Barry Godfrey is Professor of Social Justice at the University of Liverpool
“Criminologists have been stressing the importance of residential stability, employment opportunity, and reintegration into local communities, as the key factors in reforming offenders – or at least lowering their chances of speedy reconviction.
The current proposals to help ex-prisoners to find a place to stay on leaving prison, with some advice, guidance, and practical help on the practical processes of negotiating income-support and housing-benefit, and so on, is welcome.
Indeed, this laudable aim has been pursued since the Victorians established the Discharged Prisoner Aid societies in the late nineteenth century.
Recent ESRC funded research by Godfrey, Johnston and Cox has found that these societies were instrumental in helping offenders released on license to reform. Then they were replaced by the Probation Service who continued in that role.
Now we see the reversal of this process, with the state-funded services giving way to an army of volunteers. It will need to be an army too.
Not only has the enormous number of prisoners serving short-term sentences ensured that there are a lot of ex-prisoners who now need support, but the burn-out rate of mentors matches the reconviction rate of ex-offenders.
Perhaps the probation officers who have been made redundant due to severe cut backs, or the magistrates who find themselves at a loose end because of the massive court closure programme will take up the slack?
There must surely be some end to the number of public sector responsibilities being thrust onto the backs of unpaid volunteers in Coalition Britain?”