One of the ideas that has stayed with me throughout my career is a very simple one: no one is just one thing.
“As vulnerable and dependent creatures, human beings depend on acknowledgement (recognition) and justice as a condition of human flourishing.”
— Alison Liebling
In criminal justice, it can sometimes be difficult to hold on to a simple truth: we are people working with people. We may work with individuals who have caused significant harm, whose behaviour is complex or deeply entrenched, and we have clear responsibilities around risk, accountability and public protection. None of that changes, but neither does their humanity.
Alison Liebling’s work on prisons has repeatedly returned to humanity and personhood: the idea that a person is not static, fixed or simply the sum of what they have done. That matters enormously for rehabilitation because change asks a great deal of people. We may be asking somebody, after decades of living or surviving in a particular way, to behave differently, relate differently and begin to see themselves differently.
Those ways of being do not appear overnight. How we understand ourselves and the world develops through our relationships, environments and experiences. For some people in contact with criminal justice, those experiences may include trauma, poverty, exclusion, care, poor mental health, substance use or repeated contact with services. None of this explains away offending or removes responsibility, but it gives us a fuller picture of the person we are asking to change.
By the time somebody reaches prison or probation, criminal justice may be one of the last in a long line of systems they have encountered. Those interactions will have helped shape what they believe about services, authority, other people and, importantly, themselves. Yet we are often expected to manage risk, support rehabilitation and create opportunities for change with people who, based on previous experience, may have very little reason to believe that change is possible. It is within that complexity that lived experience becomes particularly valuable.
For me, lived experience is not about replacing professional expertise or suggesting that somebody who has experienced the criminal justice system automatically knows how to fix it. It recognises a form of knowledge that policy, research, performance data and professional expertise cannot provide in quite the same way: an understanding of how our systems are actually experienced by the people moving through them. We can know that a service exists without knowing whether somebody could access it; know that an intervention was delivered without understanding why somebody disengaged; and design something that makes operational sense while creating a barrier we had not considered. Equally, lived experience can help us understand what built trust, what made somebody stay and what helped a different future begin to feel possible.
Over recent years, His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) has been grappling with precisely this challenge: how do we move beyond asking people what they think and use that knowledge systematically to improve policy, services and rehabilitation? This article explores that journey: why lived experience is so important, what HMPPS has learned about embedding it within a large correctional system and, most notably, what it takes to translate the principle into everyday practice.
Lived Experience is Not New
There is a temptation to talk about lived experience as though it is a new development in criminal justice. The terminology may be new, and the structures we now build around it certainly are, but the underlying idea has a much longer history.
That is particularly fitting when we consider the origins of probation in England and Wales. Before there was a statutory Probation Service, police court missionaries were already working alongside the courts, combining supervision with practical and relational support. When probation was formally established through the Probation of Offenders Act 1907, part of the probation officer’s duty was captured in three words still familiar today: “advise, assist, and befriend.”
Probation has changed enormously since then, developing more sophisticated approaches to risk, public protection, evidence and accountability. Those developments have changed practice, but the original principle is worth remembering: supportive human relationships have always been part of the work of change (Probation of Offenders Act 1907, s.4(d)).
The same is true of lived experience. Gill Buck and colleagues have traced forms of lived-experience-led activity in criminal justice back through the nineteenth century, including people in custody supporting one another, acting as caregivers, challenging poor conditions and contributing to institutional life. People affected by criminal justice have never simply been passive recipients of professional intervention. What has changed is how formally that knowledge has been recognised and used (Buck et al., 2026).
Over recent decades we have seen a progression from informal peer support, to structured peer mentoring, service-user forums, consultation, co-production and increasingly to lived experience contributing to service design, policy, leadership and organisational learning. Work by Gill Buck, Paula Harriott and others has helped document the breadth of that contribution (Buck et al., 2020; Buck, Tomczak & Quinn, 2022).
Stories humanise systems and help us understand what services can feel like from the other side. Somebody who has navigated the criminal justice system brings more than their story; they may understand where services connect, where they fail to connect, what created trust, what became a barrier and why something that appeared reasonable on paper did not work in practice. Shadd Maruna’s work on desistance is important here because it highlights identity, narrative, agency and the possibility of seeing oneself differently (Maruna, 2001).
The Five W’s and How
One of the questions I am asked most often is:
What does lived experience actually add?
Part of the answer is understanding that lived experience is not one thing. Someone may bring their own personal story; someone else may have developed a lived experience specialism through working with others; and a professional may also bring lived experience alongside their professional expertise. All are valuable, but they bring something different.
