With a recent upsurge in news about the criminal justice system, Nacro’s media team have been able to take the opportunity to put forward spokespeople more regularly on national news outlets: BBC, Sky and Channel 4. This has raised our profile, enabling our policy and public affairs work to create a wider impact for the first time and improving working methods between the communications teams in Nacro.
The policy manager has been able to identify an issue affecting many service users: they are regularly released without any support services being put in place, setting them up to fail and often resulting in a relapse into further criminal activity and jail again. This can come about if they are released on a Friday, when support cannot always be put in place in time for the weekend by the service manager.
With additional input from the communications assistant we have developed a campaign to bring together many organisations’ experiences of this issue, including our own, called End Friday releases, with the aim of influencing a change of government policy. The launch, on Twitter and through partner organisations’ social media channels, engaged a large number of organisations and professionals and set the scene for a number of video case studies as the campaign progresses.