Looking abroad for solutions

I was an IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection) prisoner, one of thousands given an indeterminate sentence that had no fixed end point, no clear path to release, and no real vision of what rehabilitation was supposed to look like. I got out. Many didn’t, and many still haven't.

The whole IPP experience has not completely left me, although I refused to let it define my ceiling. Since release I have worked in criminal justice reform, advised the Justice Select Committee, mentored IPP prisoners still inside, and founded New Wave Trust, a community organisation supporting young Black men at risk of entering the criminal justice system, or navigating re-entry after prison. I completed my law degree with support from the Longford Trust. And earlier this year, I was awarded a Churchill Fellowship.

I still find it hard to say that without feeling slightly surprised.

The Churchill Fellowship funds UK citizens to travel abroad and learn from the best in their field, then bring those ideas home and turn them into action. I have been awarded a Fellowship to research rehabilitation-focused and restorative justice systems in Norway and New Zealand – two countries approaching justice in ways that feel almost unrecognisable compared to what I know from the UK.

What am I hoping to find? Honestly, I want to understand what it looks like when a justice system believes people can change and builds everything around that belief. Norway’s reoffending rates are among the lowest in the world. That is not an accident. It is a result of deliberate choices about how prisons are designed, how release is managed, and how communities receive people coming home.

New Zealand offers a different but connected perspective. Its approach to restorative justice, shaped significantly by Māori concepts of collective responsibility and healing, asks what justice looks like when it is not just about punishment or even rehabilitation, but about repair. It treats harm as something that ripples through relationships and communities, not just something that sits between an offender and the state. I want to understand how that plays out in practice, how victims, communities, and people who have caused harm are brought into the same room, and what it could teach us about reducing reoffending.

I want to get underneath that. I want to sit with practitioners, people who have been through the system, and policymakers, and understand what the ingredients really are. The point is not to come back and say “Norway and New Zealand are better.” The point is to come back with something usable – recommendations that can be put in front of the people who make decisions here, adapted for the UK context, and pushed into policy. That is what I intend to do. I will be sharing my findings with parliamentarians, with voluntary sector organisations, and with communities that are most affected by how this country chooses to punish and, in my view, too rarely rehabilitate.

I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a system that has given up on you. I also know what it feels like when one person, or one organisation, decides not to. That’s what I am carrying with me as I travel to Norway and New Zealand.

This blog is adapted from a piece originally published on Outside Voices.