The important thing is matching the right kind of lived experience to the right conversation. One person’s story should not be expected to represent everybody, just as professionalised lived experience should not become the only voice we hear.
When I explain the value of lived experience, I often use the Five W’s and How:
- Who — helps us understand the person beyond the offence, risk category or presenting need: their identity, relationships, strengths, fears and what is important to them.
- What — tells us what actually happened and how a service, intervention or decision was experienced, rather than only what we intended to happen.
- Where — helps us identify where things worked, where they broke down and where people can fall between organisational or service boundaries.
- When — helps us understand timing and sequence. Something can be the right intervention but offered at the wrong point, when somebody is overwhelmed, not ready or dealing with more immediate needs.
- Why — helps us understand the context behind behaviour, engagement or disengagement. Understanding why does not excuse behaviour; it helps us respond to it more effectively.
- How — for me, this is one of the most important contributions lived experience can make. Organisations are often good at describing what people need to achieve: attend, engage, complete an intervention, build skills, change behaviour, find stability. Knowing what someone needs to do is not the same as knowing how they can get there.
Lived experience can help us understand what built trust, what removed a barrier, what made change feel possible and what helped somebody navigate a system that had previously felt out of reach.
From Engagement to an Organisational Approach
When HMPPS began developing a more deliberate approach to lived experience, we were not starting from nothing. Across prisons and probation there were forums, engagement days, consultation exercises, peer-led activity and some excellent local practice. The problem was inconsistency. Too often it depended on individual staff, and some of our own recruitment, vetting, access and governance processes made meaningful involvement difficult to implement.
HMPPS wanted to move beyond occasionally inviting lived experience into the organisation and instead make it part of how HMPPS worked: in people’s own care and sentence, in service design, in our workforce and in policy and strategy. Before changing individual processes, we first needed a shared organisational approach. At the heart of that was a balance between compliance and enablement.
Our Approach Was Built Around Five Areas
- Lived Experience Voice – Creating meaningful opportunities to understand what people were actually experiencing. We wanted to know what happened, where things went wrong, why somebody disengaged, what had happened before they reached us and what might help them move forward.
Behind an offence is usually a much longer story. Adversity, relationships, trauma, poverty, poor mental health, substance use or previous contact with services may all form part of that picture. None makes offending inevitable or removes responsibility, but context is essential if we are serious about reducing future offending.
It also matters operationally. We spend significant public money on services and interventions. If the people they are intended for cannot access them, understand them, trust them or engage with them, we need to know why. In that sense, lived experience becomes a source of operational intelligence.
- Information, Access and Support – People in prison and on probation are expected to navigate rules, appointments, licence conditions, sentence plans, referrals and consequences, often expressed in language that is completely familiar to us and unfamiliar to them.
I have always felt strongly that we cannot reasonably expect somebody to do what we have not enabled. Procedural justice helps explain why this is important. People’s experience of authority is shaped not only by the outcome of a decision, but by whether they feel heard, respected, treated fairly and able to understand what is happening (Tyler, 2006; Wakeling, 2023).
Lived experience gives us a way of testing that from the other side. A letter can be technically correct and still be almost impossible to understand. So, this strand was about making written and verbal communication genuinely support understanding, participation and procedural fairness.
- Service and Care Decisions – I grew up in care and still remember sitting in rooms while adults talked about me and made decisions about my life, sometimes while I was sitting right there. I know many of them were trying to help, but that did not change how it felt to have things happen around me rather than with me. Criminal justice can reproduce the same dynamic. We assess people, write plans, discuss risks and needs and decide what should happen next, and then sometimes wonder why they feel little ownership of the plan.
Psychological reactance offers one explanation for why people may resist when autonomy feels threatened (Brehm, 1966), while self-determination theory reminds us of the importance of autonomy, competence and relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Neither means that everything in criminal justice can or should be optional. They do suggest that where participation and choice are possible, they matter.
In practical terms, this means involving people in decisions wherever possible, explaining limits clearly where choice is not available, and recognising that ownership of a plan is often built through participation rather than compliance alone.
Long-term change can involve identity, agency and beginning to imagine a different future. Maruna’s work has been particularly influential in showing how people reconstruct the stories they tell about themselves. Relationships can support that process. People often tell us about the officer, probation practitioner or other professional who saw something in them, treated them with respect and believed they could become more.
People learn not only through instruction, but by observing behaviour modelled around them (Bandura, 1977). I tend to put it much more simply: if we want people to do different, at some point they need to experience different.
- Recruitment and Employment – We asked whether we were prepared to demonstrate our belief in rehabilitation ourselves. It is one thing to encourage employers to give people with convictions opportunities. It is another to examine whether our own recruitment and vetting systems allow those opportunities to exist.
