Leaving custody is often portrayed as a fresh start, a moment of freedom and relief. But for many, that moment is far more complex. Fear, disorientation and isolation can hit harder than expected. That’s why Inside Job exists – to provide practical, through-the-gate support to the people who need it most, when they need it most.
We believe that people with lived experience of the justice system hold the answers, because they’ve had to work it out themselves. That belief shapes everything we do. People with lived experience are represented at every level of our organisation, from our part-time volunteers to our Board of Trustees, informing the design and delivery of our programmes. We’ve seen the power of this approach: people are far more likely to accept help from someone who’s walked in their shoes. Inside Job succeeds because our Recruiters have something external agencies often lack: the trust and respect of their peers.
A better criminal justice system needs fresh, informed thinking. Yet too often, people with lived experience continue to face systemic barriers: outdated vetting processes, tokenism, and a lack of opportunities in leadership. That needs to change.
If we want to build a more effective, compassionate justice system, we must actively listen to the people who know it best. Our Community Consultants, most of whom have been through the system, offer more than advice. They offer understanding, hope and living proof that a future beyond prison is possible.
One of them is Abdul, who joined our Birmingham team in June 2025. Here he reflects on what it really feels like to walk out of prison and face the world again.
Finding purpose in a whirlpool
Leaving prison is a sea of emotion but no single emotion can be signposted to it. People on the outside assume it must be happiness, joy, relief. But when you leave those gates, that’s not what you feel. It’s not elation. It’s not celebration. What you feel is something far more complicated a merging of fear, anxiety, and depression.
What do we expect from a population that, subconsciously, has become dependent on others for the most basic components of human existence? It’s Maslow’s hierarchy turned on its head. Inside, every layer of survival is structured for you, food, water, shelter, routine. It’s handed to you. Over time, you stop thinking about your needs because they’re managed for you. But the moment you’re released, the weight of those responsibilities comes crashing back, and it’s overwhelming.
Few people understand the silent, psychological impact of release, how freedom can feel alien, how society can feel like a foreign country, how family can feel distant and how overstimulated you become from sound and physical touch.
It takes real mental fortitude to reintegrate into a fast-paced and emotionally withdrawn society. Outside, everyone is rushing, as if being busy equals value or importance. But the truth is, no one is really looking at each other. Now you are someone who suddenly has all the time in the world, it’s isolating in a way that’s hard to explain. The feeling of worthlessness accompanies your already crippling low self-esteem.
When employers shut their doors, when society looks at you and sees a risk instead of a human being, survival starts to feel like surrender.
You go from sitting in a cell, staring at a grey ceiling, imagining how you’ll reshape your life how you’ll make your loved ones proud, how you’ll right your wrongs. But the truth is, the wrongs are never really rewritten. That chapter stays open, a bookmark still hanging out, waiting to be revisited. You don’t get to turn the page, not fully. Instead, you fight to stop the story from being reread, relived, replayed. Like a moment stuck on rewind, it drags you back, again and again, no matter how far you think you’ve come.
People don’t go back because they crave crime, they go back because they’ve been conditioned to a place that, for all its pain, offered structure, routine, a sense of place.
You want to do better. You plan to. You step out with the weight of change on your shoulders ready to prove something to yourself, and to the world. But when employers shut their doors, when society looks at you and sees a risk instead of a human being, survival starts to feel like surrender. So many return to prison not out of desire, but out of necessity. Not because they’re broken, but because the world refuses to see them as whole.
This is why reoffending isn’t a mystery. It’s a mirror of society.
People don’t go back because they crave crime, they go back because they’ve been conditioned to a place that, for all its pain, offered structure, routine, a sense of place. Inside, you know who you are. Outside, you’re invisible, judged, shut out.
Reintegration isn’t just about opportunity, it’s about belonging.
And when the only place that ever made you feel like you mattered was a prison cell and fellow prisoners that you have trauma bonded with, what chance do you really have in a world that treats you like a mistake instead of a person?