Financial Freedom

>> Click here for the first edition of our Financial Freedom newsletter for women leaving prison

Email: Freedom@financialmail.co.uk

This weekend we gave birth to our long gestated baby, Financial Freedom. It is a newsletter for women leaving prison designed to give them some guidance about issues like claiming benefits, finding a home and possibly a job as well as pointing them to services such as women’s centres.

To go along with Edition One we are also launching a free telephone information line that women can ring to find useful phone numbers as well as the women’s centre closest to where they live.

It is the first time anyone has attempted to provide a newspaper written specifically for women prison leavers and I’m thrilled that we have received such a positive response from virtually everyone we have encountered along the route to production.

And, what a long road that has turned out to be. We are used to starting with a load of blank pages on a Monday and producing a finance section of 26 or so pages by the early hours of Saturday morning without a hiccough. We find the stories, write them, make the decisions about where they will be placed and which pictures we will use to illustrate them. Total editorial control.

Working with such a socially and politically charged sector as prisons takes an awful lot longer. We started out on the project early last Autumn – just organising visits to prisons and women’s centres can take ages even with the skilfull help of our partners on the project, the Prison Reform Trust (see Juliet Lyons’ blog elsewhere on the site).

When we had finally accumulated the telephone numbers for all the major women’s centres in the country, all had to be tested and many, it turned out, had changed. We needed our hands held to organise delivery of the papers to the right people in the prisons – failure to do so meant we would risk simply leaving piles of unread copies.

It has been a steep learning curve but a totally fascinating one. Quite clearly some prisons have excellent provision for leavers – they have been helped to sign on at JobCentre Plus, have updated or opened bank accounts and got their names on housing registers.

But provision is far from universal – and that is where we hope Financial Freedom will help. Many of the prisoners I met complained that they didn’t know what was available or didn’t really want to talk to anyone inside about their financial situation. If they had missed the opportunity during induction sessions to write to their bank manager or mobile phone provider, chaos ensued.

One woman told me she reckoned her mobile phone contract would be about £900 in arrears by the time she got out – how on earth would she ever hope to clear that? Banks that are not contacted will start to apply punitive interest rates to any debts that can spiral so out of control that anyone leaving prison without a job would shrink at the prospect of ever repaying.

As phones are in communal corridors many prisoners do not want to call their bank from inside – and with identity theft now one of the reasons many of the inmates are there, this is hardly surprising.

Women leave prison with about £46 and their fare home. Many are frightened of using public transport alone – yet no-one makes sure they have someone to meet them on the outside. About one in five set off alone.

Tragically and ridiculously, the largest number of prisoners are released on Fridays – just as all the public services they need to access immediately are shut. With only £46 and possibly no home to go to, there is little wonder they are back to crime and back inside within days.

Many actually want to go back inside. It feels safe and the chances are they have developed close friendships which can seem very desirable when they are on their own trying to get to grips with being a single mother again, with possibly no friends or family to help.

One woman I met at Anawim, the Birmingham women’s centre, told me she wanted to go back inside even though she had three children, one of them only four years old. She’d been able to try to get her hairdressing qualifications inside because she felt she was being encouraged by her group of friends. It is hard to try to convince someone like that of the possibilities of re-creating such comradeship in the workplace or at a women’s centre.

Sadly about two thirds reoffend – even though the vast majority of women are jailed for pretty minor offences that carry terms of a year or less. But while that is a relatively short time it is amply long enough to destroy their lives – they lose their homes, jobs and children. Men tend to be more fortunate as they frequently have a partner who can hold family life together while they are inside.

Hopefully Financial Freedom will provide some help to some prison leavers. Hopefully our free-phone number will point some women in the direction of the sanctuary of a women’s centre rather than the streets. We have had great support from organisations such as Unlock and the St Giles Trust, and particularly the Prison Reform Trust which was the inspiration for the project and without which we would not have reached our goal.

The PRT, Nationwide Foundation, Government Equalities Office and Friends Provident Foundation also gave generous financial support to help publication of Edition One and an updated Edition Two later in the year.

If a woman can stay free of prison for two years there’s a good chance she will stay free forever. More might make it that far if their situation was improved with just a little thought and a small investment.

A national 24-hour helpline, staffed by volunteers, would be a real breakthrough. Help in all rather than just a few prisons with filling in forms such as those for a bank account or job application would be a massive boon. A buddy system to help women through the first vital few days when they are still feeling strange on the outside would be amazing.

But to my mind possibly the single biggest step would be to stop releasing so many prisoners on Fridays when the closure of all the support systems they need to make their bid for freedom successful means they are almost doomed to failure.

Tags: Financial Freedom, Women in Prison, Women in Prison - Advice, Women in Prison - Rehabilitation

Posted by Lisa Buckingham on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 10:58 am.

Filed under Equality, Extra, Fresh Start, Lifestyle, Lisa Buckingham, News, Tagged as: , Financial Freedom, Women in Prison, Women in Prison - Advice, Women in Prison - Rehabilitation.