Lived experience events persuade employers to rethink their attitudes to giving second chances to former offenders
12 Jun 2025
More employers are understanding that hiring people who have been through the criminal justice system is something worth considering, thanks to the evolving nature of our lived experience events
People who have committed offences emerge from the criminal justice system needing somebody to believe in them, to give them a chance, to give them a job, to give them hope.
That’s the driving principle behind our lived experience events where we are trying to change the hearts and minds of employers and training providers to understand that because you may have committed an offence doesn’t mean you are a bad person.
The events have been running since November 2023 and have developed based on the feedback of those attending.
From the start we decided to invite anybody that might influence some of the issues we are dealing with. This includes employers, senior representatives of the Probation Service, local authorities, specialist rehabilitation charities, police officers and training organisations.
Initially we found that lots of the organisations we invited had reservations about employing people with backgrounds like those of our Commissioned Rehabilitative Services participants.
Then feedback showed that, increasingly, people wanted to hear from more employers who had hired former offenders, so we changed the format.
For instance, we introduced panel sessions for people to ask about the benefits of hiring people who have been through the criminal justice system from businesses such as Greggs and Timpson.
We’ve held events in Newcastle, Middlesbrough, Durham and Sunderland and, with more employers attending each time, numbers are growing of those seeking information to take back to their HR teams about hiring former offenders.
At our next session later this year we want to go a step further and showcase the employment training that goes on inside prisons. Not enough people recognise that skills such as upholstery, joinery, printing, waste management, horticulture, construction, hospitality, professional cookery, facilities management and much more are taught to nationally recognised standards.
The most lasting impact at these events, however, is hearing directly from people who are turning their lives around after coming through the criminal justice system. Each had become a volunteer peer mentor after training at the Ingeus Academy and some have been employed by Ingeus.
We find they are so passionate about their journeys they want to tell people, to prevent others from going down the same path, to share what interventions helped them to turn their lives around and to share the hope that change is possible. We call it a journey of freedom.
We are mindful it’s a big thing to address a room of people they don’t know. We involve everyone in the planning, discuss with them how they might be involved, if or how to share their story and make it clear that right up to the day they are able to change their minds and step aside.
Nearly 20 per cent of our Justice team has lived experience, including one of our speakers who told how she’d had a good career but was a victim of domestic violence, turned to alcohol and then lost her job – a downward spiral that ended with her in court.
It can happen to anyone: it just takes a bad choice that triggers offending. It’s easy for people to see it as a black and white issue and it really isn’t.
Dependency and Recovery Team Manager, Eddie Nicholls, told how one of his team – ‘D’ –makes a huge effort to re-engage any participant who is not showing a positive response to the service.
D encourages them to volunteer for activities that benefit other people. These are instrumental to our participants’ recovery by providing distractions and to help build routine.
Eddie describes D as ‘an amazing asset to the team’ and shows how important lived experience is to services like this. He can relate to our participants on a whole other level. He’s open about his own experiences, which in turn helps participants open up about theirs, and show there is a path to recovery.
As well as encouraging employers to reconsider their views on hiring former offenders, these testimonies have had other outcomes.
An experienced police officer told how it had made him look beyond just the offence a person had committed and try to understand what led up to it.
Several probation officers and others involved in rehabilitation have said hearing such positive outcomes reminds them why they came into their jobs in the first place.
One of our guests from a local authority told us: “It was memorable, moving, and inspiring, a real highlight. I loved the fact it was led by the service users themselves and very much focused on their stories.
“It felt authentic and helped overcome my own misconceptions and, dare I say it, judgements. In that sense, it had a profound effect on me.”
These events strive to bust myths about employing people with lived experience. These are men and women who have made mistakes and genuinely want to change their lives. It’s not a quick fix, we know that, but we’re trying to make people think differently.
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