Ms Bernie Grogan:

I am a full-time liaison officer with the City of Dublin YMCA and I work part time on the Care After Prison project, which is a partnership project between the YMCA and the Carmelite community centre. We are based in the south inner city. We found that there is a need presenting itself through our support of temporary accommodation in the local community for community-based information and support services for ex-offenders and their families.

The project was originally set up as a six month pilot project in October 2011 but the need was so great that it was extended and we are hopeful it will run on. We had plans to work with 30 ex-prisoners in a six month period. We were delighted the Chairman, Deputy Stanton, launched our impact report in October. We worked with 280% more people than originally planned. This includes the family members as well as ex-offenders. Primarily, we are an information, support and referral service. We do not want to duplicate the work already in place for service users. Ours is a place of contact, where people can come in for a cup of tea and a chat about where to go next. Housing and social welfare benefit are high on the list of priorities.

It is heartening to see that we are following in the footsteps of what others are doing. At the beginning, we decided to measure impact and examine outcomes. We looked at numbers and the soft and hard outcomes of working with people. These are early days and it is hard to tell what will happen down the line. At the moment we have a 0% reconviction rate for everyone who has interacted with the service in just over a year. Hopefully, with the work we are doing, that success rate will be maintained.

We have a free counselling service and our written submission on international best practice refers to family support as a hugely important part of our service. International research shows that when a family is supporting someone coming out of prison and where there is a family mediation network, the person is more likely to reintegrate into the community and less likely to reoffend. We get many calls from mothers, wives and girlfriends and we arrange free counselling for children when people are taken into custody. There is a major emphasis on family support. Instead of just working with ex-offenders, there is an emphasis on people affected by imprisonment.

Another reason for success, which is in line with international best practice, is that we are piloting a peer support model. We do not have direct State funding or constant streams of funding, although we received some funding from the St. Stephen's Green Trust and the American Ireland Fund and we are lucky enough to have two community employment placements through the Carmelite Community Centre. We are also working with volunteers. The group of people working and volunteering with us includes two ex-prisoners. Their in-depth knowledge of the regime and the system is of huge importance to us. The written submission refers to the peer support model being piloted in Scotland.

It has been a positive start although it depends what way one looks at it because the need for our service exists. Until the end of September, we had worked with over 133 service users. The current figure is over 150. We receive some 20 inquiries every week. We also have active key caseworkers working on care plans, such as the client centred approach. We meet with them and every so often there are phone calls, e-mails and people dropping in for information. There has been a major demand for our free counselling service. We are learning as we go along and we are trying to put these things in place, hoping that the impact report and the work we do will allow us to continue next year. We have been lucky with the local community in that people have referred family members to us. We have worked with the prisons and we have also been invited to speak to prisoners in the pre-release period. Although we have spoken to men so far, we have also been invited to the Dóchas Centre. We tell them about the service and many of them contact their family members who contact us before their release.

With regard to pre-prison preparation, we have been flexible in the pilot phase in seeing where the need exists. Parents and mothers of people awaiting sentences contacted us and we linked up with them and created a support group for those getting ready for prison. We explained the importance of linking in with the integrated sentence management, ISM, system when in prison, taking advantage of educational opportunities and making the most of the sentence. We were lucky enough to be brought into Mountjoy Prison on a tour with two ISM officers showing us the process. It is all about multiagency working, collaborative work and seeing where we can fit in to support ex-offenders reintegrating into the community and their family members.