About

ex-offender.co.uk is a site being developed to highlight the issues of rehabilitation from crime within society.  The focus of the website is to bring together opinion and news as well as information for those in the process or wishing to rehabilitate themselves or others.

Cost of crime within in the UK is an estimated 60 Billion to the UK taxpayer.  It is also estimated that over 70 per cent of crime is committed by repeat offenders.  These estimates make desistance from crime and the rehabilitation of the offender to be the most important issue in terms of crime  and the costs of crime.

If society and the governments wish to reduce crime and most importantly the victims of crime, we must rehabilitate those that persist with crime.  Rehabilitation offers society many benefits, in particular those prospective victims of crime, rehabilitation will make fewer victims.  Any person that commits a crime must be punished.  Nobody is entitled to make life a misery for others, it is society’s duty to pursue and punish those that offend society and individuals within it.

However, there is a plethora of research and opinion that suggests once a criminal is punished, less effort is made to make sure the offender does not commit a crime again.  Punishment does not rehabilitate.  Many criminals were found to possess few social skills in terms of education, employment and stable backgrounds, including relationships and family.  Many criminals come from the poorest from backgrounds, where aspirations are considered the benefit of the privileged few.

To make a safer society, society must make sure social justice prevails, those excluded and without hope must be given the opportunity to change and succeed in life.  Otherwise, society pays for its failure to deliver the right each individual in society is entitled to.  Society pays for this by creating a sub-cultural class, a criminal class, a class of people failed by society.  This website aims to highlight the need to press the government and society for the focus of crime prevention, after punishment must be rehabilitation, the creation of an ex-offender, not a persistent offender.

If you would like to contribute to ex-offender.co.uk or the sister site desistance.info, please send me your thoughts via the contact page.