When I saw the advert for the job at User Voice I couldn’t believe it; it was looking for someone with lived experience who wanted to help other people in the criminal justice system and I thought, that’s me!

I sent in an application and someone called me from User Voice and the first thing he said to me was he’d been charged with the same offence as me! Too many times I had gone for jobs not wanting to talk about what happened to me; and to find a job where what I’d been through was the basis for the job, was huge.
I was sent to prison in 2019 and I came from a corporate background so it was a big shock to the system. The biggest thing I learned was how lucky I was; how fortunate in my own personal circumstances, because I met people who came from traumatised backgrounds.

One lady was being released and I said I hope we never meet again, in the nicest possible way; and she said she would be back in three weeks. She said “I’ve got £46 that the prison have given me; I’ve lost my flat and I have nowhere to live, so I’ll be back”. I was shocked by her acceptance of the situation. She came back three times while I was on my sentence.

That made me think that something needed to change for people leaving prison; and that’s what led me to User Voice.

It was time to change my life.

What it really made me want to do is make a more tangible difference; I came out of prison and decided I wanted to completely change my life. It was 2020 – I came out of one lockdown straight into another.

I had a bit of a mental breakdown trying to cope with real life again; but I went to work in a kitchen washing pots for a resort that catered for disabled people.

Finding User Voice has helped me navigate to something I really want to do; I know that I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to help people in the criminal justice system. It’s really fulfilling knowing I can help people who are on the journey I was on.

I go into prisons; I engage with prisoners; we talk about what the problems are and then the Council and I meet once a week and discuss solutions to those problems. We have engagement forms and ask people to write down what is their biggest issue. If everyone says healthcare is the biggest issue, then as a Council that is the problem we want to resolve.

I use my experience of management to create solutions; I was a problem solver and I’m still a problem solver!

My first thought when I went into a male prison was, wow! Men’s prison is a whole different ball game to women’s. This prison I was in was made up houses in gardens and I very quickly made it to the open section of the prison.

To go to a prison where men are locked up for hours on end was a complete shock to the system. I went onto one of the wings and there were 80 men all out and it was so noisy; it felt very intense; the atmosphere was shocking.

When I walked into my second prison, nobody knew who User Voice was; I raised the profile by walking around the wings and talking to the prisoners.

When I first went on and said “Hiya I’m Katie and I’m trying to recruit to User Voice” I got no response. The next week I changed my tactic and said, “Hiya I’m Katie and I’ve been to prison” and everybody wanted to talk to me.

At my first Council meeting there were just two people and now there are 13 people, one person from every wing and I’ve got a waiting list of 20 people.

There were loads of lessons I learned. On my first visit a prisoner asked if I worked for OMU and I realised I looked like staff because I was dressed like them. Now, I wear a User Voice T-shirt and trainers; it’s about making yourself approachable.

As a Council we don’t deal with personal problems, we look at things that aren’t working well for lots of people.

Healthcare is one example I went through a list of 63 people who had healthcare issues outstanding for over five days. The healthcare representative said she would go through the list and she also committed to attend Council once a month. That list now has just three issues on it and the Head of Healthcare comes to our meeting every four weeks.

Staff are now using the Council for recruitment training for new healthcare members of staff; Council members’ role is to play challenging prisoners, and they love it, it’s their favourite job!

In the first quarter, healthcare was the biggest complaint; in the third quarter, healthcare is in the ‘what’s working well’ category. The Head of Mental Healthcare is one of our biggest champions.

My aim in life is to get what’s not working onto the what’s working well list.
I’m doing violence reduction now and it’s making waves. I was at one of my prisons yesterday and got on the train which takes an hour and I just smiled all the way home. To hear the Deputy Director say, “the passion your Council has in wanting to reduce violence across the estate is amazing” – job done!

The criminal justice system isn’t working. If it worked, people would only go to prison once. I believe changes are needed to other systems first, like social services, the care system, the education system. Until you have better systems while people are young you are not going to resolve the problem of people going to prison when they are older.

I also think that if you took out all the people who need to be in hospital because of mental health or physical issues, you would dramatically reduce the prison population.

The housing system is one of the biggest reasons people are recalled to prison. I went with someone to take a friend from prison into an approved premises and when we left her, the person I was with broke down and cried. This house was in a state of disrepair and the girl sharing the house was obviously taking drugs; that meant my friend who had come off drugs three months before, was going to end up taking drugs again. And she did, she went back to prison.

Probation is broken. Prisons are overcrowded because of the high number of recalls by probation. Probation is so overworked, and the staff turnover is so high, they can’t properly apply themselves to the job and keep people out of prison. It’s not a reflection on staff; it is a difficult job and we need many more probation officers on a higher salary and with more training.

We can’t talk about overcrowding without sorting out probation. And until we all want to help people and really address all the problems, prisons will be overcrowded.

The criminal justice system needs rapid reform; and it needs to engage more staff with lived experience because we know what the problems are.

Katie Woodfinden