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Care

Change

Justice

25 June 2025

4 min read

Four things I’ve learnt from working with prisoners

Here’s why I care about the incarcerated

Daniel Bey

Daniel is the regional director, Asia Pacific, for Prison Fellowship International.

Female prisoners hug their children who have climbed across a table to them.

Prisoners hug their children during a visit.

PFI.org.

It was my mother who first sparked my curiosity about engaging with prisoners. As a volunteer prison counsellor, she held bi-weekly meetings with incarcerated individuals, listening to their stories, struggles, and moments of hope. Over family dinners, she would share the situations these people found themselves in and how counseling was breaking through the emotional walls they had built around themselves.

However, for most of my life, such a prison ministry was never something I considered pursuing – certainly not as my career. I’m a Christian and a verse from the Bible had guided me through life:

“For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink…I was in prison, and you came to visit me.”

The last part of that verse was the one I had often skipped over.

Four years ago, this verse resurfaced in my life and this time, it wouldn’t let go. I was convicted of how I, and much of society, including the church, have often overlooked this desperate need within our communities.

That conviction led me to work at Prison Fellowship International (PFI). I work alongside others who believe in redemption and grace for those the world has forgotten.

PFI is a movement of more than 120 partner prison ministries worldwide working to restore the lives of those impacted by crime. It does that by sharing the Christian Gospel and God’s love with prisoners and protecting their children from increased risks of trafficking, child labor or following in their parent’s footsteps.

As I’ve walked this road, I’ve realized why caring about prisoners matters. It’s not just a good deed, but a vital part of caring for the least and forgotten in our society. Here are four truths that have shaped my thinking.

Compassion looks past the crime to the person

In a world that often defines people by their worst mistakes, compassion calls us to look deeper. Many individuals behind bars have been shaped by lives of poverty, trauma and injustice who made poor decisions. In places like Sri Lanka and Nepal, I’ve encountered people imprisoned for stealing food to provide for their families living in desperate poverty. These stories reveal a wider context of inequality, where systemic injustices and lack of access to healthcare, education, or employment drive people towards choices they might not otherwise make.

While I do not excuse nor diminish the harm caused by crime, we must hold space for both justice and mercy. We must choose to see beyond someone's crime and into their heart to recognize their humanity and believe in the possibility of restoration – for them as an individual, for the victim and for our communities as a whole.

Families are the silent, forgotten victims

When someone goes to prison, it’s not only the individual who suffers; their families, especially children, often quietly bear the weight of that loss. I recently met 11-year-old Su Lin in Cambodia. Her dad is imprisoned, and her mother left the family in the care of their grandmother. When the burden of caring for them became too great, Su Lin’s brothers were put up for adoption. She doesn’t know if or when she’ll see her father again or whether her mum will ever return.

Her story is heartbreaking, but just one of millions. Around the world, children of prisoners are shunned by their community for crimes they did not commit and left isolated in cycles of poverty, trauma and often, generational crime.

Daily, I have the privilege of working with PFI’s network to support children like Su Lin, but so many more slip through the cracks. When we forget prisoners, we also abandon their families, the silent victims who deserve care, hope, dignity, and a chance at a brighter future.

True justice restores, not just punishes

I’ve seen first-hand how forgiveness, accountability, and a path to restoration can heal not just prisoners, but entire communities. In the Solomon Islands, a culture deeply rooted in a strong, connected community, this type of redemption is being lived out.

There, before prisoners are eligible for parole, they are invited to participate in Sycamore Tree Project, a PFI program that aims to foster healing and reconciliation through restorative efforts. When all parties are ready, local religious leaders facilitate a reconciliation meeting between the offender and victim, often joined by their families and community leaders. These difficult yet grace-filled conversations lead to healing, accountability, and forgiveness.

Our findings have been powerful: reoffending rates in these communities have dropped dramatically. This is what radical reconciliation looks like – messy and challenging, but life-changing.

Faith calls us to love the forgotten

At the heart of faith is a call to love those whom the world has cast aside, including those behind bars, so often labelled unworthy and left behind. With many correctional systems still prioritizing punitive justice, I believe we are called to deeply reckon with how we can advocate for grace in a society focused on punishment.

