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Ep 56. Anne Fox, CEO Clinks, and Ruth Armstrong, Director Justice Matters: Re-imagining Criminal Justice
306 Plays4 days ago
This episode looks at leadership, evidence, and systems change in one of the most complex areas of public policy: the criminal justice system. We are joined by two leaders who work at the heart of this system.
Anne Fox, outgoing Chief Executive of Clinks, the national infrastructure body that supports and represents voluntary organisations working with people in contact with the criminal justice system and their families. Clinks plays a vital role amplifying frontline voices and ensuring lived experience shapes policy and commissioning.
And Dr Ruth Armstrong, Director of Justice Matters. Ruth is a lawyer, academic and criminologist whose work focuses on helping organisations use evidence, and co-production with those who have lived experience, to deliver lasting change.
Together, we explore the current state of criminal justice in the UK. What re-imagining the system might look like, how we need to build community for those coming out of the system, and what we all, as a society, need to do to build a world where we can all be safe.
It's a provocative conversation. Trigger warnings: we discuss criminality, violent offences and suicide.
Recorded February 2026. Episode sponsored by EdenTree Investment Management
Secret Life of Prisons podcast: Clinks Conference 2026, Lord James Timpson and Anne Fox
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/live-at-clinks-conference-2026-lord-james-timpson-and/id1481971681?i=1000747623671
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Transcript
Society's Obsession with Punishment
00:00:00
Speaker
We have a complete and utter obsession in this country with the idea of punishment and the idea that people who commit crimes, it's very simple.
00:00:11
Speaker
They do a thing wrong, one thing wrong, and you focus on that thing. You focus on the aftermath of that thing rather than the reason it happened in the first place.
00:00:23
Speaker
And yet we also have, you know, a lot of people, if we had a conversation in a coffee shop, people would talk about, oh, they ended up in prison. They ended up in the criminal justice system. And when they talk about those people, it's often people who have had none of the opportunities and privileges you need in your life to succeed.
00:00:45
Speaker
I think there is a real danger in charitable work that you end up being an organization that puts curtains on a concentration camp.
00:00:56
Speaker
Our prisons are failing. They are failing the individuals that live in them. They are failing the individuals who work in them. They are brutal organizations and they are brutalizing. And they are failing us as a society, as communities.
Introduction to the Charity CEO Podcast
00:01:23
Speaker
Welcome to an exciting new season of the Charity CEO Podcast, where we bring you the stories and insights of remarkable leaders who are changing the world for the better. We talk to the movers and shakers who are driving positive social change, inspiring you to think big, act boldly, and make a difference.
00:01:39
Speaker
A huge shout out to our incredible global community of listeners spanning over 55 countries. Your thoughtful comments and feedback continue to fuel this growing movement, and we couldn't do it without you.
00:01:51
Speaker
To all of you who pour your hearts and souls into making the world a better place, especially those of you in the charity and non-profit sectors, thank you for the tireless passion you bring to your work. This podcast is for you.
00:02:03
Speaker
I'm Divya O'Connor, and here's the show.
Leadership in Criminal Justice
00:02:08
Speaker
Today's episode looks at leadership, evidence, and systems change in one of the most complex areas of public policy, the criminal justice system. I'm joined by two leaders who work at the heart of this system.
00:02:20
Speaker
Anne Fox, outgoing chief executive of CLINX, the national infrastructure body that supports and represents voluntary organizations working with people in contact with the criminal justice system and their families.
00:02:32
Speaker
And Dr. Ruth Armstrong, Director of Justice Matters. Ruth is a lawyer, academic and criminologist whose work focuses on helping organizations use evidence and co-production with those who have lived experience to deliver lasting change.
00:02:48
Speaker
Together, we explore the current state of criminal justice in the yeah UK, what reimagining the system might look like, how we need to build community for those coming out of the system, and what we all as a society need to do to build a world where we can all be safe.
00:03:04
Speaker
It's a provocative conversation, with trigger warnings. We discuss criminality, violent offences and suicide. Today's episode of the Charity CEO podcast is brought to you by Eden Tree Investment Management.
00:03:18
Speaker
An award-winning provider of sustainable and impact investment solutions, Eden Tree is investing for a better tomorrow. Its experienced team of investment professionals look to generate long-term returns by searching out high-quality businesses that are driving positive change for both people and the planet.
00:03:37
Speaker
And it's not just their investments that make an impact. Eden Tree is proudly part of the Benefact Group, a charity-owned family of specialist financial services companies that give all available profits to charity and good causes.
00:03:49
Speaker
If you'd like to find out more about Eden Tree's range of sustainable investment solutions, visit www.edentreeim.com or speak to your investment advisor today.
00:04:00
Speaker
With any investment, your capital is at risk. Eden Tree, it's sustainable investment elevated.
Personal Insights from Anne and Ruth
00:04:10
Speaker
Hi Anne, hi Ruth, a very warm welcome to the Charity CEO podcast. How are you both today? I'm good, thanks. Delighted to be here. It's lovely to be here, Divya, and to be here with Anne.
00:04:21
Speaker
Well, I always start the show with a few icebreaker questions just to get the conversation flowing. And so I have three questions for each of you. And Anne, perhaps coming to you first.
00:04:33
Speaker
Question one, share with us something about yourself that people wouldn't typically know. They might guess because of where I'm from, but I have 56 cousins on my mother's side.
00:04:45
Speaker
Wow. And Ruth? Can you beat that? you know, i'm wondering if I can, because i do have an Irish half the family and there's there's certainly a lot of us, but I've not counted up like that. Something about myself that people wouldn't know is's probably I'm one of six girls. i have five sisters.
00:05:03
Speaker
So I'm from a girl heavy upbringing. so and now obviously a woman heavy life, which is a fabulous thing in my opinion.
Questions for Charity Leaders
00:05:11
Speaker
Absolutely. Question two, what would you say is your professional superpower? So Anne, back to you.
00:05:18
Speaker
Matchmaker girl. So I make relationships and I help people to make relationships for others. Love that. Ruth? That's really interesting. I think that's so true about you as well. And and actually, it's something that once was gifted to me in feedback that someone talked about me being a really good networker. But when you asked that question just now, I thought, I really love people.
00:05:43
Speaker
I mean, I just think people are great. And I think actually that ends up being a professional superpower, of being able to see the good in people. And I really do. I just think the vast majority of people that I meet in life are fabulous.
00:05:58
Speaker
And question three, what do you think is one question charity leaders should be asking themselves right now? And Ruth, maybe coming to you first this time. That is ah an excellent question. ah Today I happen to be teaching a class on participatory action research and it's going to influence, I think, my response right now.
00:06:21
Speaker
I think sometimes as charity leaders and sometimes in research, we get ideas about what we want to achieve. And sometimes if you look at the demographics of charity leaders and if you look at the demographics of researchers, they can be people who have had certain amounts of privilege in life and they can think about what they want to do and their orientation to it can be, and they're very hard work, but it can be through that lens of privilege that sometimes it's hard for us to put down. So I think charity leaders should be listening to the people that they're hoping to serve and finding out what they want and they need and trying the hardest to bring that through their charitable purposes.
00:07:00
Speaker
Anne? You stole my answer. I think added to that. So for me, ah I'm on the last few years, particularly, i am on a lived experience journey.
00:07:15
Speaker
transformation journey for our sector. And, you know, I think moving from that, people should be asked themselves all the time, how far removed can you get? And are you right now from a patriarchal kind of paternalistic charity systems of old?
00:07:35
Speaker
So what right have you got to be in your role and how are you going to make it better for the people that you're there instead of?
Anne Fox on Leading CLINX
00:07:44
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Because in most cases, we are instead, they're instead for now. And that should be temporary.
00:07:50
Speaker
And that sets us up so nicely for the conversation that we are going to have today. and Ruth, thank you so much for being here. Let's start off by hearing about each of your organisations and your work. So Anne, for the past 10 years, you have been leading the national infrastructure organisation, CLINX, and you are about to hand over the baton. Tell us about CLINX.
