This is a guest post by Ella Walding of the Innovation Unit.

Care leavers are vastly over represented in our justice system. Children in care and care leavers account for less than 1% of the general population.^[1] Yet, over 25% of the adult prison population has previously been in care.^[2]  The state can spend thousands on some of these young adults, yet their outcomes are consistently poor (for example, half of care leavers have mental health needs and a quarter of care leavers have faced a mental health crisis since leaving care).^[3]

The Innovation Unit is being funded by the The Oak Foundation to understand the lived experience of care leavers in prison and following release, and the experience of those that support them. Our overall aim is to help 18-25 year old care leavers to break the reoffending cycle, to help them to flourish, and fulfill their aspirations.

This challenge is complex, in part because there are many different organisations charged with provision of support – local government, children’s social care, the criminal justice system, health – and others seeking to support care leavers. We have gathered in-depth stories about people’s experiences across the system, to understand the challenges care leavers face and the strengths and resources they have to draw upon.

Our report, published today (28 February 2019), highlights what we have found and describes both what is working well and the problems that care leavers can face.

Our findings

Care leavers are an extremely vulnerable group, a majority of whom have experienced past trauma, abuse and neglect, and a range of other problems. It is not a coincidence that the prison population is full of so many care experienced young adults: their traumatic childhood experiences can manifest as negative coping strategies which can lead to law breaking; they can also lack the lack supportive loving relationships, and guidance, that other young adults have, and can make unhealthy relationships in order to belong; children in care homes are more likely to come into contact with the police for minor offences. Care leavers then develop a police record which means that subsequent law breaking can lead them to be given prison sentences.

Prison can  be a re-traumatising experience leading care leavers to feel stigmatised, isolated, anxious and abandoned. Sometimes they are not identified as care leavers and do not receive their entitlements. There is not enough joint thinking about how to support them. There is no clear overarching vision, strategy or outcomes for this group across government departments which would allow frontline practitioners to collaborate around a common planning and practice framework. This means the services to care leavers are fragmented and they are sometimes working to different agendas and aims, which makes it hard for staff to work together, and hard for care leavers to understand the rules of the systems they are in. These differing cultures, and a lack of resources, means that staff from different sectors are working separately with different plans and almost no communication. There is no shared sense of who is responsible for what, meaning that care leavers can be left without support, and unclear about who should be doing what to support them.

Upon leaving prison, their new label of an offender makes it very hard to access safe housing, education and employment. Unsurprisingly, a high proportion of care leavers then go onto re-offend.