'A contrast to chaos' How working with the land is helping ex-prisoners to avoid reoffending

Sue thrusts both hands deep into the rich, dark soil, grabs a fistful and lets it trickle through her fingers.

- Sandra Laville

"This is an antidepressant, a natural antidepressant." Around her in the polytunnel, tomato plants bend with the weight of their produce, and seed trays freshly planted with winter salad are spread out over wooden trestles, the product of her morning's work.

Sue could be any gardener preparing for next season's harvest, but her eyes tell a different story. "I had a very professional senior job, a big well-paid job," she says. "But I was leading this ridiculous double life. I had this really pressurised professional career and at the same time I was going out with a major drug dealer.

"It was a really horrible toxic relationship, very manipulative. Long story short, he was violent to me, I had enough and I picked up a chair and smashed him round the head with it. I ended up being done for actual bodily harm."

Outside the polytunnel, a path meanders past a wildlife pond, alongside the chicken run to the outside edges of the land. A small plaque nearby is inscribed in the memory of Erwin James, the convicted murderer turned author, prisoner, reformer and journalist, who died in January 2024. The words on the slate below it are his: "LandWorks - an oasis of hope."

That hope was spawned 12 years ago in a small portable building, in what was then a bramble-covered field, with no electricity or running water. The LandWorks founder, Chris Parsons, offered three prisoners on day release the chance to experience how nature, and working within and for it, might be transformative for their lives.