Social Enterprise Aims to Cut Reoffending with Recycling : Recycling Lives Brings Skills to Prisoners

In North West England a reuse and recycling social enterprise is helping to break the negative cycle of re-offending by equipping prisoners and ex-offenders with skills to enable them to enter the workplace.

Recycling Lives is a Queen’s Award-winning commercial recycler and waste management enterprise. Its commercial services support a social welfare charity, which is helping vulnerable people to work their way back to independent living.

The organisation operates a tailored, six-stage process that is designed to help people into employment and independent living. Through a unique mixture of training, support, work experience, the charity helps people to rebuild their lives in safe, constructive environment.

Each stage of the programme lasts around five weeks, and a full review is carried out at the end of each stage covering everything from life in the charity, work placements and personal wellbeing to future goals and aspirations.

Residents get a weekly allowance during their time in the charity, part of which is paid into savings ready for when they move into independent living. And, from Stage Two onwards, residents also have the opportunity to become Resident Representatives, taking on more responsibility in exchange for additional savings.

Foundations

The social business, which was founded by Steve Jackson OBE DL, has developed an innovative rehabilitation programme for offenders, with a target to open new purpose built academies within 10 prisons every year.

The organisation has recently been recognised for the outstanding work it has done with offenders, ex-offenders and socially disadvantaged people with a Profound Impact Award from the Northern Enterprise Conference 2016.

Headquartered in Preston, with offices and partners across the North West, the organisation runs a number of charitable programmes including projects to aid rehabilitation and reduce re-offending by providing offenders with training and employment at recycling centres, which operate within HMP facilities. Offenders are paid for the work, 40% of which goes towards victims’ support funds.

“Against the backdrop of the vast reforms which the prison service is undergoing, attention is increasingly turning to how we look after people who have been incarcerated,” Alasdair Jackson from Recycling Lives.

“As a society, we need to evaluate what we can do to make people’s time in prison meaningful, transformative, and valuable, both for the individual offender, but also to society as a whole,”

Re-offending rates in England and Wales are currently 67% within the first year, with many ex-offenders struggling to make the transition back into normal working life. This is said to cost the government around £15 billion a year.

“Creating opportunities for people to grow, reform and develop needs to be a wider priority and this is a vital part of what we do at Recycling Lives. We believe that we can release potential in every individual and we want to unlock and nurture that often-dormant possibility,” conlcuded Jackson.

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