Charlie Weinberg, Executive Director of Safe Ground (which works to help prisoners improve their relationship skills and links with families), is the latest contributor in a series of interviews about the MoJ’s probation reform programme.
Charlie says there is potential for the resettlement prisons to be a major factor in helping prisoners maintain contact with families. However, she questions whether more offenders might end up in prison because of TR and is particularly concerned about the fate of long term prisoners – will they lose services and interventions to help fund the new resettlement work?
Overall, Charlie says the future of reducing reoffending work is currently very unclear and uncertain.
You can follow Safe Ground on Twitter on @Safe_Ground
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ALTERNATIVE TO PRISON: An alternative blueprint is to operate up to 5000 small community improvement studios (CIS) whose aim is to be self-sufficient, ranging from specialist farming units to town and urban studios, where horticulture, sculpture, high quality social home building, fine food production and heritage schemes are practised around the notion of “making my neighbourhood more attractive” through artisan craft standards.
About 10 – 20 offenders would be allocated to each studio, taking in up to 80,000 participants per year. The aims of the studios based on principles of
• Improving estates, public spaces and community assets
• Supporting restorative justice and the rehabilitation of offenders
• Serving a range of sentence types, based on contract, from 1-5 days per week depending on the crime, employment status and family circumstance
• Non-profit operations with a cost neutral target and an agreed reserve of £150,000 per studio per year (which can be built up as assets) – making a total cost of £85million, producing a saving of about £1.5billion to the exchequer each year.
Thanks very much for this David.
Are you working up the opportunity to pilot this anywhere?
Best Wishes
Russell