00:08:14
Speaker
Yeah, Clinks started life as a project, 1997, London Prison Community Links. And its job was to gather together and connect all the different charities. It would have been mainly just charities at that time, working in the then five London prisons.
00:08:33
Speaker
because it came from a recognition that prisons, you know, they are isolated places and they are separate from the rest of society. And as a result, when you're working in there, other people may not know you're there and it can be really difficult to get the kind of coordination that will be needed for the people that you're there to serve. So over the last nearly 30 years, CLINX has evolved now. into the National Specialist Infrastructure Charity for voluntary organisations working in criminal justice in England and Wales. And by criminal justice, we really mean working on organisations that are focused on the needs of people who have committed crime or been criminalised. We might come back to that later. And their families, rather than specifically those organisations that are focused on victims of crime. Although there's a lot of crossover. And also organizations are more at what we would call the penal justice system. So people who've already been convicted and therefore have a conviction, a criminal record may be in prison or have been in prison or served a community sentence.
Ruth Armstrong's Roles and Focus
00:09:46
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And those things create needs that our sector meets.
00:09:51
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And our job is to help them do their job. That's what I say to everybody I meet in the sector. My job is to help you do your job. And they do all sorts of weird and wonderful and amazing things in lots of different places, including within adult male, adult female and children's prisons and in the communities.
00:10:12
Speaker
And yeah, we do all sorts of things for them, but we keep them up to date on the money and on what's happening. We provide the interface with the prison and probation service and the Ministry of Justice.
00:10:25
Speaker
And we influence with our sector for positive change. As leaders, I think our jobs are to help others do their job. and And we'll come on to that later. But Ruth, tell us about Justice Matters.
00:10:39
Speaker
Yeah, well, i I wear two hats at the minute. it So one is as the director of Justice Matters and the other is that I've just recently moved back into academia. So I'm also wearing a hat as a researcher at the University of Liverpool. So I'll talk a little bit about both of those things. Within Justice Matters, the slogan, and don't we all love a slogan in an organisation, but it's evidence act change.
00:11:00
Speaker
And that is because I really believe in putting evidence at the heart of action for change. And I think oftentimes we and get confused about what evidence is.
00:11:11
Speaker
I think we often narrow it down to scientific evidence and certainly coming from an academic background, I believe that scientific evidence is really important, especially in criminal justice. We have an awful lot of evidence.
00:11:22
Speaker
around what works and who works to achieve the outcomes that we want but we don't always listen to that evidence very well and there's a fabulous academic called Rob Bryner who works with evidence-based change and he talks about four different areas of evidence that you need to consider so he talks about scientific evidence but he also talks about professional expertise he talks about contextual evidence what's going on in an area and then he talks about politics what's possible and what is And that might be politics in an organization or it might be sort of bigger global politics or national politics around an issue.
00:11:55
Speaker
And so I really love his his definition of evidence base. And within Justice Matters, i have over the last four years been using a real systems change approach to working with as senior leaders in government, especially in criminal justice, in third sector, so in charities, and then also working with academics to try and think about how you build the kind of dialogues that help differently placed actors within our systems get together, understand what they're hoping to achieve, understand the different powers that they hold to achieve it, think about where they need to share power, which sometimes means share budget, and that's where things get more difficult, But then also when you do that process, when you have the evidence, when you do some action, when you do some change, one of the things system change says is you should be reflecting all the time because your change sometimes might produce unintended consequences. So you build in the evaluation, you go back and you try to provide evidence about that change and reflect and start the process again. It's about understanding that we're never on a journey of we've made it. But it's always we're on the journey of we're trying, we're considering the evidence, we are taking informed action, we are working with other people who are differently situated across the system. And then we're reflecting at the end about the changes we're doing to understand what the impacts they're having are.
00:13:12
Speaker
And man I guess now I'm doing that both through Justice Matters and then also through working within research at the University of Liverpool. Wow, so much to delve into there, particularly around evidence and driving systems change.
Challenges in the UK Criminal Justice System
00:13:24
Speaker
But before we do that, for those listeners who may not be familiar with the criminal justice system, give us a sense of the state of the sector, some of the key challenges, and perhaps also touching upon what are some common misconceptions about how the criminal justice system operates.
00:13:42
Speaker
um Wow, what a question. I think one of the misconceptions might be that it works. that we have a fair system, that we have a statutory system of the admission of justice when a crime has been committed and that provides air restoration and justice to the victim. and punishment and retribution to the person who's committed the crime and then they get rehabilitated and everything is fine.
00:14:13
Speaker
The system is absolutely not fine. It is so unfit for purpose. I can't think of a public system in this country or any other that is as broken and it's not even broken. It's just not the right one because it's not a system. Like we talk a lot about system changing it, but it's not a system. we We have a complete and utter obsession in this country with the idea of punishment and the idea that people who commit crimes, it's very simple.
00:14:48
Speaker
They do a thing wrong. one thing wrong and you focus on that thing, you focus on the aftermath of that thing, rather than the reason it happened in the first place.
00:15:00
Speaker
And yet we also have, you know, a lot of people, if we had a conversation in a coffee shop, people would talk about, oh, they ended up in prison. They ended up in the criminal justice system. And when they talk about those people, it's often people who have had none of the opportunities and privileges you need in your life to succeed.
00:15:23
Speaker
So prisons are full of people who we predicted would end up there because prisons currently, and the criminal justice system, so not just prisons, but community sentences, they are evidence and proof that our systems of human services and support for poor people in our country do not work.
00:15:45
Speaker
Hmm. and like I couldn't agree more with what Anne says, but your question made me think of a quote by Oscar Wilde. And I think this follows on nicely, so I'm not i'm not going to repeat what Anne says, but i agree with absolutely everything she has said. And the evidence says our criminal justice system is in a terrible place at the moment.
00:16:05
Speaker
Oscar Wilde has a quote that he says, we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. And I used it recently on a proposal for some work with some senior leaders in the prison and probation service.
00:16:17
Speaker
and And that's because we really need leaders leading our system. And I'm happy to say that I think we really have some of them, but who are trying to look at the stars, trying to reimagine something different. and So I'm currently working on a project at the University of Liverpool, which is called Making Space for Radical Imagination.
00:16:32
Speaker
And I want to talk about it a little bit because I think one of the problems in criminal justice is that we think what we're dealing with is something really different than what we're actually dealing with. And we also think that differently situated people across it are likely to have different thoughts about how they want it to change, what they practically want to happen, how they want it to feel.
00:16:55
Speaker
And one of the things I want to do in in this project and that I'm going to do is is to make space for people who are differently situated to talk about their experiences of criminal justice, to engage with evidence about criminal justice and through that evidence and through those experiences to try to think, one, what a research agenda might be, what don't we know that we might need to know something about, and two, what a policy agenda might be, what might be we be wanting to change, and maybe three, what actually a staff preparation agenda might be, what might we want, what skills might be wanting the people who are working in our criminal justice system if they're going to deliver a system that looks like the people who are involved in it might want it to look like. So there is a real, I think, misconception that I think gets politically exploited by people and organizations that currently have a lot of power and a lot of budget in criminal justice, and that is that people who have suffered criminal harm
00:17:49
Speaker
that people who have caused criminal harm and been through our criminal justice system and that people who work in our criminal justice trying to reduce criminal harm and the impacts of criminal harm have vastly different experiences of the criminal justice system and want vastly different reforms have different campaign orientations to have what they wanted to do and how they wanted to feel and through my work separately with all of those different constituents I have to say that I am not sure that is right. I am not sure that that division is correct. There will be some different orientations. There will certainly be different experiences. But I think actually people want to reduce harm. People want to increase safety.
