Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Veteran Offenders - The Change Partnership

Alabare' <"http://www.alabare.co.uk/supportforex-servicepers"> are providing excellent support to homeless veterans. As part of a new partnership with Life Change UK, The Langley House Trust and Exeter City YMCA, this work will soon be expanded to provide an alternative to custody and probation for veteran offenders, reducing re-offending and enabling veterans to regain the pride they once had!!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

There is an urgent need to promote support to our Veterans who ate facing challenges in the Criminal Justice System.
Despite numerous attempts to both identify Veterans and provide practical support with resettlement, all too often they are not identified at pre sentence stage whilst facing court proceedings.
The recently established offender Rehabilitation Act posted into statue the requirement for all three sectors to work in p partnership to reduce recidivism.
Our Armed Forces are frequently engaging in combat, placing individuals who have made the ultimate sacrifice against challenges that have profound psychological, anatomical sobs physiological egrets upon the rest of their lives. Affecting not only then bit their families too. All require and deserve high level support.
It has long been accepted in our culture that mental health victims should have parity with regards to their rehabilitation with individuals suffering from physical health conditions.
It is therefore a serious concern that Veterans who are within the Criminal justice system in part of in whole due to criminologic needs arising from combat stress are not receiving support when recent changes in legislation have created the framework for effective resettlement.
The question arises what would effective resettlement support be? In short, for those Veterans who are serving medium to lengthy community or custodial sentences it would address their needs following purposeful assessment. Care plans would have to be developed akin to those in any other high quality provision where risk, education, health, employment, accommodation factors etc all have comprehensive care pathways.
There is clear and substantial evidence that experiential learning environments promote outcomes. Therefore, Veterans should be supported via care pathways from within a residential provision enhancing experiential learning.
The care pathways, arising from comprehensive partnership working between HMPS Offender Managers, CARAT Education and Healthcare Teams would be a fine example.
The VCP offers this and so much more.

Unknown said...

Our Veterans deserve and require effective resettlement support. For those who have been prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf, if combat stress has led to them facing challenges in the CJS. the least we must do is apply basic case management principles of quality assessment and the establishment of care pathways within a learning environment facilitating experiential training.
The VCP provides this opportunity.
Currently not only are Veterans not receiving this support they are not being identified at either pre or post sentence stage.
All of this despite fairly recent legislation in the form of ORA. where partnerships and creative resettlement plans have been encouraged.