One of the pictures illustrating the Crime and Punishment research cluster pages is of a visit in 2018 that I and Professor Meek made to a Colony 25, a prison on the outskirts of Kharkiv in Ukraine, as part of an evaluation were doing of a prison resettlement project run by a charity called Depaul Ukraine. I have visited the Depaul project in Kharkiv three times now and got to know the Depaul project team well. The city is in the East of Ukraine, close to the Russian border and so is a primary target of the Russian invasion. The Depaul project leader, who I now regard as a friend, sent me a message, in his original halting English, on the first day of the war:
Now I am at the home with my wife. Situation not goog, attack is continuing. We are hearing sound of tank shoot. Attack near our work, where you was. Our staff in the shelter also. Now the air attack.
I am waiting.
I am believe all will be good. Not just now but will be good. We must go through it.[sic]
Normally what I would expect to write about a project of this kind is the results of our evaluation (the project was great), the survey methods we used and perhaps a summary of Ukrainian prison conditions from the international literature. But on this occasion, as a violent page of history is turned , I wanted to say something about the ordinary Ukrainians we met who now shelter in their houses as the tanks roll in.
Depaul Ukraine is a Catholic project. It is not a faith I share and they do not proselytise or restrict their services, but all the staff convey an obvious vocation. The project began working with the street homeless in the city and I spent time with them as they went out on the streets, searching for often elderly homeless people who were sheltering from the cold, providing food and where they could taking them back to their emergency shelters. The shelters started as derelict buildings or warehouses at the railways station, but gradually the team managed to raise a bit of money, beg or borrow second-hand furniture and with their own building skills they made the shelters habitable. I also went with them into hospitals, where homeless people without identification papers were not entitled to medical care, and saw how the Depaul staff nursed, fed and washed their clients there.
The project quickly identified the revolving door between prisons and the streets - a problem familiar to anyone who works with prisons in the UK - and so painstakingly negotiated permission to work with prisoners before they left prison. When the project started in 2016 Ukrainian prisons were based on the old Soviet gulag system, and had a notorious reputation. The United Nations had condemned the use of torture. So the work of the project was not only to meet prisoners' practical needs - for ID, a place to go when they left prison, and a familiar range of financial and social problems - but also to work with prison officials to change the culture of the prisons. As the reputation of the project grew, and wider social and political reform took place, its influence grew too. We went with them as they met government ministers and in 2019 I attended a conference they organised in Odessa ( a city that is also now overrun) for an emerging network of NGOs working in prisons in Ukraine. Anyone who has been to a conference of charities working in prisons in the UK would have felt a home there - and recognised the passion, the disputes between the pragmatists and the idealists, a bit of disorganisation, the partnership working and the political sophistication some delegates showed.
When the COVID-19 pandemic they continued their work. It was not possible for me to visit during this time but I kept in touch. I know it was a struggle for them to obtain masks and other equipment but where they could they visited and when that was not possible, they used shaky internet connections to carry out their work.
It would be wrong to claim too much success for the project but there is no doubt that their work coincided with a real improvement in the treatment and conditions of prisoners in Ukraine. The prison population fell and the United Nations recorded that improvement when they returned to the country in 2019. I saw it for myself.
My point here is not a political one but it is important to me not to lose sight of the individuals affected as war rages. The Depaul project team would fit into any resettlement projects in the UK. They are staying put for now but hundreds of thousands of refugees are on the move. As with refugees from other conflicts I have worked with, they could be our team members. And there will be millions of other Ukrainians who a few days ago were living lives like ours but whose lives have now been torn apart and who will be considering whether to stay or go. I am not going to fundraise here but there are many excellent projects working in Ukraine itself and, here in the UK, with refugees from Ukraine and elsewhere.
Professor Nick Hardwick
