Consult a Criminal

Having identified a gap in the employment market for the on-boarding and management of people with a criminal record in organisations Lloyd Criminal Consulting Co works in the space between employers and ex-prisoners and provides best-practice support, education, and training on how to engage and work with people impacted by the Criminal Justice System, and other marginalised populations.

Lloyd Criminal Consulting Co was founded as a direct result of my lived experience in the Criminal Justice System and my personal fight against a 4-year prison sentence becoming a life sentence. Out of my own experience, it became obvious to me that the current processes, instruments of measurement (such as risk assessments/capacity to work assessments etc) for people involved in the criminal justice system are unhelpful and counter-productive at best, and provide few viable supports or real-life solutions for incarcerated people upon exiting prison.

While in the midst of a burgeoning Real Estate career I decided that I could no longer walk past the injustice I saw in the supposed re-integration of inmates back into society and decided a career change was necessary. As I stepped into the Community Services Sector though, I started to experience more fully the inhibiting factors of my own past, the long shadow of the past coming to bear on my emerging future in ways that frustrated and alarmed me. I was given a role that I will always be grateful for - housing homeless people in Community Housing organisation Bridge Housing and went on to work in a number of Men’s Rehabilitation and Post-Release Services, but as my time in the Community sector evolved, it would reveal ever more injustices and systemic failures that I felt determined to do something about.

I studied further so that I would be in a better position to influence the very systems and structures I, and many others were caught in, studying Community Services, Gestalt Therapy and Systemic Constellations and doing my own personal work in Bowen Systems Theory. In only having really scratched the surface of how systems work, I felt I had experienced an awakening, and developed so much more perspective on how people get stuck, the multiplicity of systemic forces that hold their stuckness in place and what might be required to free them a little. These knowledges led to the birth of Lloyd Criminal Consulting Co, our underpinning philosophy is that “A community problem requires a community solution.”

For me, this isn’t just about improving that environment of prisons anymore, though that was the beginning point that my vision sprang from. It is about working to implement pathways and frameworks that will lead to greater participation in grassroots level communities, firstly for myself, and then for all marginalised others. It’s about acknowledging that if I am not doing something to move away from the current societal trajectory towards disconnection and exclusion, which so often lands at the pointy end in the most underprivileged, under-resourced, traumatised and thus disconnected amongst us being incarcerated (be it in prisons or mental health institutions), rather than adequately treated and re-homed (literally and metaphorically) within their bodies, minds, communities and society at large, then I am actually part of the problem.

So “Am I part of the problem or part of the solution”? I assess this for myself in terms of whether I am honouring my personal responsibility to

• Speak up and give myself and my experience a voice, in the hope that one day those who are still voiceless will one day be resourced to speak, and that others will listen.
• Lean into connection, exercising the principles of inclusion, listening to and sitting with diversity and difference.
• Integrate science’s many rigorous contributions to our understanding of disconnection and understand the very real barriers to connection and community for underprivileged, marginalised and traumatised individuals.
• Advocate for and be a part of the development and application of familial, social and organisational policies that support versus punish, scaffold rather than break down, include rather than exclude.
• See individual ‘failures’ as systemic failures, and individual struggle as a social problem being expressed by an individual, rather than a moral problem being in the individual.

It is my hope that Lloyd Criminal Consulting will support and inspire other individuals, businesses and organisations to take up the invitation to be part of the solution at a level that is viable, manageable, sustainable and life/organisation-enhancing for them. Say hello to someone you wouldn’t usually make eye contact with, employ someone with a disability or a criminal record, involve someone in your organisation who is vulnerable to discrimination or a lack of privilege, get up-skilled in how best to include, connect with and manage different populations in your business or organisation.

It is an illusion that any of us give up anything to do this! We only gain. Moving in this direction is value-adding! Individuals, families, businesses, organisations and communities gain enormously from the social capital of inclusion, outstretching a hand and educating themselves on more systemic approaches to rehabilitation, mental health and community safety. It seems to me that it is not actually the incarcerated who need to be rehabilitated. It is the systems around those people.

Every small individual or organisational effort in this direction goes a long way towards strengthening the fabric of our society and creating safer, more robust communities for us all to live in.

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