00:18:30
Speaker
And people want the criminal justice system to work for those things. And if they could understand how to make that happen, they might be more on a page about what steps they want taken and how they want the criminal justice system to feel and to perform. and so the idea of that project is to try to bring those voices and those opinions together in some ways to say, we may have our differences, but if we could look at the things that join us, what might they be? And could we manage to get some change in those areas and manage to get some political will behind those changes?
00:19:05
Speaker
And just going back to what you said, Divya, about what's the state of the system, to give people, I suppose, ah a bit of a peek in behind those changes. gates There are about 90,000 men, women and children in prison today and about coming up on 300,000 people in the probation system. So that's people who will have either left prison and are on a period of license and supervision by the probation service or who have not gone to prison, whose crimes are being managed in the community under a community sentence. and we can come back to the fact that that's going to get a bigger group and we're hopefully going to switch those numbers. We also have within the prison population an increasing number of people who are going to prison for longer and also to give, you know, to actually the word is to colour the picture for people.
00:20:00
Speaker
Racial disproportionality in the criminal justice system is an absolute disgrace and we have a growing and increasing number and disproportionate number of racially minoritised people, particularly people going in for longer sentences from a young age. So our population of young Black men who are going into prison, who will be in prison for a very long time, 10 years plus, 20 years plus, that population is rising.
00:20:31
Speaker
And we also have a significant population now of older people in prison. Now, very sadly, particularly for me and Ruth, that means people over 50. But within that, it also, we do have quite a sizable population now of people who are over 70,
00:20:51
Speaker
And there's kind of two driving factors for that. One being better public health for people who would have died earlier, particularly intravenous drug users and people who may be without good health care in the past would have died younger.
Critique of the Age of Criminal Responsibility
00:21:07
Speaker
but the second being historic sex offences and some of the work that's been done around, for example, Operation Utrey. And there were tranches of arrests and convictions of people, and they generally would have been disproportionately white, older, retired professional men.
00:21:29
Speaker
And therefore, were probably pretty healthy going into prison for the first time. So we have that population of people who are aging and so how our sector works as well we have people designing dementia services and you know things we never thought we would really need in prison everybody's there all human life is there yeah there's quite a lot within that think about how you meet the needs of people so that they don't ever go back I wondered if I can just jump in with a criminological fact that I think is is relevant to what Anne has said about who we have in prison. So within Europe, we have one of the highest rates of long-term life sentenced and long-term sentenced prisoners. and We have, as Anne said, increasingly in high rates of racial disproportionality. And we have one of the lowest ages of criminal responsibility. So we say that people, children from the age of 10, are criminally responsible.
00:22:28
Speaker
And I recently heard a case of a boy who was misidentified as it happened, but was wanting to be cautioned, which gives you a criminal record for apparently kicking a door during a game of knock-a-door run. And this is what the police were spending their time doing. Now all of the evidence says, and that's because the boy was, think, 11 or maybe 12 at the time. But I mean, that is a disaster on all criminological
Understanding Desistance Theory
00:22:50
Speaker
evidence. You want to keep people out of the criminal justice system for as long as possible, because it is well proven, Edinburgh Desistance Study, that if you do, you reduce the amount of crime. Overall, you reduce spare both the amount of crimes that those boys, if you take two boys, and they have similar sociodemographic backgrounds and they commit similar offences, and you put one of them through the criminal justice system and you try your hardest to keep one of them out.
00:23:12
Speaker
ah The one that you keep out is likely to commit less offences over the life course and less serious offences over the life course. So keeping children out of our prisons is a really important thing. And actually, it's something we've been doing quite well over the last few years. We've dramatically reduced the amount of children that we send to prison, which is ah a good thing in terms of keeping our communities safer over the long term.
00:23:33
Speaker
But the criminological facts I wanted to give you, and I think the public really misunderstands this, is that most people desist from crime over the life course, and many do so on their own initiative. That is the start of an article by a man called Professor Sir Tony Bottoms, And he talks about the process through which people move away from crime and the evidence about this. And he said, if you got a Martian, a man from Mars that came down to Earth, and you told him that that is a really well-proven criminological fact, and they looked at our criminal system, they would be really surprised because what we're always trying to do is one, responding as if anybody who commits an offence is never going to move away from that, and two, trying to provide programs through which people move away from crime. So we have this thing called the age crime curve and it's really true to say that crime is a young man's game, largely.
00:24:23
Speaker
So if you look at the age crime curve and you map the amount of offences that someone commits over the life course and the age at which they commit them, you see that women, one, actually commit far fewer offences. They start earlier about the age of 15 and they start to decrease about the age of 21. If you look at men, then what you find is they start about the age of 19 to peak a bit more and it starts to reduce about the age of 25. We're now learning much more about neurological development that might help to explain some of those things in the ages at which that happens. So if you take that evidence in terms of helping people to commit less offences, what you're really interested is the downward slope on that graph from the 21 with the few women who were involved, from the 25 with the majority of men who were involved. And you're trying to say, okay, what's coming into their life at that point What's happening when they're moving away from crime?
00:25:12
Speaker
There's some individual biological factors, but people grow out of crime. So the things that we know matter are those individual factors, but also the interpersonal factors. What relationships do they get into? What jobs do they get? What kind of identities can they develop through the people and places and organizations that they're connected to? And the social context really matters.
00:25:31
Speaker
So we're beginning to really understand that this kind of desistance process doesn't happen in in isolation. It happens through social movements. It happens through broadened social narratives and places where people can belong.
00:25:44
Speaker
and And when you take all of those facts, the fact that most people who commit criminal offences will over their life course move away from crime, the fact that the majority of them will do it on their own initiative, it begins to really pick at the logics of incarceration, the logics of our response to crime, which is based on exclusion. Is exclusion really best designed to help somebody develop the individual factors that might help them move away from crime, to build those interpersonal relationships and to create the social context within which people can thrive and not cause harm to themselves
Charities' Role in Justice System
00:26:18
Speaker
or to others. So i think it's a really interesting question for our criminal justice system, which is how do you reduce harm by building safe connection rather than how do you prevent harm by imposing exclusion?
00:26:34
Speaker
Yes. And talking about reimagining the system, and Ruth, I'm sure many people will be shocked to know that the age of criminal responsibility in the UK is 10.
00:26:47
Speaker
I'd like to talk about the role of charities in the criminal justice system. And why are charities involved? Has this changed over time? And perhaps if you could share some examples of where the sector has helped build community in terms of what you were just talking about, building community for people coming out of the system.
00:27:09
Speaker
The point Ruth makes about the desistance theory for me is absolutely where the criminal justice voluntary sector sits. So we have a real understanding and belief that people are not inherently criminal, that crime in a lot of our organisations, people will believe that crime is a social construct, that, you know, certain things can be a crime.
00:27:36
Speaker
Things used to be crimes that aren't now and things will become crimes that weren't. And therefore it's about really what are the social circumstances of people and how do we help people move from one situation to another.
00:27:53
Speaker
So that's really what our sector does. And it does it through, as you say, Divya, it does it through people. So the majority of organizations, they spend their money on people.
00:28:06
Speaker
or they use volunteers. And what we do in our sector is we spend time with others. And it may seem, it may seem really simple, but it's the most complicated and complex thing. And we don't understand sometimes what the kind of, as suppose if it was a chemical reaction, how it looks or a nuclear reaction. But what tends to happen is you put a volunteer or a paid member of staff working with somebody, for example, somebody coming out through the gate, as we call it, from prison into the community, which is a terrifying time.
00:28:44
Speaker
There are some people that talk about it as prisoner re-entry. And I will say to me, that is the best example. Because the only other re-entry I know is when ah a rocket's coming back from space and bits are falling off it and it's going through like the hottest temperatures in world. Like it's under so much pressure.
00:29:03
Speaker
And yet we see it as such a simple thing. See it in movies all the time. Guy comes out, plastic bag with his pants in it, you know, through a gate into the world. It's terrifying because on the other side of that gate, you couldn't decide if you're having a shower today.