Prisoners are not beyond hope. Their families are not invisible. Their futures are not sealed. Together, we can bring light into the darkest places in our communities and societies. In doing so, we discover the depth of true, lasting justice and mercy.

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Grenfell disaster

Justice

9 September 2024

4 min read

Grenfell – what should happen now?

Six urgent priorities that should follow the Inquiry

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A tube train runs on a raised track, in the distance is a tower block wrapped in white material with a green heart on it.

I remember standing at the base of Grenfell Tower on the morning of the 14th June 2017, talking with firefighters, gathering clergy to act as emergency volunteers, praying with evacuees from the surrounding blocks, as the building still smouldered. At the time the question on everyone’s lips was: how could something like this happen in sophisticated twenty-first century Britain?

Now we know.

In one sense the Public Inquiry into the Grenfell tower fire told us nothing new. Few people who have followed the Inquiry over the last six years will have been surprised by its conclusions. What is new is to see the dreadful catalogue of ‘incompetence dishonesty and greed’ laid out in excoriating detail for all to see.

So what should happen now? At least six things must be on the agenda:

Combustible cladding on remaining buildings around the country should be removed as soon as possible. Government estimates suggest there are 4,600 buildings around the country with unsafe cladding. Less than one third of them have had their remediation completed, and work is yet to start on half of them. And, astonishing as it may sound, this is now more than seven years after Grenfell. Cladding that is illegal on new buildings can still remain on existing ones. Developers and owners who are responsible for this state of affairs should be made to pay for the remediation rather than passing those costs on to leaseholders, or delaying remediation for technical and bureaucratic reasons. Institutional resistance to this, as outlined recently by Michael Gove, someone who from my dealing with him on Grenfell, was one of the better politicians to deal with this issue, has to be overcome with urgency.
Prosecution of those who have been identified in the inquiry as bearing responsibility for the fire should also be brought as soon as possible. The police investigation suggests that it will be a number of years before court cases take place. The victims of this tragedy have already had to wait seven long years and now face the prospect of another three or even more years until justice is served. That is too long.
Those named and shamed in the report should examine their own hearts. Some remorse and apology has been evident from some, but not enough. Many still deny responsibility despite seven years of evidence-gathering. This is not a matter of revenge, but an indispensable step towards justice for everyone. Those named have presumably carried a burden of guilt over these past years. The Christian doctrine of repentance, confession and absolution tells us that there is a relief in finally admitting culpability, bearing the penalty, and finally, once all this has happened, receiving a measure of absolution.

We might look back on Grenfell as a turning point in our life together: a fitting memorial for those who tragically died on that terrible night.

The companies involved often have big pockets and the bereaved and survivors are ordinary people without the resources to pay expensive legal fees. The government should set aside a sum of money to enable victims, if they wish, to bring a civil case against those accused in the report. Arguably this should have happened many years before to speed up the process of justice.
A wider debate needs to take place in our society as to how we place love for neighbour at the heart of national life. A libertarian individualism which focusses on personal fulfilment and a view of freedom as doing what we like as long as we don’t harm others, rather than freedom to do the good has led us to this point. What would it mean in company law, for example, for each business or institution to have to explain how it is seeking the genuine welfare of its staff, clients and customers, not as an add on in their ESG agenda, but as the primary purpose of the organisation?
We need a spiritual renewal. Toleration rather than persecution of the neighbour was a good legacy of the Enlightenment, but it is not enough to build a well-functioning society. We are commanded not just to tolerate our neighbours but to love them. And this only be justified if my neighbour has ultimate transcendent value. The new atheism was an act of cultural vandalism, undermining faith in God, an objective basis for each human life, and having nothing to replace it with. As Nick Cave recently put it: “People need meaning. And secular society has not come up with the goods.” This is why religious traditions including Christianity have tended to link love for God to love for neighbour. What that spiritual renewal looks like is hard to tell, and yet we have perhaps seen a stirring of it in recent times.

If something approaching those six things happened, then we might look back on Grenfell as a turning point in our life together: a fitting memorial for those who tragically died on that terrible night.