The Arts of Desistance: Evaluation of the Koestler Trust Arts Mentoring Programme for Former Prisoners

This report presents and discusses the findings of an evaluation of an arts-based mentoring scheme that is aimed at prolonging and enhancing desistance from crime through providing former prisoners with opportunities to continue engaging with the arts after release. The evaluation focused both on the implementation and effectiveness of the scheme as the former influenced the latter. Different yet complementary research techniques (observation of mentoring sessions, interviews with mentors and mentees, analysis of mentor reports, and a survey-based quasi-experimental design incorporating control groups) were employed to strengthen the validity of the data and improve their interpretation.