About the Project:
Life After Prison in Cork
Welcome to our project website, where we want to share the findings from our CLEANSLATE CORK project.
We are a team of persons with criminal convictions in our histories and university researchers who collaborated to explore how accessing education and employment with a criminal record looks like in Cork.
CLEANSLATE CORK was designed to investigate from the perspective of persons with criminal convictions themselves, how these barriers and stigma are experienced as well as how they can be addressed in an Irish context. Through training and accompanying persons with criminal convictions as peer-researchers, CLEANSLATE CORK wanted to address these questions through their own perspectives.
Research Questions
How do persons with criminal records experience their journeys towards employment, training and education specifically in relation to their criminal record?
These were the research questions we sought to explore through this project:
How can we co-produce research with persons affected by policies rather than researching and writing about them?
What types of legal provisions, policies and practical supports are needed in the Irish context to facilitate reintegrative journeys particularly in relation to accessing employment, training and education?
Findings: Peer to Peer Interviews and Biographical Walking Maps
You will see that we ended up doing much more than this during our project. As we conducted 13 in-depth peer-to-peer research interviews with people on their experiences of accessing education and work with a criminal conviction, we realised that we can only understand these experiences in the context of their lives as a whole.
This was also true for our own biographical reflections, which we expanded from the narrow focus of education and employment to thinking about our experiences of life after prison more generally. We have done this by creating biographical walking maps, accompanied by short essays, which we hope you will enjoy.
We have also formulated some policy recommendations as well as our learning from collaborating on a participatory research project such as CLEANSLATE.
The CLEANSLATE project was generously funded by the Irish Research Council New Foundations Scheme 2021/2022.
If you are interested to learn more or are working on something similar, please do get in touch, we look forward to hearing from you.