A Trauma-Informed Perspective from The Reasons Why Foundation.

Introduction: The Long Road to Liberation

When we talk about prison sentences, public attention often focuses on headlines, crime statistics, or the cost to the taxpayer. But little is said about the human cost, not just of offending, but of long-term imprisonment. For those serving 10, 15, 20 years or more, prison becomes a place where time freezes and trauma compounds. And when release finally comes, it is not simply a moment of freedom. It is the beginning of a complex and often overwhelming journey of re-entry into a society that has long since moved on.

As a trauma-informed mentoring and rehabilitation service, we appreciate that working with long-term prisoners requires a different approach. We know that release is not a destination, it is a transition. One that begins long before the prison gates open, and one that requires specific, sensitive, and sustained support.

In this post, I outline what that support looks like, before, during, and after release, if we are serious about rehabilitation, public safety, and the potential of every person to change.

1. Before Release: Healing Begins Behind the Walls

Trauma and the Long Sentence

Long-term imprisonment doesn’t just remove liberty, it fragments identity, erodes autonomy, and disconnects people from relationships and community. Many who serve long sentences come into prison already carrying deep trauma: childhood abuse, neglect, community violence, systemic racism, or loss. And prison, for all its attempts at order, can replicate many of those early traumatic dynamics, unpredictability, surveillance, isolation, and institutional neglect.

Trauma-informed services recognise that long-term prisoners are not blank slates awaiting punishment; they are often individuals whose offending is rooted in complex, unhealed wounds. Before we can expect rehabilitation, we must create environmental conditions that are conducive to healing.

What’s Needed Inside

A trauma-informed approach inside the prison must include:

• Consistent, relational support: Long-term prisoners need access to psychologically informed mentoring or therapy that recognises their need for safety, trust, and control. Continuity matters, healing cannot take place in a revolving door of professionals or tick-box interventions.
• Preparation for release starts early: We must stop seeing resettlement as a “six months before the gate” issue. For someone serving 15 years, the psychological adjustment to freedom can take years. Gradual, scaffolded preparation, through ROTL, therapeutic groups, and practical planning, must begin long before a release date is even set.
• Space for identity reconstruction: Prison reduces people to numbers, roles, or risk levels. Services need to help long-term prisoners reclaim a sense of self beyond the offence. This includes space to explore guilt, shame, grief, and hope, all crucial components of sustainable desistance.
• Inclusion in decision-making: Best practice involves collaboration. Too often, decisions about resettlement, parole, or rehabilitation are made without the person’s input. Empowerment is key to healing.

2. During Release: Navigating the Cliff Edge

The Day of Release: From Institution to Intensity

For many long-term prisoners, the day of release is often paradoxical. It’s anticipated and feared in equal measure. It brings hope, and anxiety. Some describe it as “being reborn without a map.” The world outside has changed. Technology is unfamiliar. Relationships are strained or broken. Autonomy, once a dream, now feels like a burden.

There is also the trauma of the transition itself. After years or decades of routine, regulation, and controlled movement, stepping into the noise, pace, and unpredictability of the outside world can be terrifying. The nervous system, long adapted to institutional life, is suddenly expected to re-regulate overnight.

This is where many resettlement systems fail. Release is treated as a moment of success, not the high-risk, high-needs period it truly is.

What’s Needed at the Gate

• Relational handover: Ideally, the support that begins in prison should continue through the gate. Trauma-informed mentoring that straddles custody and community creates a bridge of safety. This consistent presence can reduce panic, prevent immediate reoffending, and support emotional regulation.
• Psychological first aid: The days and weeks after release can be a sensory and emotional overload. People need space to debrief, feel, cry, rage, and reflect. Resettlement services must be prepared to offer grounding, validation, and containment, not just appointments and forms.
• Practical support is emotional support: Securing ID, housing, and benefits are not “just admin.” For someone recently released, each of these is a potential flashpoint for shame, confusion, or shutdown. An effective support service walks alongside the person, never pushing, rushing, or assuming competence.
• Managing triggers and retraumatisation: The outside world is full of triggers, busy streets, rejection, bureaucracy, and even the sudden lack of structure. Support must help people notice their nervous system’s responses and build tools to regulate and respond.

