Holding the key, podcast episode 6: Bishop Rachel talks to Edwina Grosvenor

Published: Tuesday October 22, 2024

The Anglican Bishop for HM Prisons, the Right Revd Rachel Treweek, in conversation with Edwina Grosvenor, a philanthropist and criminologist who has worked in and around the prison system in England and Wales for 25 years.

In this sixth podcast in the series of ‘Holding the Key: Unlocking the door to doing prison differently’, Edwina tells us, “If we are looking to bring people out [of prison], let’s look at the people who shouldn’t be there in the first place. Lots of women who are in prison in the female estate; they really don’t pose a risk to the public, most of them pose a risk to themselves.”

Talking about the vision for Hope Street, a secure accommodation project for women leaving prison, she said “I sat down with a team of people to see if we could design the gold-standard, replicable, scalable-model, for women to be able to be sentenced to the community, that would work with probation, the police, the judiciary, children’s services, drug and alcohol services. We thought if you really mapped all that – we should see if we could possibly create it. So we did.”

Bishop Rachel responds, “There should be an equivalent for Hope Street in every county.”

 

 

 

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“Is our prison system feeding the homelessness crisis, is it feeding the mental health crisis? Is it feeding all of these crises? And it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than… yes it is. ”

Talking about the lack of basic accommodation facilities available, Edwina says “If magistrates cannot give people community sentences, then they get up-tariffed to prison; which feeds into the inflation in sentencing and the overcrowding crises that we’ve seen. Magistrates need accommodation alternatives in order to sentence appropriately, so if those places don’t exist, it strikes me that what we need to do is put them there.”

“We designed the building, it’s now operational with the staff in it. We have beds for 24 women and their children, but then crucially we have a housing pathway, so they have step-down accommodation so they can move on and start living more independently.”

Bishop Rachel responds, “It’s fantastic to see how you’ve inhabited that vision. It’s also utterly fulfilling everything we’ve been saying. Not only do we think it’s a good idea, but the evidence supports that. And you’ve made that happen -if you hadn’t pushed for this and are now producing more evidence to show that it works, this would not have happened.”

 

 

About the series

Bishop Rachel is currently recording a series of Podcasts called –  ‘Holding the key: A series of conversations to unlock the door to doing prison differently’. Bishop Rachel will be joined by influencers and change-makers as they ask the questions – what is prison really for and more importantly what could the alternatives be?

Find out more about the series →
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