Introduction

The term ‘mentoring’, rather surprisingly, does not appear in the Corston Report but, as the quotation above indicates, it would seem to be compatible with the aims and ethos of that report. In the period since its publication, mentoring has had an increasingly high profile in both statutory and voluntary sector work with women in prison and those newly released in the community. Yet for all its commonsensical ‘feelgood’ benefits, it has been subject to very little evaluation. In this chapter we examine some of the positive and negative features of mentoring programmes for women who have experienced imprisonment.

Our original intention was to base this chapter on the results of our current research, in which we are evaluating a mentoring programme for young women released from prison. The programme is run by a voluntary sector organisation and includes both peer mentors (recruited in prison) and community-based volunteer mentors. In the event, the programme has faced a number of challenges – many of which reflect prevalent obstacles that have been identified in the literature on mentoring, both generally and in criminal justice settings in particular. Consequently, our data collection has proceeded at a slower pace than we had anticipated. We decided, therefore, to change direction and to write what might be termed ‘an illustrated literature review’. The core of the chapter is a literature review but, wherever appropriate, we have illustrated the review with data from our interviews with volunteer and peer mentors and a case study constructed from mentee files. We make no claims for this data, other than that they reinforce both the opportunities and the challenges of mentoring already highlighted in the research of others.

What is mentoring in the criminal justice context?