3. After Release: Sustaining Freedom and Growth

The Long Road of Reintegration

The real test of rehabilitation begins not at release, but in the months and years that follow. This is when long-term prisoners must rebuild relationships, routines, identity, and purpose, often while facing stigma, surveillance, and social exclusion.

For many, this is also when unresolved trauma resurfaces. Without the structured environment of prison, old coping strategies, including substance use, avoidance, aggression, or withdrawal, may return. If not addressed, these can quickly lead to breach, recall, or relapse.

What’s Needed in the Community

• Ongoing therapeutic mentoring: Trauma does not heal on a schedule. Long-term support, rooted in trust, reflection, and shared humanity, is vital. This might mean a mentor who sees someone weekly for 18 months, not 12 weeks. It’s not dependency, it’s what secure attachment looks like for people who may never have known it.
• Support with relationships: Long-term prisoners often return to fractured families or become estranged from loved ones. Parenting adult children, rebuilding partnerships, or navigating loss requires careful, compassionate support. Support services need to make space for grief, guilt, and reconnection.
• Meaningful occupation: Employment is often held up as a success marker. But it’s important to understand that integration into the workforce must be paced. Volunteering, education, peer support, and social connection all matter. The focus must be on purpose and belonging, not just productivity.
• Addressing shame and self-image: Many long-term prisoners carry deep shame, about the offence, the time lost, the impact on others. Without space to process and integrate this, shame becomes toxic. Services must create environments where people feel seen as more than their past.
• Trauma-informed systems, not just services: No matter how compassionate one organisation is, if probation, housing, health and employment systems are cold, chaotic, or punitive, trauma will be reinforced. We need joined-up systems that treat people as whole and complex beings.

4. The Importance of Lived Experience in Supporting Long-Term Prisoners

Those of us who’ve walked this path, who have served long sentences and rebuilt our lives, carry insights that no textbook or theory can teach. A felt sense. Practice is most powerful when it includes the wisdom of those who have survived and grown.

Peer mentors with lived experience provide not just inspiration, but attunement. They can spot deflection, shutdown, or despair not as “non-compliance,” but as understandable human responses to overwhelming circumstances. They can hold space without judgement because they know what it takes.

Trauma-informed services must ensure lived experience is not just included, it is centred. In staffing, strategy, design, and delivery.

5. Barriers to Trauma-Informed Resettlement, And How to Address Them

Despite the evidence, trauma-informed support for long-term prisoners is far from standard. Key barriers include:

• Short-term funding: Effective support takes time. Yet most contracts are time-limited and outcome-driven, forcing services to rush or withdraw too soon. Funders must be educated on trauma timescales.
• Lack of training: Not all resettlement staff understand trauma. Mandatory training, including nervous system regulation, shame, and relational practice, should be built into every role that supports long-term prison leavers.
• Stigma and fear: Long-term prisoners can often be labelled as “high risk.” This label can lead to over-policing, mistrust, and exclusion from opportunities. Effective support challenges this by highlighting strength, resilience, and potential.
• Fragmented systems: Without collaboration between prisons, probation, housing, and health, people fall through the gaps. Integrated care pathways must be developed and trauma-proofed.

6. A Call to Action: Building a Better Future for Long-Term Prison Leavers

The UK justice system is at a crossroads. The number of people serving long sentences is increasing. So too are the mental health needs, rates of recall, and public concern about reoffending.

We cannot solve this through surveillance, control, or performance targets.

What long-term prisoners need is relationship, regulation, and repair.

They need trauma-informed mentors, not just officers. Psychologically safe spaces, not tick-box groups. Opportunities to reconnect with purpose, not just to “behave.”

Most importantly, they need to be seen and heard, not as risks to be managed, but as human beings in the process of change.

At The Reasons Why Foundation, we commit to walking that path alongside them.

And we invite every funder, policymaker, practitioner, and community to do the same.