A brand-new destination on Gloucester Road is unlocking the potential of recently released inmates from HMP Bristol. Simon Horsford meets the mind behind The Key Café…
A new café in Bristol is hardly a surprise, but The Key Café on Gloucester Road, which opened its doors recently, is a very different proposition with its mission to offer employment opportunities for people who have been recently released from HMP Bristol. Coffee and croissants with a conscience, if you will.
“It’s all about transition,” says Suzanne Thompson, whose brainchild this was as the founder and CEO of the Restore Trust, an organisation which facilitates ex-offenders’ rehabilitation and community integration via education and employment, but also works with anyone who faces barriers to gaining employment. “With my background in the criminal justice system [Thompson is a former senior probation officer] and my work at Restore, there were recurring themes as regards people leaving prison. We saw that when it came to finding work, it was often difficult to sustain because of a negative self-identity around ‘who is going to employ me’, ‘I’ve got a criminal record’, ‘no up-to-date work history.’ So there are challenges… often we are dealing with what’s going on in their minds and they really felt that stigma in society.”
The answer, says Thompson, was to provide a transitional environment, like they have done in the past at the Restore Trust helping prisoners with training and education before entering, say, a mainstream college, but to translate that to an employment-type setting. “For people leaving prison, there will be a percentage that can find and sustain work, but there’s also a significant number that don’t.”
“We are working with people who have often experienced trauma as children and young people and quite often they haven’t developed the capacity for emotional regulation.” So the concept of The Key Café providing a supportive environment “is exactly what I envisaged,” says Thompson.
Reform, not reoffend
Staff at the Restore Trust work within the prison to identify anyone about to be released who are most likely to make the most of the opportunity. It’s tough coming out of prison, Thompson stresses, “you might be assigned to a probation hostel for a few months and then you’ve got no money and you’re bored and without any structure and it’s so very easy to slip back to your old ways, and friendship groups and other influences and pressures. But [it’s different] if you’ve got a job to go to and [staff] work incredibly hard to prepare them.” That observation is backed up by a previous Ministry of Justice report that suggested offenders who got P45 employment in the year after being released from custody were less likely to re-offend.
The stats and the money involved in maintaining a seemingly ever-increasing prison population are nothing if not sobering. As Thompson points out, “reoffending is costing us £18 billion a year [that covers the economic and social cost, including arresting people etc] – while sending someone to prison is around £53,000 a year and they are often not coming out with the skills to contribute to society.”
And reoffending rates are high. Lord Timpson, the Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Parole, who as the former CEO of the Timpson shoe repair and key cutting group, was known for employing ex-offenders and championing prison reform, last month bemoaned the fact that “38% of adult criminals in England and Wales go on to reoffend within a year of being let out of prison”.
“So,” says Thompson. “We have to do rehabilitation differently and tap into the unlocked potential that exists inside our prison estate.”
Thompson had the idea for the cafe some 10 years ago, but logistics and the inevitable bureaucracy delayed the process. “The high sheriff at the time [Rosalind Kennedy] said, ‘What about the old MoJ building [an old storage facility] in front of HMP Bristol?’ and I thought that would be brilliant idea. We first needed to find the funds to register the charity (The Key – Unlock Potential) and talk to people to show why this is needed and a demand for it.”
And it was another, later, high sheriff, Anthony Brown, who was pivotal in “enabling me to set up and register the charity in 2019. We then had to go through various departments and there were two changes of prison governor as well.” The current deputy governor, Natalie Steadman, a passionate advocate for improving the outcomes for people in the criminal justice system, is on the board of the charity. Crucially, Thompson adds that the ‘key’ was that venture had to be commercial and offer a “a proper working environment”.
Café culture
The result is a spacious, brick-faced space with large arched windows facing on to the street, with a cool, industrial-style interior and a mix of tables and bar stools and a counter laden with croissants, brownies, cakes and flapjacks all baked in the prison kitchen together with with various jams (Jail Jars – also made in the prison – with the strapline ‘Taste the Freedom’). The menu also includes bacon and sausage rolls for breakfast and toasted sandwiches for lunch. Quirkily, there are several beehives in the prison, utilised for making honey (which is also for sale). Bristol chef Tom Green, who was involved in the project creating the menu, and working on behalf of the charity inside HMP Bristol in developing the jam, said working with the prisoners was “an extraordinary experience”, and believes “everyone deserves a second chance.” Look on the walls and you’ll see artworks by prisoners, while The Key Café logo came about as a result of designs submitted in a prison competition.
