Bill
Bill’s life as a child was hard and pretty loveless.  Finding friendship with ‘the wrong crowd’ was easy and soon petty crime was turning into something more serious. By the time he came to the attention of the Community Chaplain he had over 28 convictions and 11 prison sentences behind him. He was still only in his early thirties so life was looking bleak and hopeless.  In conjunction with the Prison Chaplain and the Probation service, arrangements were made for a church group to keep in touch with him at the Bail Hostel. Even although a fairly long drive was involved, with the help of the bail hostel team and Probation it was possible for Bill to go to the church he wanted to attend and keep in touch with some of the visitors who had seen him in the prison chapel.

On final release it was somewhat of a challenge to find suitable employment but after numerous meetings with agencies one was found. However it involved early morning starts and it was not too long before Bill was sacked for poor time keeping. Sadly no other job has come up but with the support of the church a nice place to live was found and support through meetings in town and mobile phone calls continues. There have been problems with drugs but Community Chaplaincy has been able to ‘signpost’ to the appropriate support agency and has also enabled Bill to have some counselling with a professional Counsellor.