Building Self-Esteem With Ex-Offenders

We designed a two-week psychological education programme for ex-offenders.

About Nacro

Formerly the National Association For The Care And Resettlement Of Offenders, Nacro is a national social justice charity with more than 50 years’ experience of changing lives, building stronger communities and reducing crime. Nacro educates, supports, advises and speaks out for and with disadvantaged young people and adults. They are passionate about changing lives and in 2017/18, Nacro helped around 32,000 people..

The Challenge

Nacro needed a programme to build the self-belief and self-esteem of ex-offenders recently released from prison.

The charity has many services such as housing, education and resettlement to help people to move on. Nacro also links to many other governmental and charitable organisations who provide practical support and vocational training to help ex-offenders. Often ex-offenders struggle with a sense of worthlessness and feel disempowered. They do not have the confidence to accept the help and opportunities available to them. Without accepting this support they may sadly re-offend.

Nacro needed a partner who could work with them, their clients and their partners to build ex-offenders’ own confidence, belief and esteem.

Our solution

Our approach was to design a two-week psychological education programme for ex-offenders. It helped them to understand their own behaviours, patterns of thinking and emotional responses, particularly when in stressful situations.

The programme consisted of cognitive and behavioural models made accessible and contextualised for the situations participants found themselves on release.

There was significant work done on recognising that people are not simply the sum of their behaviours. Other components of the programme included goal setting and goal realisation.

We worked with participants to develop a series of interpersonal skills including dealing respectfully and confidently with people in authority.

We needed to recognise that ex-offenders had both internal and external barriers to overcome when trying to get back into the community and develop a useful role in society. We, therefore, worked with various charities and governmental partners. These partners provided assistance on debt management, drug and alcohol misuse, mental health services.

Our facilitators needed to build a working alliance with participants. While not providing therapy the facilitators worked in a therapeutically informed way. They acknowledged the sometimes substantial anxieties that these participants experienced. They respected any disclosures and provided the boundaries to keep participants safe.

Participants created their own goals with support from our team and this included accessing many of the services that Nacro and their partners provided. The programme ran over two years at various locations in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire.

The Impact

Participants assessed the programme extremely positively with marked upturns in self-belief and self- confidence. During the programme, many participants started to make use of this to register and apply for many of the services available to them. Also, every participant was able to set personalised goals for themselves.

Nacro reported a significant uptake in the services they supplied to ex-offenders and a willingness to engage in the other training and development programmes they offered to participants. Furthermore, partner organisations such as the DWP experienced an increase in the use of their services.

“Thank you for delivering the amazing sessions for my ING Eagles group. They gave me a great opportunity to reflect and develop myself.”

“I was part of the ELBA group. I’d personally like to thank you for the sessions. The main things I took out of the sessions were the levels of presenting myself and how each level is interpreted. I also feel that the techniques will help to control my stammer where focusing on body language helps me to not focus on the fear of stammering.”

“More importantly, your kind words touched me and gave me a boost when it came to doing the presentation. I also think that you should be incredibly proud of the work you do, as it’s helped me a lot and I know it will help a lot more people in the future.”