The café also works in partnership with Lifecycle, the bike repair and retail charity based in the same building, and whose Bikes Beyond Bars project helps prisoners gain maintenance skills and qualifications.
The intention is that the café will at some stage employ around three ex-offenders (about 50% of the workforce) and they will stay there for between three and six months, “we will see how they are getting on and then help them find jobs they want and can sustain. They don’t have to go into catering or hospitality afterwards, they can go to any kind of employment if they wish. So it’ll be a rolling programme and when people move on, a place will become available. Hopefully we are going to be able to change lives.” It’s all about, giving someone structure, confidence and a belief, reiterates Thompson.
Serving success, not time
As if to confirm the point, Brad, who is now trained as a barista at the café and made my flat white, had only been out of prison for a few days after a 15-month stretch, but says the job “has given me an opportunity and structure. Even if 15 months doesn’t sound long to everyone outside, inside it is. When I came out, I was so anxious I was shaking.
“I suffer from anxiety anyway and had that for years. When my sister came to pick me up [from prison], I said to her ‘God, you’re driving fast’ and she said ‘no, I’m doing the speed limit’ and I was tripping up on kerbs because there are no kerbs in prison. It sounds absolutely bonkers, but you don’t realise it until you are in that situation [away from the realities of life on the outside]. But the support you get from the Restore Trust is amazing. [In prison], I made the most of a bad situation and got all my qualifications – level 2 Maths and level 2 English and I just thought I’m going to take the opportunities. I kept myself to myself – you’re doing your own sentence.” A labourer before going into prison, Brad now wants to stay in hospitality. His former cellmate, Ben, who also works at the café, added that working there “gives structure and purpose to my day.”
As to the reaction of the local community to the cafe, Thompson was amazed by the support. “On the day we opened, Radio Bristol did almost like a blind test [we had done local forums] stopping people in the street and every single one was positive, but people have come in and said ‘we really love the ethos’”.
Filling state gaps
At the ribbon-cutting opening, Darren Jones, the MP for Bristol North West, stressed that the Key Cafe was “exactly the type of project that we want to see in all parts of the country and is a classic example of where frankly the state wouldn’t be able to provide something like this. We all know we’ve got challenges in the system and the economy, but this has great example of how partnering with third sector community organisations can really enhance the service we provide but also transform lives. So I really want to take [this] experience and the work you’ve done here to the MoJ and to share it with organisations around the country like yours.”
Rolling out the idea elsewhere is definitely on Thompson’s agenda. Equal praise came from George Ferguson, the former mayor of Bristol, who highlighted the idea of helping people to transition into a job in the future, adding: “I think it connects the local community with prison life and those two things coming together are really important. What is special to Horfield is that the prison is on a high street, so is not forcing hospitality, but is grasping a gift.” Further confirmation of the café’s potential comes from Chris Jennings, Executive Director (South West/South Central) of HM Prison and Probation Service, when he says: “This is a fantastic initiative that will make a positive difference to the lives of men being released from HMP Bristol and that will benefit the local community too.” He added that the HMPPS “cannot achieve all the outcomes it wants on its own” but having partners such as the Restore Trust will help the service innovate and deliver similarly exciting projects.
It’s long been a question as to whether prisons should be about punishment or trying to rehabilitate those who have crossed a line. Twenty-odd years ago, for instance, Norway moved away from a punitive “lock-up” approach and sharply cut reoffending rates. But in Thompson’s view, we have taken the opposite approach, suggesting that, in recent years judges and magistrates, have been given less flexibility in sentencing “with successive governments bowing to public opinion and wanting to be seen as being tough on crime.” The judgements of experienced probation staff are carrying less clout than, say, 15 years ago, she adds, and there is less of a concentration on the causes of crime, while sentencing guidelines have become increasingly punitive.
It’s clear that Thompson is an inspiring and passionate believer in education and employment as a pathway out of poverty and reoffending. And she speaks from experience of the former, “I was the daughter of a Hungarian refugee, bought up in a very poor family in inner city Bristol, and I had to work extremely hard to escape poverty, but a lot of my peers and friends at the time I saw were feeling quite hopeless and getting involved in drugs and crime. So it’s not that simplistic, it’s far more nuanced and unless people have been on that journey they don’t understand [that] in the same way.”
Maybe a visit to The Key Café will change those perceptions but also – over a coffee and some cake – help further an understanding of why such initiatives can help transform lives and lessen the cycle of reoffending.
The Key Café, 246 Gloucester Road, BS7 8NZ (open Tuesday to Saturday 8.30am-4pm) | thekeybristol.com