00:29:18
Speaker
You can't decide what you're going to eat. You don't have any control, any autonomy. And then you get out and you've got to do everything. You've got to be in probation, maybe 150 miles away by one o'clock. It's like the wacky races. So our people walk with you and where they do that best, they've made that journey themselves in the past or they've done it with a loved one. But we're very much about understanding that this is a human process.
00:29:48
Speaker
of change and transition and to do it, there will be certain things you'll need in place. The sector has been doing it for hundreds of years and it has changed in terms of, I think, what we do is very similar. We still go to people in places of isolation.
00:30:05
Speaker
but we do it with a different understanding. So I'd say, you know, the kind of the history books will take us back. We did some charting a few years ago in Clings, about 300, 350 years and the kind of concept of prison in visiting. So people of wealth and privilege who would visit those less fortunate than themselves.
00:30:28
Speaker
in prison so that those people might be, for example, brought to the Christian enlightenment and the wickedness in their life would be taken away because they would be shown at the error of their ways and an an alternative way to live. So there's a whole lot in that.
00:30:47
Speaker
So faith is still really important in criminal justice. So there was a man called Frederick Raynor and Frederick Raynor was a magistrate, I think. So at the time in London, he was able to do two things when people came in front of him at court.
00:31:05
Speaker
And that was either send them to prison or find them not guilty. So what he did with an act of volunteering and philanthropy was he set up a thing called the London Temperance Society with, I believe it was sixpence, but I may be wrong on the sum.
00:31:24
Speaker
The idea being that if people came in front of the court, one of the biggest issues he had was vagrancy and alcoholism. So people came to the court because they were drunk disorderly and committing crimes when drunk or to get drunk.
00:31:40
Speaker
And what they needed was a period of time to sober up and to understand how to live their lives differently. But by going to prison, they wouldn't do that because they'd come out and the cycle would start again.
00:31:54
Speaker
So Frederick Rayner made this donation so that the London Temperance Society could set up a mission where people could be sent instead of prison. So they are guilty of the crime.
00:32:06
Speaker
There's no getting away from that. But he doesn't send them to prison. He sends them towards mission. And in the mission, they are able to be supported to choose a different path.
00:32:17
Speaker
And that is the evolution of our probation system. That's where that comes from. So we've been doing this for hundreds of years, going in, doing acts of coming close to people and supporting them and thereby changing their lives and the system through which we do that. So the criminal justice voluntary sector works alongside the statutory systems.
00:32:40
Speaker
It's not part of it and it never can be because we have fundamental red lines, like not running prisons, not being part of the punishment, but recognizing like we have members of clinks, organizations that exist because of the harms of the system.
00:32:59
Speaker
Like all the organizations that support the families of people in the system do so because Prison splits families up. Prisons creates an adverse childhood experience that we have evidence of.
Civil Society-Government Partnerships
00:33:12
Speaker
Parental imprisonment when you are a child is one of the things that will impede and harm your outcomes as an adult. It can affect how young you'll be when you die. So we have these organisations and they're still there. a lot of them have been around for hundreds of years. What I'd say has evolved and I'm very pleased to see it is this idea of people who are less fortunate than ourselves.
00:33:36
Speaker
So the sector has been on a massive learning journey and there's times when that becomes more critical and you see it in the 10 years I've been in Clings, I've kind of seen two big shifts in it. One is around lived experience. So organisations are increasingly aware they cannot do on to others.
00:33:58
Speaker
they have to do for others. So they have to be in service to their beneficiaries more. And that means that they'll need to work differently with them. And the second one, I think in relation to race, and because we have this disproportionality, which is really at critical levels and is a shame and is a stain, I think, on on our society.
00:34:20
Speaker
But the majority of organizations are not racially minoritized. They are not by and for organizations. And therefore, organisations have to understand who are we providing services to and also how do we stand up as allies and say, why are all the people we are supporting from minoritised communities in our country? and So there are those changes. so that The things they provide might actually be the same, but the reason they're doing so is based more on a value of equality and human rights than it would have been. So it would have been like proper old school charity.
00:34:59
Speaker
You know, the idea of you are worse off than me, I am better off than you, and I am going to do something kind for you, to this is your right and it is my responsibility.
00:35:11
Speaker
So that's kind of where we are. And what have you seen that works? What does an effective partnership look like between civil society and government, between the voluntary sector and the statutory sector? One that is dynamic and active. I think we've got some really good examples of things. We've got a whole community of what we call women's centres. So they are holistic places. So they very much have a physical presence in a local community where women who will have very complex needs that come into contact with the criminal justice system.
00:35:43
Speaker
And those organisations, those women's centres work. not on behalf of government, absolutely needing to be independent. Women have to go there voluntarily.
00:35:55
Speaker
But because women do go there voluntarily, what we find is what Ruth talked about, their contact with the criminal justice system slows down. It becomes less frequent.
00:36:06
Speaker
It becomes less because women's offending particularly is very well evidenced to be ah a trauma response in a lot of cases. So the majority of women do not commit violent offences and they will commit offences under coercive control. So, you know,
00:36:26
Speaker
We haven't got time to go through all the evidence, but we have a lot of it. So by providing women with a space and with very practical things like information on how to get access to your own income and manage your own income and not be dependent on on a man and for your home, that those kind of systems work well. So we we've had through that learning, for example, there's some brilliant work happening in Manchester, in Greater Manchester,
00:36:56
Speaker
in partnership with a lot of these organisations where now if a woman is experiencing domestic violence, she doesn't leave her home, he leaves the home.
00:37:08
Speaker
You know, and that changes everything. And women who have experienced domestic violence will be on the priority list for all of the 10 boroughs in Manchester.
00:37:20
Speaker
And they won't have to start at the bottom if they move away for fresh start. so And all of this has come from organisations listening to the people that they work with and then government listening to those organisations, understanding those organisations are trusted and they are best placed because the criminal justice system takes away your liberty.
00:37:40
Speaker
So you can't really expect when people are transforming, I think it's perfectly okay to expect them to be a bit resistant to doing that in full view of the system that has penalised them.
Critique and Acknowledgement of Prison Work
00:37:57
Speaker
So you need something different. This comes back to what you were saying about crime is a social construct. it It also, i think, comes back to how if crime is a social construct, then the solution also lies in social life.
00:38:14
Speaker
And I just want to reflect a bit on those last two questions about the role of a charity and also what Anne has talked about in terms of charities that are effective. And want to shout out a little bit to another podcast called The Secret Life of Prisons, and the last episode of which I listened to, which was the wonderful Anne Fox with our current Minister for Prisons and Probation, James Timpson, because I want to draw on something that they said in in that podcast. But I want to start with a bit of a provocation for our charitable sector.
00:38:45
Speaker
and And that is, i think there is a real danger in charitable work that you end up being an organization that puts curtains on a concentration camp.
00:38:58
Speaker
Our prisons are failing. They are failing the individuals that live in them. They are failing the individuals who work in them. They are brutal organizations and they are brutalizing. And they are failing us as a society, as communities. That is not to diminish any of the amazing work that goes on by people who work in our criminal justice system, by people who work in charities that are involved in our criminal justice system, and by people themselves who are working so hard to rebuild good lives after having done some things that they're deeply ashamed of. So all of those things can be good, but can sit inside a failing system. And it is incontrovertibly failing.
00:39:41
Speaker
which only makes the good work even more spectacular.
Texas's Approach to Prison Reform
00:39:45
Speaker
And I want to talk a little bit about Texas, and this is where I'm going to the podcast that James Timpson was talking about Texas as an example. So it's got a tough-on crime history and reputation, you know, don't mess with Texas, you get those signs everywhere, which actually was an anti-literating slogan in Texas.
00:40:02
Speaker
But I happened to do my PhD in Texas 20-some years ago. And what's really interesting for this question about the role of charities is that Texas realizeed texas has a massive, massive criminal justice system.
