wales. Their breakfast show, naturally, is called Porridge.
Now the idea, not just of running a race, but taking the time to train properly for one, is taking root as a worthwhile prison project. A second Run for Reform event takes place in late October 2025 in the women’s institution HMP New Hall, south of Leeds. Both New Hall and Brixton are keen to do their races again in 2026, and another women’s prison, HMP Styal near Manchester, looks set to become a third venue. ‘It teaches people that if you put your mind to something and work hard at it, you can achieve what you want to achieve,’ says Governor Mia Wheeler. ‘You can make what you can out of what you have, and not put limits in place because of where you are, even if you don’t have fields to run over. There’s also this idea of group support and camaraderie, being present for each other when things are tough.’
And things are tough in Britain’s prisons, no doubt. The news headlines depict a system that is on its knees. Around the time I am visiting, there is a barrage of outraged news stories about prisoners being released by mistake, blamed partly on understaffing and outdated administrative systems. Ten UK jails have been issued with an urgent notice to improve since November 2022. The Justice Secretary, David Lammy, said in November 2025: ‘We inherited a prison system in crisis and I’m appalled at the rate of releases in error this is causing.’ A survey conducted by the Prison Officers Association around the same time found that 85% of prison officers believe there are not enough staff to safely supervise prisoners, 83% say there is not enough space for prisoners, 80% think their prison is in desperate need of modernisation and 83% say there is not enough activity space for prisoners. In September 2024 it was reported that the prison system was so close to capacity that the Ministry of Justice was days away from activating ‘Operation Brinker’ – a never-used nuclear option where a new prisoner can only be accepted if another is discharged. The UK Government’s Public Accounts Committee has warned that: ‘Overcrowding forces UK prisons to be focused on averting disaster instead of rehabilitation.’
Even HMP Brixton, with all those activities I witnessed taking place, is officially not doing well. The most recent report by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, from March 2025, found that the majority of prisoners were sharing cramped cells designed for one person, and that the amount of time they were permitted to spend out of their cells was ‘insufficient’. Brixton is due to transition to a Category B prison, which should ease its overcrowding problem but will mean less focus on training longer-sentence prisoners to prepare them for release, and more time processing short-term or remand stays. After reading the crisis-strewn language of the official literature, a running event with nine prisoner participants, in a place that holds roughly 700, feels like nowhere near enough to make a difference.
But a positive feeling from the run is spreading. Pia Sinha, the CEO of the Prison Reform Trust, was formerly in charge of women’s prisons across the country, so is particularly keen that the Run for Reform project helps women. ‘We were buzzing from how it went in Brixton, but we wanted to do it in a women’s prison because that is where you will really see the spirit of this race come alive,’ she says.
At the time of writing there are about 87,500 people in prison in England and Wales, only around 3,500 of whom are women. Compared to the multi-storey 200-year-old cell blocks of Brixton, the smaller HMP New Hall feels less intimidating but still depressing. Approached through undulating West Yorkshire countryside to the south-west of Wakefield, it has the drab civic architecture of a large secondary school or a small hospital. There are greenhouses for gardening work, a room decorated with pictures of woodpeckers where parents can spend time with their children, and a decent lawn that is sometimes used for yoga sessions but gets too boggy in the colder months.
In this second Run for Reform iteration, the format is different. Instead of a set half marathon distance, the runners are challenged to see how far they can go in three hours, looping clockwise around a 440m service road that goes past offices, the cell buildings and the education block, keeping the high green prison fence on the left. Not only will they run for longer than the Brixton men, they also have a not insignificant hill to negotiate along one side of the rectangular route. The cumulative elevation across three hours of running must be big, but again, there are no watches allowed to give an official figure.
This time there are around 40 runners – staff plus volunteers from Prison Reform Trust, The Running Charity, the Yorkshire Sport Foundation and Huddersfield Town Foundation, the local football club’s community arm – and 17 women serving sentences. Five of those women have been bussed over from Askham Grange, an open prison near York where women can have day jobs, preparing for re-integration into society after release. One young woman has actually already been released, but having committed to the 16-week training regime with her peers, wanted to return for race day.
Faye Dunn, who is roaming the New Hall gym with headphones and a large microphone to record content for her role as an assistant producer with the Prison Radio Association, has mixed feelings about being here. Between 2022 and 2024 she served 22 months in prison for her involvement in a drug trafficking operation, four months of which were in New Hall. A former semi-pro footballer who played for Leeds and was capped in the England under-21 squad, she began working on the radio while inside and now her bubbly scouse tones are a familiar sound of the station. She says she’s returned, to lead two training sessions as well as witnessing the run itself, to try to give the women some hope. ‘Some of them know me from when I was inside, so it’s about showing them that there is life after you’re released. There is light at the end of the tunnel.’
She has a much fuller understanding of the female prison experience than I can gain as a one-time visitor watching a good vibes sporting event. ‘There’s a lot of sadness here. A lot of complex mental health needs, and people who should really be serving time in a mental health institution. There’s a lot of self harm. Just a lot of different kinds of sadness,’ she explains. ‘A lot of women when they go to prison will lose custody of their children because they haven’t got a partner to support them. They lose their home, lose their job, then in prison they’re surrounded by drug use, trauma, self harm, and it becomes a very rapid spiral of things getting worse. Unfortunately that’s why, for a lot of women, prison becomes a revolving door.’
