Welcome to the Members’ section of the Recoop website. This section is for professionals who work with, or are interested in working with, older offenders. If you work in a prison, in the Criminal Justice sector, or for a voluntary sector organisation working in the Criminal Justice arena, you will be able to access our range of specialist resources. These include information, advice and guidance on working with older offenders, training materials and session plans for running group activities.
Please note that the resource library is being built up over time, so do keep checking to find out what new resources have been made available.
Our support resources have been developed with service user consultation and input. The topics and themes have been identified of interest or important to them although this is far from exhaustive! More are continually being developed and uploaded. Session plans have been developed so they can be delivered or facilitated by service users to help share learning, mistakes and experiences within the group as well as developing self esteem, confidence as the facilitator. Please utilise them as you see fit.
Some older offenders will not have even started to contemplate living in the community and still be in denial through fear and anxiety, and having not been successful in getting parole on previous occasions. The Cycle of Change model (Prochaska and DiClemente) is a useful tool to help move service-users around to a point of contemplation and to take responsibility for their actions and goals both inside prison and in the community.
Consider the pace of any sessions being delivered as the cognitive ability of the older population can slow with age. Be prepared to repeat elements and provide notes or summary documents for later reflection. Good practice font size for resources is 14+.
It’s important to carefully manage their expectations and the reality of the difficulties they will face living in the community. They will be at a far greater risk of being socially excluded as they suffer from the restrictions, stigmas and aggravating factors of being offenders. Specific age related support for older offenders is hard to find but important as their needs are different.
If you have any problems downloading the resources you require, please contact us.