This was never about removing security, safeguarding or proportionate risk assessment. The challenge was whether we could hold those responsibilities alongside rehabilitation rather than automatically seeing them as incompatible. It also meant looking beyond recruitment. How would colleagues respond? Would managers know how to support people with lived experience? Would their history continue to define them? Would there be genuine opportunities to progress?
Change is not only about seeing yourself differently; it can also depend on that changed identity being recognised by others. If an organisation says it believes people can change but continues to treat the past as a permanent identity, there is an obvious contradiction.
- Policy and Strategy – If lived experience only happens in forums or individual projects, the insight can disappear when the activity ends. We needed ways of connecting what people told us, identifying patterns and making sure that insight could influence service design and policy.
This is where the distinction between lived experience as story and lived experience as knowledge becomes important. Individual stories are crucial, but no organisation should make policy on the basis of one story alone. Lived experience needs to sit alongside research, professional expertise, operational evidence, performance information and risk data. Each tells us something different. For HMPPS, the ambition was to create a clearer line between people’s experiences and the decisions that shape the system they experience.
From Strategy to Practice: Operationalising Lived Experience
A strategy is only useful if it changes something in practice. Once we had agreed what lived experience should mean for HMPPS, the harder work was creating the structures to make it possible. It could not depend on one team, one enthusiastic member of staff or an occasional engagement event. It needed to reach service delivery, workforce practice, evidence, governance and improvement.
One example is Engaging People on Probation (EPOP), developed as a national framework for participation and lived experience across probation. Its principle of being nationally led, regionally owned and locally delivered gives consistency without assuming every community or region needs the same response. Alongside opportunities for people on probation to influence services sit governance, workforce development, feedback mechanisms and an Engagement Maturity Model that helps regions identify strengths and areas for development.
One of the easiest traps in lived experience work is to measure activity rather than impact. We can count forums, consultations and attendees. The harder and more useful question is:
What happened because people were involved?
Peer mentoring provides another example. People with direct experience of criminal justice can bring credibility, practical understanding and visible evidence that a different future is possible. Bandura’s work on observational learning helps explain why relatable role models can be powerful: people learn not only through what they are told, but through what they see modelled around them (Bandura, 1977; Buck, 2020).
But lived experience alone does not make someone a mentor. Good peer support still requires recruitment, training, supervision, boundaries and safeguarding. If we genuinely value lived experience, we also have a responsibility to support the people using it.
In custody, Prisoner Councils provide another route for people to raise collective concerns and contribute to prison life, creating a more ongoing relationship between lived experience and decision-making rather than relying solely on one-off consultation.
We also needed to think differently about evidence. Sources such as Your Views Matter and Measuring the Quality of Prison Life (MQPL) allow us to look across individual experiences and identify wider patterns around relationships, safety, respect and legitimacy (Liebling & Arnold, 2004).
The aim is not to turn people’s experiences into another sterile dataset. It is to keep their richness while structuring them enough for the organisation to learn. A single story may alert us to something; connected stories, feedback, research and operational evidence help us understand whether it is systemic.
The same thinking is beginning to extend into quality assurance, complaints and service improvement. Large organisations are often very good at asking whether the correct process was followed. Lived experience can add another question:
What was it actually like to be on the receiving end of that process?
Recruitment has required some of the most fundamental change. Routes such as Going Forward into Employment, lived-experience recruitment pathways and risk-assessed approaches to vetting have helped create opportunities for people with direct experience of prison, probation or the wider criminal justice system to contribute directly to the workforce while maintaining HMPPS’s security and safeguarding responsibilities (Cabinet Office, 2024; Ministry of Justice & HM Prison and Probation Service, 2026).
If we value lived experience as a form of expertise, people also need opportunities to develop, progress and lead. Otherwise we risk recruiting somebody because of their past and then permanently defining them by it.
And none of this works without culture. Policies and frameworks can make lived experience possible, but they cannot make people value it. That requires leadership, learning, visibility and sometimes difficult conversations about stigma and assumptions. Operationalising lived experience, is not about creating a collection of lived experience projects. It is about changing how an organisation thinks about knowledge and who gets to contribute to it.
It means somebody in prison having a meaningful voice in the environment in which they live. It means a person on probation helping shape the service they receive. It means a peer using their experience to support someone a few steps behind. It means a colleague being valued for their professional contribution as well as their lived experience. And it means policy being informed not only by what a system intends to happen, but by what people tell us actually happens when they experience it.
Tassie Ghalini
National Lived Experience Lead
HM Prison & Probation Service
References available upon request.
