On Thursday and Friday this week I had the pleasure of working at Feltham YOI reffing at two football tournaments. It's the first time that they've had 60 offenders on their field at the same time playing in a 5-a-side football tournament. It went really well with only one incident on Friday after the matches had finished, which is really amazing considering some of these guys are in different gangs on the outside.
It impacted me a lot just to go into the prison and see the huge effort, through fences, barbed wire, guards and locked doors, to keep these young men from getting out. Feltham has got a bad press, and I understand why, but there is still a lot of good stuff going on there. Some of the guys in there are very dangerous but imagine if there was complete revial in the prison of people turning to Christ! It would be amazing. Imagine if the hours spent in cells were used for reading the bible, praying and worshiping God?! I think there is huge potential there. But it did feel dark in there knowing what some of the guys had done.
As a thank you for us coming in (there was three of us from Kick London reffing) we've been invited back to watch 'Ian Wright's Football Behind Bars' being filmed at Feltham in September. They even said they'll get all the Ex-England players involved to sign a top for us! :-D
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