Many of us think about employing on release as charitable: giving back to society, enabling social value, “doing our bit”......but doing this overlooks how much these workers have to give in return.

Last month, as part of #Yorkshire5in5, we supported the team at Hatch Digital to carry out 60 structured skills surveys across 5 prisons. You might be surprised at what they found.

An extensive range of experience across sectors, some highly specialised, including science, IT, engineering, healthcare and construction.An impressive range of transferable skills including leadership, organisational, problem-solving and communication skills.

All this, plus these people are prepared to work hard and succeed. They are looking for a sense of purpose and have so much to offer a potential employer – a good number are already excelling in roles and responsibilities taken on during their sentence.

Yet only 31.1% of prison leavers secure a job within 6 months of release. The figure is going up (slowly but surely) but it's still a long way off where it should be.

How do we get this number up?

How do we reduce the rate of reoffending?

How do we reintegrate prison leavers into our community and into our workforce?

Find out more about how the Hatch team got on over on LinkedIn.