00:40:15
Speaker
I can't remember the statistic now, but if you look at people who've either been involved in it or worked in it i think it was something like one in five in the population. I mean, it's just massive within Texas, the criminal justice system. They realized 20 years ago that they were broke, that they couldn't keep building more prisons. So they invested, they stripped all of the money, the things we've been doing in austerity, out of meaningful activities. They invested money in building a volunteer network. And in a very deeply religious society, they drew largely on religious organizations and largely on Christian churches in order to build that volunteer capacity. What they got was a whole bunch of rich businessmen who had previously, through their churches and through their religious groups, been writing checks
00:40:57
Speaker
for things in prison. They got them going into prisons and volunteering. And what then happened is that these very capable people saw what the prison system was like and went, uh, not in our name, not how we want our prison system to be. And they started, the businessmen started to campaign for a different criminal justice system, which had some political purchase.
00:41:16
Speaker
So one of the things that delighted me about the podcast I listened to with Anne and James Timpson the other day was how, as our minister, James Timpson is taking seriously the voices of the charitable sector that is working in the prisons.
00:41:29
Speaker
So we have this history from Elizabeth Fry onwards and that Anne has talked about in the probation service of how the charitable sector in some ways has sustained some ethicality around a system that is failing. But increasingly what's happening is that politically we are realizing we need to listen to those voices So I would say to people who are involved in criminal justice charities and those who aren't because there are so many charities, i mean in this um radical imagination, i'm hoping to working with Mind, i'm hoping to working with Shelter, you know these are all charities that are working with people who have been criminal justice involved and their work deeply matters what our criminal justice system feels like, does and achieves.
00:42:07
Speaker
So it's not just criminal justice specific charities, but to say to all of them, it really matters how you stand up. But that porosity matters. So there is a fabulous sociologist, Richard Sennett. He's not a criminologist. He's not talking about crime and justice. But he talks about the public realm and how you build healthy societies. And he draws on natural cell biology to make an analogy. He says that with our cells, and it's interesting that it's the same word, as the places where we hold people in prisons. But in our cells, what we need is we need them to be porous enough to let the good things in, but we need them to be bounded enough to be able to keep the harmful things out.
00:42:47
Speaker
And I think one of the problems in our criminal justice system is that we want to do the boundedness because we are rightly really, really scared of the harm and its consequences. But we don't understand that if we do that too well, the organism dies. If your cell becomes really bounded and can't let the good things in, your organism dies. So Richard Sennett talks about beaches, about where the water meets the sand, about the areas in life where you get this porosity. And then he talks about it socially and in terms of how we build our cities architecturally, how we make spaces. But we need to really think about how it is that we build a criminal justice system that has the right level of porosity. And charities have a really crucial role to play in that.
00:43:26
Speaker
So it's not just that they're involved in making prisons and their outcomes less brutal and slightly better. but also that they are challenging some of the policies and practices, maybe some of the procurement processes, some of the flow of money that let them do their good and that let that be spoken to a system that is wanting the same good but sometimes has different logics that are often politically imposed
Charities as Connectors and Supporters
00:43:49
Speaker
on it. And I wanted to just give a shout out to a charity called the Welcome Directory. And I wanted to do that because I think it's a really good example of a fairly small criminal justice charity that's having a massive impact
00:44:00
Speaker
So it operates with faith communities or faith communities within the UK. And it it provides training to train them to welcome people who've been involved in faith communities in prison back into faith communities in in the community. Now, we previously and sometimes still have had policies that have prevented charities who are in touch with people in prison, providing support to them post-release. But that's absolutely vital. If you go back to what I was saying about crime and routes away from crime, for those individual factors, for the inter- interpersonal factors and for the social context. Those charities being able to build those relationships with people in prison and being able to sustain them at once they're released, help them to develop these identities that actually I can be person faith, I can be a good person in my community, I can build positively and sort of building the social context within which they can make those things real, really matter. but When I teach about these things, I often say to students, in ah I use the example of if I wanted to be an astrophysicist because that felt completely ridiculous to me. I now have a son who wants to be an astrophysicist and I think it's almost like punishment for using this as a ridiculous example my whole life. But for me it is this. Sometimes what I was talking about, and the difficulty of people leaving prisons, just wanting a normal life feels utterly unachievable.
00:45:16
Speaker
if you have done something really bad in your past. It's either disappear into obscurity and loneliness or stay in your criminal identity. But the idea that you could just build a positive, safe, productive, normal life feels like me wanting to be an astrophysicist. And so I'd say if I want to be an astrophysicist, just having this identity of I want to be non-criminal, I want to be astrophysicist isn't enough. What I need is the chance to go and learn something about being an astrophysicist.
00:45:45
Speaker
I need people to teach me to be around me so I can understand it. But not just that, I need the networks and the opportunities that like might might let me practice those things. And so I think this is what we really need to think as a society. We know that most people want to move away from crime and will. How is it that we make that most possible rather than least possible? And how is it that we build with our charities those kinds of relationships with our statutory services whereby we understand that the statutory services are there to manage risk, are there to understand offending behaviour, are there to keep the community safe and are there to provide links to our non-statutory organisations, our charities that can do the softer work is what some people see as or although it's very hard and complicated, of coming alongside those people as they move towards these new and different lives. So to give some examples, because I know you want to think about kind of what does that look like? Your listeners thinking, oh, I wonder what kind of things. You will find all sorts of amazing things happening in the system. But if we think about it from what Ruth was saying there about, you know, how it happens and how people go through that process,
00:47:00
Speaker
what the organizations that I represent and work with, including Roots, what they generally do is they don't focus on the crime, they focus on the person and why, what what went wrong, you know, and what do you not have?
00:47:18
Speaker
Or what do you have in abundance that we might use differently? So for example, some people in prison can be extremely enterprising. but they have perhaps chosen or come across the wrong way to do that. So that's where James Timpson first, I suppose, came into the whole way of working in prisons, saying that people with brilliant personality, that actually is a great thing to have running a shop.
00:47:45
Speaker
So we have a really vibrant arts sector in criminal justice. And what you will have, you know, the lot of people in, particularly in prison, we know now we're learning all the time.
00:47:57
Speaker
We have a quite high and growing proportion of people who are neurodivergent, might have learning difficulties, you know dyslexia, different things, and therefore will have really struggled to attain at school and in university. And the way we currently kind of measure you know, achievement and progress.
00:48:17
Speaker
So, but what we find is they could be extremely creative. So while working with arts charities, so...
00:48:28
Speaker
You're not supposed to have favorites, but I really do. But there's going back to the idea of, you know, doing the same thing for hundreds of years. During the Crimean War, there would have been many women who were betrothed to men who died. And therefore, they we had this kind of concept of spinsters and they would go into prisons and teach people to needlepoint because those people are going to be in prison for a long time. And what you need to create a work of beauty is time.
00:48:55
Speaker
So we have an organization called Find Cell Work and they work with designers and fashion houses and textile designers on the outside who create patterns and ways of working that people on the inside with a lot of time can create something really beautiful.
00:49:12
Speaker
no I challenge anybody not to see how stunning these pieces are and how well created. But while you're also creating a beautiful cushion, you are creating a new identity.
00:49:28
Speaker
You are not the person who did this thing. You are not only that person. You are now somebody new. You are becoming somebody new. So all of the work that we have in the arts, we have drama, we have music. At our conference two weeks ago,
00:49:42
Speaker
we had the most beautiful and moving dance performance by a group of men in recovery in the criminal justice system in the community.
00:49:53
Speaker
And every single one of them had never danced before. And their identity now is also as a dancer. You would not have picked them in the audience as the guys that were going to dance.
00:50:06
Speaker
And their dance was moving, and poignant and like it knocked everybody's socks off. We have organisations that teach people to write, to read, so that they can write to their families and read letters from their families or read the posters all over prisons telling them what's there. We have organisations that help people to and learn practical traits so that they can be good at something.
