A few words: from Chief Executive Tony Paine

I was pleased to speak at the national Prison Fellowship conference earlier this month.

Advocates for victims' rights like Victim Support need to have good relationships with advocates for reforming the way we deal with offenders, even though we have different priorities. But as I said to conference delegates, advocacy for prison reform, for example, will not be successful unless it acknowledges victim pain and anger and the need to support victim healing. The question I asked the delegates was "how can you honour the voices of victims as you work to improve the chances that an offender will change?". Much of the social debate on whether we are too 'soft' on crime or need to become 'tougher' on crime arises from a failure to reconcile the impact of the pain and suffering caused by offenders with the fact that when prisons fail to rehabilitate the result is more crime and more victims. Advocates for programmes that support offenders to make different choices need to find ways of making sure that the restitution an offender needs to offer a victim as part of that process is made real and tangible. Of course we should do everything we can to ensure that offenders do not offend again, but prison also has a role in ensuring that actions that deeply and often permanently hurt others are punished. It is, of course, not possible to say that "all victims of crime want...". That would be a glib underestimation of the diversity of victim experience and points of view. But it is possible to say that as we work to improve the criminal justice system, ensuring that victims find safety, healing, restitution and justice needs to be a central part of any advocacy for change.