Faye is also a strong advocate of exercise as a positive thing you can do here: ‘Exercise creates discipline, and there are a lot of people serving time in prison due to a lack of discipline – probably myself included. If you get in the gym, you get the endorphins, you eat better, you sleep better, you’re in a much better headspace, plus there’s the community, mixing with people who are all aiming for a similar thing. It breaks the cycle of mundane things in prison.’
Glenn Whitehead, the New Hall PE officer who devised the training schedule for the three-hour run, agrees that the gym is the place to be when you’re in here. ‘As jobs in the prison service go, I regard it as the best,’ he says. The Barnsley man first worked in a prison when he was a young plasterer, helping to repair Strangeways in Manchester after the notorious riots of 1990. ‘When they see you in the black and white uniform of a prison officer, they have one kind of relationship with you. When you put on a tracksuit, it’s a totally different relationship. You get far more out of them. When prison gyms are shut, assaults and other incidents go up. When the gym’s back open, some of the people that would be doing that kind of behaviour can manage their anger and frustration elsewhere.’
At the end of May 2025, Glenn started the women who had signed up for the run on half an hour of laps, power walking the hill. They spent a lot of time over the weeks going back and forth on this hill, not least because it was easier to keep sight of all the runners and their different abilities for security reasons. There were also Hyrox workout sessions in the gym with laps outside in between, building up to two hours and 15 minutes of run-walking as the longest session before the actual race. He devised different types of PBs to announce over the weeks so that they were hitting motivating new achievements all the time.
Liz Adams is another volunteer who came in to host coaching sessions. She leads the Leeds branch of The Running Charity, which organises running groups for young people who are experiencing homelessness. She sees the benefits of being outside with the people she works with on a weekly basis, and it’s even more pronounced in a place where being in the fresh air counts as a rare treat. ‘As it’s so limited for them, it makes a massive difference,’ she says. Having never been in a prison before, she wasn’t sure what to expect. ‘I didn’t know if they’d really want to deal with a load of do-gooder people who haven’t got a clue what they’ve been through, or if they’d think we’re just doing it to make ourselves feel better. But the atmosphere in that gym was brilliant every time I went.’
On race day, Liz arrives with three other Running Charity volunteers, all of whom soon fall into step with women who are serving time. Conversation sounds relaxed and easy. Imo Boddy is also here as a guest, patiently pacing beside a woman who seems intent on walking for the full three hours, tactfully avoiding mentioning that she holds a world record as the fastest woman to complete the UK Three Peaks challenge. Outside the gym there’s a chip timing mat, a trestle table holding gels, drinks and sweets, a boom box blasting cheesy dance hits, and an enthusiastic bunch of cheering Prison Reform Trust staff.
Only one woman appears to be running with great seriousness. She ends up completing 85 laps, 37.4km in just over three hours. The lowest total is 33 laps – 14.5km. Jennifer Willis falls somewhere in the middle, a rare spell of mid-pack anonymity for the woman who is the Governor of both New Hall and Askham Grange. She’s been a runner for the past eight years, finding the activity a wonderful replacement for smoking, and didn’t need any convincing to host the Run for Reform. She has no time for anyone who might think prisoners are only there to be punished, not to get free trainers and a fun running experience. ‘These are human beings who have made mistakes to a greater or lesser degree, depending who they are,’ she says. ‘Yes, there are some people in prison who should never get out, but the vast majority of them are going to get out, so if we don’t work with them to get them out better than they were when they came in, what is the purpose of prison?’
As everybody works their way around the loop over and over, talking and smiling, it becomes harder to tell the difference between the people who are there because their life has lost its mooring and those who are there to try in a smaller or larger way to help them right again. ‘It stripped everything back. We’ve all got our trainers on and we’re all here for the same thing. We’re all just trying to achieve our goals,’ Jennifer says. Mia Wheeler says something similar about the Brixton run: ‘The labels, the roles that we all play, just disappeared. I got really emotional about it. I came away thinking it was the best thing I’ve participated in, personally and professionally.’
As the three hour mark ticks over on the digital clock, tired runners huddle on the finish line to cheer and hug those still completing their final lap. The metaphor gods have shown up for the last stretch to join them: in the grey sky above the beige prison gym emerges a double rainbow.
Part of the lengthy process of me being allowed in to witness the event – with my dictaphone, but without my musical socks – is that for reasons of privacy I’m not permitted to interview any prisoners directly. However, I receive an array of effusive written feedback after the two runs. ‘Signing up for this event has been the first thing since coming here last year that has given me purpose and made me feel like a part of something,’ says one resident.
‘Today I felt free for those three hours. I didn’t feel like a prisoner and for that I am forever grateful,’ says another.
Adds a third: ‘I cannot recall the last time I was out in fresh air for this long. I came to the gym about 8.15am and left about 5pm. This never happened before. I forgot I was in prison for the day… The ceremony was very emotional to me. The Governor, prison staff, members of the public and the prisoners were all called out by our first names – no titles or labels mentioned – to collect our medals. I felt so normal and human.’
You get the idea. Now it is up to everyone involved to do what they can to keep that high from fading. One man who has been released from Brixton has already run the Big Half and the Asics 10k. A south London reverend is now coming in to keep a running club going every week. Tara is going to live up to her ‘marathon woman’ title by looking for a prison estate capable of hosting a full 26.2 mile race. As I’m writing this, Charlie Benson emails to invite me to a 5k Santa run in the Brixton yard. So far this project has provided some good days to a handful of prisoners, but it feels like it’s going to become something much bigger. It needs to.
‘Some of these people have been in the prison system for well over 20 years,’ Charlie says. ‘We created something different for them, and it’s a memory that will never leave them. It won’t even leave us.’
