‘I came out of prison to nothing. This is the key to getting early release right’

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Leaving prison after eight months behind bars, Aaron White knew he was staring straight back into a life of crime.

Kicked out of his family home at just 16, he had already started smoking cannabis and turned to dealing as a means to get by. But after being caught in an undercover police sting, he found himself in prison at 18 years old, and surrounded by hardened criminals. With nowhere to go and “no support” once he was released, he instead said he used the tricks he had picked up while inside to take his crimes “to a whole different level”.

Mr White spent the next decade of his life in and out of prison, each time released into the same cycle. But for him, everything changed in 2017 when he was arrested at Notting Hill Carnival after police stopped his car and found loaded handguns. He was given his longest sentence yet of six-and-a-half years, and remembers his 12-year-old son crying as he came to visit.

“I used to think I was a bad boy; my ego was through the roof,” Mr White told The Independent. “But that was a game-changer for me. That was when I had the realisation I wasn’t there for the people I needed to be real for.”

When he was released, Mr White’s probation officer pointed him in the direction of a rehabilitation programme called Key4Life. The scheme, which was founded in 2012, uses a unique seven-step programme to work through participants’ underlying trauma, build resilience, and ultimately steer them away from a life of crime.

Mr White managed to get a role as a mentor on the scheme, coaching and supporting other young men behind bars. “I had never worked before, but I put my heart and soul into becoming a mentor,” he said. “I’m trying to make the difference and be the person that I needed when I was younger.”

The impact of Key4Life’s work is stark. According to an independent evaluation in 2018, 47 per cent of all offenders had reoffended one year after leaving prison. For Key4Life participants, it was just 24 per cent.

Government figures show the economic and social costs of reoffending sit at around £18.1bn per year, and high reoffending rates are routinely cited as one of the major barriers to clearing the overcrowded prison estate.

Mr White, now 42, is now one of the key figures behind a study which suggests that schemes like Key4Life could be crucial to the success of the government’s early release scheme. On 1 October, around 700 eligible prisoners left jail under the programme, which aims to combat prison overcrowding in England and Wales.

But Mr White and the study’s authors believe that if the right support isn’t put in place, prisoners are likely to reoffend quickly and return to crowded prisons.

“If you’re just letting prisoners be released onto the streets with no support and no help, you’re setting them up to fail,” Mr White said, adding that with the right support network around them upon release they will “flourish”.

“When you come out of prison and want to change your life, you work 10 times harder than someone who hasn’t been to prison,” he said.

Dr Natasha DuRose is a senior lecturer in criminology at London Metropolitan University and authored the study. She interviewed 46 men who participated in the Key4Life programme at HMP Fosse Way and within the community, and said the scheme allows men to shift how they see themselves “from an offender to someone with something to offer”.

“That can be the first time that anyone has shown them any kind of value,” she said. But she warned there are only “very few” programmes based on rehabilitation across the country.

She said she believes the success of early release depends “less on the release date and more on who is waiting on the other side”.

“Reoffending is estimated to cost about £18bn annually, whereas programmes like Key4Life are a fraction of that cost,” she said. “But they can only reach a couple of hundred men a year.

“We need the expansion of funding for these types of programmes to really help make a difference.”

An HM Prison and Probation Service spokesperson said: “We know those who have turned their lives around can play a vital role in helping others do the same. That’s why we’ve already created opportunities for prison leavers to join our workforce, and we’re drawing on their experience to strengthen staff training and shape rehabilitation programmes.

“We also run a range of schemes to give prisoners the skills and experience they’ll need after release, including work in custody and support finding a job, all of which helps to cut reoffending and keep the public safe.”

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