00:50:35
Speaker
And we have people that, the organisations that teach people how to be in a group that is, you know, that is safe because the last time they were in a group, maybe, you know, in a big thing, was in school where they were ridiculed or they never felt they fit in or they didn't have a safe idea of family. You know, the the link between The care system, I hate that word because that's not what it does, you know, but the link between people who have been in statutory care as children and people who've been in prison as adults is staggering.
Ruth's Journey and Commitment to Justice
00:51:14
Speaker
You know, so people who've never felt love and connection. And we have all sorts of things happening in prisons and communities that really just brings that to light. So programmes,
00:51:26
Speaker
helping people to understand what they want and just making friendships. We have mentoring programs. We have dog training programs. We have coffee roasteries in prisons.
00:51:39
Speaker
We have restaurants in prisons, bakeries. HM pasties make fabulous pasties and pies. We have all sorts of brilliant things and a lot of things about sport and activity and health and well-being that allow people to reimagine their future and recover from their past.
00:52:01
Speaker
What Anne was saying was making me think of the role of the charitable sector in challenging some of the logics of crime and justice. And it made me think of two things.
00:52:15
Speaker
One is that there's this trope that is used a lot and I think has a lot of truth to it, which is why it's used a lot that people listening to this podcast will probably have heard, which is there but for the grace of God.
00:52:26
Speaker
And sometimes I think that's been a lot of the charitable organization's orientation to work in the criminal justice service. There's something about that that sort of acknowledges that people can be, ah you know, a bit lucky or even privileged or sometimes differently situated to people who end up being involved in crime.
00:52:44
Speaker
and but There's a fabulous research project which is now an art exhibition. It started in America and it is called We Are All Criminals. And I think in some ways it goes by that there but for the grace of God logics but actually it troubles it because instead of saying we're looking different what it says is that one in three people in America is convicted of a criminal offence but three in three have committed a criminal offence. And it started a research project where it asked people what the consequences of whether they had been caught or not were. And the art exhibition is fabulous. It gets people to hold up big posters in front of their faces and it says on it the criminal offences that they have committed throughout their lives.
00:53:22
Speaker
And then there is a paragraph that says whether they were convicted or not and what the consequences of those things were and what they're now doing in life. And you really see that the conviction is often the more shocking thing and the more important thing in the consequences, which is not to minimize at all criminal harm and how we respond to it, because I think you can both hate and deplore criminal harm and also hate and deplore some of the consequences, the very harmful consequences of our criminal justice system. You can hold those things together.
00:53:51
Speaker
And when Anne was talking about all of these different amazing examples of the work of these different charitable organizations, you know, it's almost like it took me back to Richard Tennant's idea of like the sort of life that grows in a poor society when you have these connections, when you have these spaces and places where people can meet and develop. all of these multifarious things that we enjoy to do in life and that make us who we are.
00:54:15
Speaker
It made me think of a project once I did with some students in prison, and I remember the feedback in this group was done by a fabulous person called Mark Conway, and I don't think he would mind me shouting him out. He spent time in prison. He now leads the most amazing campaign group, UnGrip. which has managed to work together with other other organisations and the government government ministers to and get rid of the IPP sentence and is now continuing to campaign for all of the people who are still serving that sentence in prison.
00:54:40
Speaker
Ruth, do you quickly just want to explain what IPP is? IPP is an Imprisonment for Public Protection and it was a sentence that was created by David Blunkett who now speaks out cogently against it and its consequences. But it was for people who'd committed repeated specific offences, they automatically got what is akin to a life sentence but with a tariff that they had to serve. So some people might have had very low tariffs, like two years, and that they would then go on to have to prove that they'd reduced their risk in order to get out of prison. So you might have committed two sentences that weren't particularly bad. I can remember one probation officer telling me about a case of a woman who, i can't remember what her first offence was, i think it was a mugging
00:55:21
Speaker
someone who was addicted to drugs, and then the second offence was arson. And those two offences were on the schedule that meant that you automatically got this IPP sentence for life. But they were both very, very low level. She was a homeless person when she committed to the arson, which was the second offence having committed it. So they were actually both, when you looked at the facts of them, very, very low level criminal offences and something that with addiction support, she's likely to have been able to move away from in life.
00:55:49
Speaker
and yet her mental health deteriorated so much once she got into our prison system that it was really difficult to be able to support her to prove that she'd reduced her risk enough so she might end up serving 20 years for those two sentences which might not have attracted more than six months on their own because of this IPP sentence so that's an example of it So Mark has worked but ah cogently since his release, his own release from prison, having served an IPP sentence to campaign and to get rid of that sentence and also now to help the people who are trapped to be released safely. But what I wanted to say, what Anne's examples made me think of was when he was a student and he was still in prison,
00:56:28
Speaker
he presented the work of his group on how you would use legitimacy theory to reimagine the criminal justice system. And legitimacy theory talks about how power holders use their power in ways that feel rightful to the people that it's exercised on and how important public opinion thinking that that power is rightful is. So when the public feels that the criminal justice system isn't achieving what we want it to achieve, which is to keep us safe, we are likely to be be less invested in that power because we think it's not working for what we want it to achieve. And when people who that power is exercised on feel like it's being exercised unjustly, then we also think that that's unlikely. So this theory it poses why dialogue is really important, dialogue with the public about our criminal justice system, but also dialogue between power holders and those that power is exercised on.
00:57:14
Speaker
And his group, they had to use this theory to reimagine the criminal justice system. And his group, I think, came up with this amazing idea and they called it Inside Out. And they wanted to turn the logics of imprisonment on its head.
00:57:26
Speaker
So I once, many moons ago, wrote an article with Professor Shad Maruna, who's the head of department here at Liverpool. And we talked about what would prisons look like if they actually were going to help our communities achieve social justice rather than if they were going to impact negatively against it.
00:57:42
Speaker
And his example really brought to life what that could be. What we know about our prisons is that although they're often talked about as like economic booms, creating jobs and things, over the course of years, they strip life and they strip economic viability from areas. They are not good for our communities in the ways that they currently operate, aside from the ch criminological outcomes.
00:58:01
Speaker
But mark Conway and his group talked about, imagine if you look to all the goods that's in prison, if you look at the dog training, if you look at the electrical courses, if you look at all of these skilled staff who really know how to work with students that can be challenging, if you look at the maths that's being taught, if you look at you know all of these different skills that are in our prison, imagine if we had that open for the community.
00:58:22
Speaker
Prisons are actually fairly safe places for the community to come. They're very controlled places. They have all of the staff available. That is not when you're walking down the street. So imagine if prisons became hubs of our communities, if they became places where actually they were a resource to the community. And to the extent that it was safe, people could come in and could access those resources within our prisons. It really flips the logics of imprisonment on its head, that they could be a community resource instead of keeping the community out and keeping the bad people in.
00:58:51
Speaker
And Ruth, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your personal journeys. i I'm curious to hear what drew you to this work and what has surprised you working in the sector? I think i ended up here by happy accident.
00:59:05
Speaker
A very healthy accident. So my, I suppose, professional background, 25 years or so, working in campaigns and policy roles in charities, mainly around social justice and and social issues, families.
Impacts of Crime and Potential for Reform
00:59:20
Speaker
And that very much came from dyed-in-the-wool sense of social justice from my early childhood, growing up in a pretty disadvantaged time.
00:59:34
Speaker
in Dublin in the 70s and 80s and my own family's experiences of not having enough and living with chaos and addiction in my dad.
00:59:48
Speaker
and So that very much shaped me and who I wanted to be. But about 11 years ago, a friend of mine saw job ad and said, you should go for this job at Clink's. And I was like, I couldn't do that.
01:00:00
Speaker
But I love collective work. I love bringing lots of people together continue and seeing what we can achieve when we're all together. So I kind of gave it a punt, but I have absolutely loved it. It's been the best thing that's ever happened to me as a professional, as a person. Because I think there was also a thing of when I was working in different jobs,
01:00:24
Speaker
You know, I brought everything to my work, always have done. But there's something between about my values and the way that I work best. And I think particularly during COVID, I often say this, you know, I've always seen myself as a really kind person.
