Want Some Advice Guv?
On a fairly quiet news day for secured loans I thought I’d just do a quick post about something I hadn’t spotted before.
I was having a quick flick through some reports about the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and noticed a report saying that since 2002, Oxford had employed 40 people from Springhill Open Prison as volunteer advisers.
Now I know next to nothing about the Prison Service or the rehabilitation of offenders, but this strikes me as a pretty neat relationship between the organisations. On one hand the prisoners learn a new skill and probably get a strong feeling of “self worth” from helping people and on the other hand the CAB manages to get enough recruits to fulfill demand.
Independent research has concluded that prisoners selected as advisers perform just as well as non-prisoner volunteers. The research also says that CAB clients were just as happy with the service supplied from prisoners as they were with that from other volunteers. Although some did say that they wanted prior disclosure that the volunteer was a prisoner and others wanted people serving a sentence for several specific types of offence, quite understandably, excluded from the scheme.
I had another dig and found that last December the government produced a green paper called ‘Reducing Reoffending Through Skills and Employment’ and no doubt we will see such schemes grow.
