The circular nature of people leaving prison, entering a state of homelessness, resorting to crime and returning to the prison system is a soul crushing, needless and widely ignored issue.
It hurts society, and more so, it hurts those trapped within it.
Our justice system does not do enough to help the men and women leaving prison to resume normal life, and have the second chance they were promised.
Because this second chance is too often a second chance of exactly the same – sleeping rough, begging for money, and turning to drugs and criminality.
A new type of prison, from which few escape.
This cyclic journey is well known, and efforts to address it have been pretty ineffective - but what I’m sharing with you today, is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
A ‘manual’ more haunting or distasteful than any satire, words and advice you only wish were fake, or just simply a bad joke – but its all true.
The Ministry of Justice have been working on a draft guide for British prisoners to use after their release, to help them live ‘safely’ on the streets.
How to savage for food, sleep rough and not smell.
The advice is gives is not funny, because it is brutally true, and remind us all of the problem we continue to sweep under the carpet.
So take a look…
How do we break the cycle of incarceration and homelessness?
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Source, The Telegraph https://tinyurl.com/mr3amd8d
ONS – Homelessness, https://tinyurl.com/mrybbpyc
ONS – Homeless Deaths https://tinyurl.com/bd34hrsz
Images by Jorg Karg, Leroy Skalstad, Ashkan Forouzani, Dean Xavier, Smail Bouhari and Darya Tryfanava from Unsplash