Impacting on service development: Evaluating a post-prison resettlement project
“The learning from the evaluation and Revolving Doors recommendations helped us to enhance our future support offer for people leaving prison. We recognised that we needed to establish a more cohesive approach to supporting individuals and ensure that there was additional support in place for people most at risk of reoffending and/or homelessness.”
Karen Kenmare, Head of Business Growth at Thirteen
Thirteen Housing piloted Project Lifestyle in the Northeast – a post-prison resettlement service. Our evaluation spoke with service users, staff, and stakeholders to understand how the pilot needed to evolve to support successful resettlement service development.
We recommended:
- Developing a well-defined eligibility criteria to improve the referral process into the service and case management meetings for joint decision making and share learning.
- Building on existing local partnerships to ensure that service users have support for their needs beyond housing.
- Accessing the Justice Data Lab to learn more about the impact of their work with people leaving prison.
Thirteen have since been awarded a contract by the National Probation Service to provide advice, support and assistance to people leaving custody who need housing. Our recommendations have supported the design of the new programme. For example,
- Eligibility criteria was developed in partnership with contractors and probation staff.
- Monthly caseload reviews, with the relevant partners are a formal part of the management processes.
- Thirteen have begun to develop a partnership portfolio which builds on other organisation’s expertise. They have sub-contracted aspects of the programme to two experienced support agencies and will continue to bring other specialist agencies onboard in future services.
- Thirteen are registering with the Justice Data Lab understand the impact of their new programme on reoffending rates locally.