01:00:40
Speaker
Injustice, kindness is critical. We must have, you know, you can talk, we use the word love a lot. You have to love.
01:00:52
Speaker
You have to love what you do do, what you love, and you have to do it with love. And i am that kind of person. To me, it's important that professional people are able to be outwardly kind, outwardly loving and soft and empathetic, that you don't have to be, you know,
01:01:12
Speaker
aloof and you know the professionalism isn't seen as something that is only for people who are so boundaried that actually in our business we are asking so much of the people that we work with you've got to give them something, you know, while always respecting people and what people need. So, you know, i'm not going to go around prisons hugging kids, you know, like, but allowing people feel that you matter to me and what happens to you matters. So yeah, that's, that's how I ended up here. And i have absolutely loved it.
01:01:47
Speaker
Yeah, so my story is, i'm going to start off with when I was listening to James Timberson's talk about his route into this work and how this was the job for him, he started off by talking about how his parents were foster carers. So I started this podcast by saying I have five sisters in life. I do. One of them is a sister who was fostered by my parents when she was young and my parents were respite foster carers. So we had, as well as the five, original five of us,
01:02:14
Speaker
and We had many, many children come through the house for short-term respite foster care, and including my sister, who who very much stayed as part of the family long-term.
01:02:26
Speaker
I think that that from a very young age means that you cannot disassociate crime in terms of the harms that are inflicted on people and in terms of the harms that people cause from the m beauty and goodness in children who we were looking after.
01:02:46
Speaker
And we very much looked after that as a family. I'm one of the older sisters. So I was older when this was happening. So I think that from a very young age, I had this sense that crime wasn't entirely other.
01:02:59
Speaker
Then that was really compounded when I often call myself a recovering lawyer. I was at law school and I went and studied in Texas for a year and I did a death penalty class and the first prison I ever went into was death row in Texas. In fact, three different prisons, one of which was the old death row, one of which was a brand new high security death row prison they were just moving people to, and one of which was the execution chamber where they are still executing people today.
01:03:25
Speaker
And then I worked for the lawyers who were my professors after studying there. And I remember working on a really shocking case. The case was, I remember, still a 14-year-old girl who had been kidnapped.
01:03:39
Speaker
She had been gang raped for days. she was eventually buried alive. Her brother was involved in drugs and it was a revenge attack. It was absolutely horrific. And I was organizing this case file and I was reading through it. And I remember thinking, you don't really need the death penalty. Just find me this person who did this and I'll kill them myself. it was just absolutely awful. And then as I read on through the file, and I think I was all of, what was 22 or 23 years old young As I read on through the file, i started to read about his life and about the offence. And I had this shocking and horrible realization, which was that maybe in those circumstances, I could have done something like that, which is a horrible thing to have to realize when you've been reading facts of something and wanting somebody dead.
01:04:23
Speaker
So I just got this sense of the absolute horrors of crime that you're terrified of as part of what you're trying to reject from yourself. And I then worked on these cases and I met people who had committed horrible offences and I hated their offences and I hated the harm that they had caused. But I met people. I didn't meet criminals. One of them, Jonathan Reid, I'm still working on his case. He actually has a very plausible innocence case. Look it up in America.
01:04:51
Speaker
and has just been rejected parole at the age of 72, even though he literally couldn't do anything more positive. He has committed horrific offences in his lifetime, so I make no excuse for him or for any of those, but he has also admitted those and worked very hard to move away from them. But his index offence that he's still in prison for, he hasn't committed. But I met people like John, and it just made me realise that people move away from crime.
01:05:16
Speaker
And through working on death penalty cases, i re ive found out about this area of work called desistance and that people, that there was a process through which people move away from crime. And I thought I was more emotionally constituted to invest the efforts in my life in and learning about how it is that you support people to live better rather than how it is that you punish people for the bad that they've done. And I'm not sure those two things are disconnected now. I think they're entirely connected. And I moved then into criminology from law because I got interested in the study of how people move away from crime. And you asked about things that have been surprising. And so I want to tell you two things. It's a bit of ah a tale, when when I went into death row and into that new prison, I can remember I'm a lawyer and it's the first prison I've ever been into and these were um ah professors taking their students into the prison and I was quite objectionable and horrible to the member of staff who was kindly taking time out of their day to show us around. i remember them showing us the packs, the peanut butter sandwiches that people get when they're on lockdown or in punishment. And he was talking about how they get delivered to the people in the prison. And I just remember suddenly as a lawyer, legal head, procedurally going, hold on, if somebody wants to make a complaint about mistreatment, having just literally been all the way back in the belly of the prison, having been in the cells where people on death row were being held, having understood the absolute isolation, in physical and social, that people on death row were serving, they don't even have recreation times together. They were in absolute isolation. If people want to make a complaint about their treatment, how do they make that complaint And I was absolutely shocked as this young little lawyer that that process, they had to complain through the people they were complaining about to make a complaint. I was like, that's obviously procedurally problematic. How do you do this? But I was quite aggressive and rude to that member of staff, I think, by then. So one of the things that I have become really surprised about, and I think my work orients around, is within this really broken penal system that we over-rely on tremendously. the brilliance of some of the people who work in it, which is not to say that there are also people in it that should not be there and need to be weeded out.
01:07:22
Speaker
But there are so many people in criminal justice doing such a thankless and difficult job so well. And one of the things that I want to do is help people to understand more what good looks like so that the good that those professionals are doing can be recognized and celebrated. Because sometimes I think the people that do the good end up doing it around the seams and the edges.
01:07:44
Speaker
And the second thing that I have learned, which is a really difficult thing to talk about, is I've just learned really personally and really viscerally how painful criminal harm is. I've learned it in two
Hopeful Reforms and Supportive Leaders
01:07:56
Speaker
ways. I learned it through my glorious sister number three, taking her own life after her house was burgled and she lived alone. and I've often thought that person who burgled her house would never understand that taking that laptop removed all of her safety in life and she couldn't carry on after that. So the even small crimes can have massive consequences. And I learned it again, horrifically, when one of my students, Usman Khan, attacked a conference that I was holding and leading and he killed one of my colleagues, Jack Merritt, and he killed one of my students, Saskia Jones, and I was in the middle of that attack and we were all terrified for our lives.
01:08:38
Speaker
that how we do criminal justice, that giving people who want to succeed options for jobs, options for positive social networks, keep us all safe. I don't just know it academically. I don't just know it through brilliant practices of charities. I know it absolutely personally. I know it through the terror of thinking I'm going to die.
01:09:00
Speaker
How is it that we all stay alive? And so I think we have a real responsibility to use the evidence to think carefully about the action, to evaluate our actions, but not to give up. At the minute, our criminal justice system is failing us, and we all need to do better to play our part in building the kind of world where we can all be safe. It really, really matters.
01:09:25
Speaker
There but for the grace of God. What gives you hope for justice reform in the next five to ten years? I'm getting a lot of hope at the moment from the fact that, as Ruth has repeatedly said about evidence, the evidence is irrefutable.
01:09:47
Speaker
People have not given it up. So I suppose the resilience in our sector is unmatched in that. I don't know how they keep going, but they keep going.
01:09:57
Speaker
And that means they we have a body of evidence that shows resilience not just what works, but irrefutably what doesn't work. So the statutory sector repeatedly gives us what doesn't work because we get that in our re-offending and re-conviction rates.
01:10:14
Speaker
But we have a good sense of what does work and people are starting to listen. So the aforementioned prisons minister, Lord Timpson.
01:10:25
Speaker
He is a prison reformer and he is our minister. Now, you know, politics is a very difficult... I personally believe that we should bring more independence...
01:10:37
Speaker
into the system. David Gawke, the former Justice Secretary, he did a seminal review last year. And one of the things he talked about was making sure that there was an independence and a checker on policies that are introduced. So because of the populist risk around criminal justice, you know, we have John Major in prison works, we had David Blunkett in the IPP sentence, you know,
01:11:01
Speaker
We play with people's lives with politics a lot and criminal justice and and we all suffer from it or we all benefit from it.
