Unsurprisingly, Covid has been quite a challenge, given what we do. In the last operational year, we have had just over 1,000 males go through our programme. It has been challenging. The programme is structured through six months of support in prison and six months of support post-liberation. Providing the support in prison was quite challenging. Teresa Medhurst’s colleagues have been fantastic in supporting us and keeping contact with potential programme participants during the lockdown period.
One of the most pleasing things during that period was the recognition that things that were previously not seen as doable were all of a sudden doable. We should remember that as we come out of the pandemic. Necessity is the mother of all invention, as they say, and we managed to do things together, particularly in relation to technology, that were previously difficult or were not even considered possible.
During the most recent operational year, more than 1,000 people in the male prison estate have gone through the programme and the reoffending rate—those who returned to custody within a year—is 8.7 per cent. That means that over 90 per cent of our participants are not going on to reoffend in a way that results in a custodial sentence.
We need to look at that in a more acute way, given the conversation that we are having today about victims. What we are doing is a bit like a vaccine, in that we are severely weakening or even breaking the link between introductory criminality and the graduation from that to serious criminal offences. I should also say that Kate Wallace and others do phenomenal work in supporting the victims of such offences.
There is no doubt that this has been a challenge but, with support from the SPS and the Government, we have continued to support, on liberation, those coming out of prison, even under the early release programme. We have been able to bring technology and partnership working to the fore in a way that has not been evidenced previously, with greater access to services and greater integration of services with local authorities and so on. It was a challenge, but it forced us to do the things that we were always able to do but had never managed to do as a collective. That is the overriding lesson that we have learned.
The female estate has suffered the same challenges. We work in partnership with Sacro and Apex Scotland, which are fantastic, but the same issues are prevalent.
I do not have any employment figures for the female estate but, as far as the male estate is concerned, we have been able to find employment for roughly 10 to 15 per cent of those who have gone through the programme successfully. That is because we are able to cross-integrate existing programmes in different Government directorates, but we need to look at how we design or bake in such an approach at the beginning and not have disparate programmes running almost contrary to each other as far as successful outcomes are concerned.