Outside Chance currently presents two workshops - 'A Career In Crime?' and 'That'll Never Happen To Me!' - in three young offender units - HM YOIs Feltham, Huntercombe and Reading.

 

Our high impact Powerpoint workshops take the inmates through how they were probably introduced into crime, a path which takes a very familiar route, how easily they will be caught again should they choose to reoffend on release, the effect of their offending on family, partners, friends and, in time, their children. We also explain, using their own case studies, how little money they have actually made from crime compared to the time they have spent in detention.  The difficulties they might face in the job market, education, training, housing problems and relationships.  We close with practical demonstrations of anti-crime technology.

The 'wagging finger' approach simply does not work with young people in general.  We tend to focus on the complete futility of continuing in a field where inmates have already proved, not only to society but also to themselves, that by their detention, they are clearly out of their depths.  Continued offending will, invariably, be met with longer and longer prison sentences, often for relatively petty crimes.  By homing in on the inmates' own thought processes, they will often bring themselves to the conclusion that they have no future in crime, a view they express consistently in their post-workshop Evaluation Forms and which is also borne out by the statistic that, according to Research Development Statistics, a division of The Home Office, the 'peak age' for offending in the UK is currently 19 years.  Our aim is to short circuit that process by diverting them from repeat offending at the earliest possible stage. 

In independent studies by Research Development Statistics, who have access to all court and prison movements across the United Kingdom, the outputs of Outside Chance showed an encouraging reduction in post-release recidivism over two years in the young men who pass through our sessions of 62% compared to the national average of 76%, just over 3 in 4, in 18-21 year old young adults and 74% compared to the national average of 88% in 15-17 year old juveniles. 

'A Career In Crime?' remains the ONLY workshop operating in any UK prison to be publicly endorsed for 5 consecutive years by UNLOCK, The National Association of Reformed Offenders, a record of which we are justifiably proud.

 

'That'll Never Happen To Me!', a sexually transmitted diseases awareness module, was developed at the request of HM YOI Feltham and rolled out to other prison locations due to the relatively high incidence of young adult inmates who were found to have one or more STDs during their induction into detention.