Over 1 million views for Alan Crickmore’s talk on TED.com
10 Dec 2018
The pioneering work of a charity based at a Devon prison, Storybook Dads, is in the international spotlight after a talk from TEDxExeter was chosen to appear on TED.com. The 11th Talk chosen from TEDxExeter.
In a moving talk at TEDxExeter in April, Alan Crickmore explained how Storybook Dads helps prisoners to keep in touch with their children by enabling them to record stories they can listen to at home – and how this benefits society.
“Every year in the UK, 200,000 children experience the shame and isolation of a parent in prison,” he said. “It can affect the children of prisoners very deeply – there can be problems at school and they are three times more likely to suffer from mental health issues.”
“In so many ways, children are the overlooked victims of their parents’ crimes.”
Storybook Dads now helps inmates in more than 100 prisons in the UK to record stories for their children. More than 60,000 CDs and DVDs have been sent to these children since the charity was founded in 2003.
Storybook Dads has also inspired similar programmes in countries such as the USA, Australia, Denmark, Hungary and Poland.