Prisoners’ chance to build a law-abiding new life outside

Is releasing prisoners on temporary licence the key to halting rising levels of reoffending? Sarah Freeman reports.

Barry’s story is typical.

Two days before he was due to be released from prison he was told he had been lined up for a job interview. For a moment, there was a glimmer of hope that he might not fall into old ways once on the outside.

However, when he arrived at the company he was told that there were no vacancies and Barry found himself living on the streets.

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“I ended up with pneumonia over Christmas and because I missed two appointments with my probation officer while I was in hospital I ended up being called back to prison,” he says. “Twenty- eight days later I was out again, but still homeless, I’d just had enough.

“I lost five stone in less than nine weeks. Not eating and sleeping in a tent, I went out and shoplifted. I knew I would get caught, I wanted to get caught because I knew as mad as it sounds I was better off back in here. I knew I would have a bed, a roof over my head and my meals. Outside I would have ended up dying.”

Almost half of all adult inmates find themselves back in prison within one year of release and no-one yet has come up with a solution to break the vicious cycle of re-offending.

However, the Prison Reform Trust has just put another set of ideas on the table in its Out for Good report. The organisation says that a scheme to temporarily release prisoners serving lengthy jail terms into the community has proved successful and should be offered to more inmates.

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The idea behind the initiative is simple – if you allow prisoners to reconnect with their families, put out feelers for jobs and organise training courses, when they have served their sentence they are more likely to stay out of trouble.

“If prisoners are unable to exercise responsibility during their sentence, the likely outcome is a creeping and all-pervading dependency on prison and prison authorities during their sentence and an inability to exercise responsibility after their release,” said Lord Woolf, chairman of the Prison Reform Trust. “So prisoners should be given the opportunity to make choices and be held responsible for the choices they make. In this way responsibility is being placed on prisoners to make positive use of their sentence.

“Treating prisoners as responsible and making full use of their knowledge and skills as well as their hopes and ambitions suggests a blueprint that encourages former prisoners to lead law-abiding lives on release.”

Based on visits to nine prisons and talks with groups of both staff and inmates, the report calls for an extension of the Release on Temporary Licence (ROTL) scheme as a way of addressing a system many feel sets prisoners up to fail.

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One woman serving a lengthy sentence in an open prison told the researchers she wanted to do some work as a volunteer, but when she found a placement with a company, was told she could not accept it because it was not charitable.

Later she found a place in education, but was told that if she was undertaking training, the educational institution would have to pay her travel expenses.

“I was already having to explain I was a prisoner,” she said. “It just seemed the system was designed to make it harder.”

According to the trust’s figures, 79 per cent of offenders who are homeless at the time they go to prison are reconvicted and with almost half of prisoners are at or below the level expected of an 11-year-old when it comes to reading, only 36 per cent leaving jail go into a job, educational course or training.

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Prison governors already have discretion to use ROTL and depending on the length of their sentence, offenders can enrol on the scheme up to two years before their are released.

However, those serving shorter sentences must serve a quarter of their term before they can be considered for temporary release, which can involve leaving prison two or three days each week.

The report suggests the solution to effective resettlement does not lie behind bars and has recommended that the Ministry of Justice should now work across government departments to ensure local authorities put in place housing, employment and family support in place for prisoners.

“It doesn’t make social or economic sense to imprison people only to release them a few months later homeless, jobless and ready to offend again,” says Juliet Lyons, director of the Prison Reforms Trust. “Solutions lie in responsible resettlement and agencies working together to help people lead a law-abiding life back in their communities.”

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