As at the time of compiling this piece, Headfort Foundation has successfully secured the release of 127 inmates free of charge despite the pandemic which crippled court proceedings. Most of these beneficiaries spent an average of one year in prison and don’t even know how to live as normal humans or where to pick up the pieces of their lives from.

This breaks our hearts as we watch them struggle to make ends meet. Some of them lost their confidence in prison and find it hard to even go out, some had to deal with post traumatic stress disorder, skin diseases, infections and insomnia. They spend the first few months trying to fix their health and this remains impossible as they do not have the financial capacities to do so.

We ensure that we keep in touch with them but it’s even hard for some to possess cell phones thereby making communication almost impossible until after few days and in some cases weeks and months. We have discovered through our follow up process that most of the inmates are stigmatized and as a result of this stigmatization, they cannot return to their places of work or even their neighbourhood, so they roam around the society and this is pregnant with possibility of going back to crime. We realized that getting back on their feet is harder than imagined and they still look up to us for help so we started this project.

The Ex-Inmate Support Initiative is one that covers the entire support given to inmates after gaining freedom. These includes health care, skill acquisition, back to school project, and start-up funds. The history and needs of the Ex-inmates are used in determining the kind of support to be given to them.

Objectives:

·  To ensure that ex-inmates are properly re-integrated into the society.

· To provide these ex-inmates with a platform for counselling, mentorship, skill acquisition, training, and funding through Partnership with other initiatives.

·  To prevent the spread of diseases and infections they might have contacted while in prison by providing proper health care immediately after gaining freedom.

·     To give hope, love and put an end to stigmatization.