Always Hope: Supporting young men with experience of care and custody

Justice and violence reduction

Design

Practice

Scaling

This new solution connects practitioners from prison, probation and local authority leaving care and Lifelong Links services with young men, to integrate their support and help them build supportive social networks.

Care experienced young adults (18-25 years old) are over represented in the prison system; approximately 25% of all adult prisoners have had experience of care, compared to 1% of the general population.

Since 2017, Innovation Unit has been shining a spotlight on the additional challenges facing care experienced young adults given prison sentences, and testing what could help them to thrive following release.

The result is the Always Hope offer – co-designed and piloted with a committed and passionate group of national and local statutory and voluntary sector partners in the West Midlands, including care experienced young adults serving prison sentences at the time.

The model is focussed on offering support for the young adult, from both the professionals working with them and their personal support networks, in ways that are integrated and sustainable.

"[Always Hope] shows the young person that there are people who care about them."

Practitioner at Coventry City Council

The approach

The Always Hope approach began by generating insights, carrying out mixed-methods research to draw out key findings; we identified that the fragmentation of care was a real barrier for leaving prison ‘well’.

In the next phase we mobilised energy for the project, gaining commitment from practitioners and senior leaders at a national level, and co-designed a new approach that brought together local authorities, prison, probation and VCSE services.

The new approach had two strands:

Creating an integrated plan for each young adult by aligning statutory assessment and planning between practitioners in the prison, probation and leaving care services.
Developing a sustainable and coordinated support network for care leavers, both for when they’re in prison and when they’re released using Family Rights Group’s Lifelong Links approach.

We piloted this approach over 18 months working closely with Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton leaving care and probation services and HMPS Brinsford and Swinten Hall to support a cohort of 61 young adults.

We are now exploring how we might co-design a new initiative specifically for women, while also working to embed the Always Hope model more deeply both locally and nationally.