When we spoke with young men who have been through the justice system and asked what helped, one word kept coming back. Consistency. Someone who shows up whether you are inside or out. Who is still there when you are released. Who does not disappear when you go back in.
“A lot of professionals, they’ll either distance from you when you go to prison or they’ll distance from you when you leave. No-one else really does the full round.”
That kind of presence is rare. HM Inspectorate of Prisons found in 2022 that when a trusted, named relationship did exist between a prisoner and a member of staff, it cut across barriers of suspicion and mistrust in ways that nothing else did. For black prisoners especially, those relationships were the exception. And the organisations providing consistent presence outside prison, specialist, culturally rooted, led by people from the same communities as the young men they support, have been doing so without adequate funding, and without funders like us.
“The place where you’ve been sent to that’s supposed to help rehabilitate you, it doesn’t really do that. It’s almost setting you up to fail. If you don’t have a big support network around you, it’s very easy to slip through and become stuck in that revolving door.”
What we found when we looked closer
According to the Ministry of Justice’s Statistics on Ethnicity and the Criminal Justice System 2022, racially minoritised people make up around 27% of the prison population against 18% of the general population, a disproportion that cuts across communities. Muslims, for instance, make up 18% of the prison population despite representing just 6.5% of the general population, a figure that has risen steadily for a decade. Belief and culture are read as markers of risk within the system, not just ethnicity. For Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, the data is poor because prisons have never recorded their identities reliably. That is itself a form of institutional neglect.
The organisations working closest to all of this have known it for years. What we found, when we looked more closely, is that we had not funded most of them. Several had never heard of us. That’s on us. We had funded criminal justice work broadly, but never targeted this corner of it. Behind those numbers are young men cycling through a system that rarely stays with them.
What the organisations told us
We started listening. We spoke with organisations across England working in this area and what we heard was consistent. Many have learned, through experience, to expect less from funders, and so ask for less. Others described how prison access, hard won over years, can disappear quickly when key relationships break down. And repeatedly, we heard about the cost of short-term funding: staff who leave when contracts end, young men who lose a consistent presence when they need it most.
And yet these organisations understand the young men they support in ways that generic services struggle to replicate, and they have been building that understanding for years on short contracts and thin budgets.
What we are doing about it
The result of that listening is the Equity in Justice Fund.
The £2.6m fund will make 13 grants of £200,000 each, over three to five years, flexible enough to cover running costs, not just project delivery. At least half of the fund is ring-fenced for organisations led by and for the racially minoritised communities they serve, where at least 50% of trustees and staff come from those communities.
Those decisions are deliberate. Short funding cycles are one of the reasons consistent presence is so hard to sustain. An organisation that has to reapply every twelve months cannot promise a young man it will still be there when he needs it. Multi-year, flexible funding does not guarantee that presence, but it removes one of the main reasons it breaks down. If this fund works, the young men these organisations support will have someone who shows up in year three of a grant, not just year one.
What changes when that presence holds over years rather than months is not just stability. A young man starts planning. He thinks about parole not as something happening to him next year but as something he is building toward today. That shift, from managed to agent of your own future, is what consistent, trusted support makes possible.
If you deliver specialist services to racially minoritised young men aged 18 to 25 in contact with the justice system, and have at least 18 months of experience, we want to hear from you. The fund opens on 24 June. Our webinar on 23 June is the place to start. Book a place here.
If your work sits outside this focus, we hope our fund criteria is clear enough to save you the time of applying. The field it targets is specific. These organisations deserve a stronger funding base behind them.
