Femi

Network Co-ordinator (Prison Reform Trust), Unlocked assessor and ex-prisoner

A prison officer is integral to anyone’s prison experience. If you ask anyone who’s served time or is serving time, they’ll tell you that a good officer can make all the difference. A bad officer can make all the difference. So, it’s intrinsic, really, to how someone does when they’re going through their sentence.

Getting someone with lived experience, like myself and my colleagues who are also doing the assessments, to take part in the assessment of future prison officers, is exactly the vision of how I see lived experience contributing to a better criminal justice system. You can’t create a better system without having lived experience voices who are positive and balanced, but who are direct and honest as well at the same time. I feel like Unlocked Grads has a lot of trust in us as people with lived experience and just want us to bring that to the table to help to make things better for everyone. So I think it’s extremely important that these voices are integrated, and I think Unlocked are honestly trailblazing with it.

I would say that the best piece of advice I probably could give to Unlocked participants because I’ve never been an officer, is to treat the people they’re working with as humans. Treat them as individuals, as people. Have empathy for them, although I understand the difficulties, but have empathy for them. Because I think if they come with that point of view, they’ll know when to toe the line, they’ll know when to draw a boundary, but they’ll also be able to interact and just talk to people and get to know them. Which has been my experience of Unlocked Grads. They’ve all sort of taken a bit more time to speak to people and I’d want that to continue. I’d want that theme and that vibe to continue through future Unlocked participants.