It is often focused on race, class and gender, but is also helpful for understanding the overlapping and often amplified needs of those with care experience in the criminal justice system.
I’ve recently been using Intersectionality to reflect on what it’s like to be care experienced in custody. How might people’s mental health challenges be exacerbated? What is it like to be a parent in custody? Do staff understand or acknowledge care experience? Imagine growing old in prison if you were raised in an abusive institution.
A Strategy for Care-Experienced People in Custody was developed by HM Prison and Probation Service in 2019 and it is good to see that messages from the Care Experienced Conference are being incorporated into work in the prison and probation service.
There are now lead officers in every custodial setting, including young offender institutions, and third sector organisations are playing an important part in helping to understand the needs of care-experienced people, empowering them, and helping the system to connect strategy to work on the ground. In some places, there is work with young people connecting support for care leavers with rehabilitation of offenders in the community.
It is shocking that the needs of care-experienced people in the criminal justice system were barely recognised until five years ago and that numbers in the system are still not known. It is estimated that more than 25 per cent of men and up to 50 per cent of women in prison have care experience, but only one in 10 have been identified.
It is unsurprising that many people do not declare their care experience status: those seeking to exploit or abuse the vulnerable target people who have been in care. For women, the fear of losing their children, if they say they have been in care, is all too real.
Despite the positive work, a lack of awareness and understanding in the prison and probation service about care-experienced people and their needs is still widespread and there is much to do to improve recognition and tackle prejudice.
There is also a danger that this work is seen as a series of short-term small-scale initiatives. It is vital that the needs of care-experienced people of all ages, across the whole system, drive a wide-ranging approach, to improve practice and shift outcomes for the long-term. Sustained attention across government is needed, which could not be more urgent than in the youth estate where a crisis in quality of care and capacity looms large.
It is in everybody’s interest to address the needs of care-experienced people to improve their outcomes, as the cost of not doing so is high for the system and for society in general, not to mention for the person concerned.
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Alison O’Sullivan is chair of the National Children’s Bureau and former ADCS president