Final Reflections on Reform Efforts
01:11:10
Speaker
So I'm getting my hope from the Sentencing Act 2026, which for me, when we talk about systems and the fact that this system is failing, this piece of legislation and the review that with the non-legislative bits, the review that it came from, which is being implemented now,
01:11:29
Speaker
is going to, if we all get behind it, it is has the potential to completely change the system so that there is actually a system and not just a bit of a lottery of whether or not you will go to prison and when you're in prison, whether or not you will get what you need. So we should have a hopefully a really system So my little boy loves Inside the Factory. i don't know if you know this show. And it's you know it's Paddy McGuinness and he's showing how like quavers or cornflakes are made. And you'll see these machines, these systems, different processes for different things. So what this Sentencing Act is allowing us to do is have a much better way of sorting people out based on who they are, what they did,
01:12:17
Speaker
and what the best remedy for that is, and then giving them different types of sentences, some in the community, some in prison, and how they get their support with their sentence so that they won't do it that thing again.
01:12:31
Speaker
And I get a lot of hope from that. I mainly get my hope from the fact that of all the people who come out of this system, you know, this is not, this isn't hospitals, this isn't schools. These are not good systems.
01:12:46
Speaker
These are not good places. But the number of people who come back
01:12:52
Speaker
returning to the worst place they've ever been, to the worst time of their lives and go, oh, I think I'm going to go in and, you know, teach the guys some art or do you would be a bit of kickboxing you know, just let them know that they're not forgotten about. And that, the peer work in our system is so, so amazing and really gives me hope.
01:13:19
Speaker
So, yeah, that's where getting it from. And on that note, and a shout out to Dan White, who I met at your Leaving Drinks and who runs an organization called Doing What Really Matters. Really matters.
01:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Ruth. and Well, I would echo some of what Anne says. James Simpson does give me hope. I'm a non-politician doing a politician's role, and but who I think knows deeply and viscerally some of the realities of our criminal justice system and is working for change.
01:13:53
Speaker
And the sentencing review also really gives me hope. But two other really pragmatic things that give me hope are the Ministry of Justice research priorities and a brand new thing which is being launched, I think it's next Tuesday, but is an operational evidence base actually. They're looking at what evidence do we really want operationally as well as overarching research questions. which So I'm delighted about both of those things and delighted at the role of lived experience and making an appearance in both of those things and listening to people who have been through the system.
01:14:21
Speaker
and But when you asked about what gives me hope, I thought I want to read a quote and then I want to read a poem. As I've just quickly looked them both up, the quote is from Rebecca Solnit in a book called Hope in the Dark. It's to do with the Iraqi war. It's not to do with criminal justice again. But I want to sort of give this as ah as a sort of like, um I guess it's like a a bit of a social movement warrior cry to all of these charities who are doing this amazing work, which sometimes can feel really hidden and thankless. And actually beyond the charities, are the people themselves who are in the criminal justice system or working in the criminal justice system about the kind of hope that we need to have in this area. So Rebecca Solnit says, hope is not a lottery ticket. You can sit on the sofa and clutch feeling lucky. It's an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out of the door because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the Earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal, which is what we see in our criminal justice system. To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
01:15:32
Speaker
So I get hope from all of the amazing people, whether they're serving a sentence, whether they've ah suffered criminal harm and are lifting their heads up and carrying on, whether they're working in our system who continue to do their good in really, really difficult circumstances.
01:15:49
Speaker
And then I wanted to read you a poem because this poem was really personally helpful to me and and it is continually personally helpful to me. It is on my office door. It is what I see every day. And I've just actually written a um an article with two colleagues and it's about the role of joy in trauma-informed work. But my interest in this area has grown from this poem, which really, really spoke to me as I was trying to hold myself, hold other people and rebuild after suffering the really devastating attack at Fishmongers Hall.
01:16:24
Speaker
and it's by Amanda Gorman, it's called Resolute, and she says, this rush of peace runs so deep it roots us to the spot. It is true that poetry can lump an era scraped hollow, a year we barely swallowed, there is justice in joy, starlit against all that we have ended, endured and entered. We will not stir stones, we shall make mountains.
01:16:53
Speaker
And I love that like hard-fought joy that sometimes within criminal justice there is so much trauma. The wonderful Father Gregory Boyle, who runs the massive gang intervention program in America Homeboy Industries, he talks about people who get air gang involved and people who are violent. And he said, we misunderstand violence. that violence is the language of people whose burdens are more than they can bear. And having been the victim of serious violence, I take that very, very seriously.
01:17:26
Speaker
And we cannot live without joy. So in this world, we can get... overborne by the violence. We can get overborne, the burden of the harm can feel too heavy. The massiveness of the task to make things better can feel too much. We can lose that kind of hope that Rebecca Solnit talks about.
01:17:47
Speaker
But Amanda Gorman's poem, I think, reminds us that to be resolute, we have to find our joy. We have to fuel other people's joy. And we have to be really deliberate about saying we will keep working. We will find the good. We will be joyful and we can build something better if we all do our little bit together.
01:18:08
Speaker
And on that lovely, hopeful note, coming now to our final question, mean, what is one thing you'd like people to take away from this conversation, a final thought or reflection from you both?
01:18:22
Speaker
The criminal justice system in this country to keep you safe and to help you live in a country that you're proud of needs to change.
01:18:33
Speaker
And to do so, One of the things that needs to happen is that charities need to be free to do what they're good at in listening to people and helping people to move on.
01:18:50
Speaker
And that that may look fluffy and soft, but it's anything but. And I think it's a ah message for everybody. and so whether it's someone who lives in the community, whether it's the CEO of an organization, someone working in organization, whether it's somebody who happens to be listening to your podcast in prisons, podcasts are really important for people in prison, whoever they are and wherever they're situated, i would want to say to that person, you matter.
01:19:19
Speaker
Your brilliance really matters. There is only you that can do your bit. So don't be hard on yourself, but also don't be light on yourself.
01:19:30
Speaker
Find out what your bit is and do that bit and do it with your whole heart. And I think if we can do that, if we're really honest with ourselves about whether we're doing that, And if we do it to the extent we can and not to the extent we can't, then actually we might very slowly and very carefully ah build er a better criminal justice system together.
Call to Action for Listeners
01:19:53
Speaker
Can I just add, Ruth's been great at using quotes and mottos. I have a professional motto that I've been using for the last few years from one of my heroines, the wonderful Dolly Parton.
01:20:07
Speaker
And it's find out who you are and do it on purpose. And I think that that's what happened to me in criminal justice. And I think that thing about what Ruth talks about joy and hope, it is sometimes so bleak and so hopeless that you have to be yourself and you have to just, you know, we bandy together and That's what people need to do. Do something.
01:20:28
Speaker
Because if you do nothing, if we are bystanders, we will miss our opportunity. So yeah, let's all find out who we are and do it on purpose. Anne Fox, Ruth Armstrong, this has been a brilliant, heartfelt and challenging conversation. Thank you so much. It has been a pleasure to have you on the Charity CEO podcast.
01:20:48
Speaker
Thanks, Divya. Keep fab work. Thank you, Divya. Thanks for all your work.
01:20:55
Speaker
Well, that's a wrap on another inspiring episode of the Charity CEO Podcast. I hope today's conversation left you feeling empowered and uplifted. I know it did for me. If you loved what you heard, please share the joy by leaving us a quick review on your favorite podcast platform.
01:21:11
Speaker
Reviews really help us reach more listeners and grow this amazing community of change makers. Be sure to also hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And for even more inspiration and resources, head on over to thecharityceo.com.
01:21:26
Speaker
There, you can dive into our past episodes from the last five seasons and find valuable content to help fuel your impact. Thank you for listening. And remember, together, we're building a better world.
01:21:38
Speaker
See you next time.