The main concern of our ongoing research is to investigate how participating in the Makeright project affects and effects inmates. Understanding this will help us improve the project, implement it at a larger scale and help other organisations apply this research to their own initiatives in order to tackle high reoffending rates.

In the past year, through action research, the team of staff and volunteers have continuously reflected on the above question. This has involved informal meetings following every session, journals kept by facilitators and volunteers as part of their practice, as well as formal debrief meetings where key insights were discussed in order to gather feedback and to implement changes in subsequent iterations of the course.

In addition, the project has conducted a series of questionnaires with each cohort:

• RAND
• The Empathy Quotient
• Erika Renedo, on behalf of Makeright, also conducted one-to-one interviews with HMP Thameside inmates  linked to semi-structured interview questions. These interviews are currently being analysed with the Atlas.ti qualitative research software program.

To read the interviews as a data set – please see here. Please note that those asterisked are the ones we found to be most focused on the Makeright project. The rest, despite being asked similar questions, are less focused on Makeright.
Additionally, to read broadly about evidence about factors that influence recidivism – see Transforming Rehabilitation.