05.03.13
Prison mentoring could help reduce crime
Former convicts should be used as peer mentors to help other offenders, prisons minister Jeremy Wright has suggested.
In prison, certain inmates can help new prisoners with reading and other education and training. This could be extended outside jails, supporting convicts to reintegrate into society and cutting reoffending.
Speaking at a conference yesterday, Wright said: “There must surely be potential for us to say to those offenders, ‘Look, wouldn’t you like to consider this as a career so that when you come out you will have the opportunity not just to do mentoring, but to be paid for it?’
“What we’re doing with these new proposals is creating a huge new market for mentoring. Peer mentoring is going on inside prisons. It seems to work extremely effectively.
“It’s a way of newer, often very young prisoners, quickly getting to grips with prison regime and older more established offenders starting to take more responsibility, which isn’t a bad thing for when they end up leaving custody themselves.”
On the subject of private companies taking on probation contracts, he added: “We will not compromise on public safety. We believe that a professional public sector service is best placed to manage those who present highest risk of serious harm, just as we believe they are best placed to make judgments about who falls into which risk category, both at the outset and an ongoing basis.”
Ministers are also considering tracking short-sentence offenders with GPS to monitor their movements more closely and to exclude them from areas where they are thought likely to commit further crimes.
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