Rehabilitated Portsmouth criminal on mission to pay back society by helping offenders and young people

Jamie Denman, 41, hopes to put his dark experiences to good use to help other people avoid the pitfalls he fell into during his younger days whilst offering others skills and hope for the future.

The Portsmouth man now living in Fareham has launched his company Dez-ire Developments and is keen to spread the word.

For his work with schools Jamie has designed offender programmes and hopes to get across the message to ‘control offending behaviour related to anger’ and ‘controlling your emotions and basic arousal levels’.

His efforts will also see him helping those struggling with their mental health.

Work is also lined up with Pompey in the Community to give talks to youngsters on gangs and county lines drug dealing.

‘I’ve had really good feedback so hopefully things will take off. I’ve come out of prison and am trying to push on and be positive in life and do well for myself,’ Jamie said.

His ‘De-railed’ program to deliver insightful talks to offenders in jail has already been given the greenlight from prisons such as Guys Marsh.

‘I work with the guys in the prisons on training and education and get them temporary licences and get them working in the community with us,’ he said.

‘When they are released from prison they get training and education for a period of six months and work experience. When they are out of prison full time they come and work with us.

‘The hardest thing when you leave prison is that you are left to yourself. So it’s about using my experiences to help others.’

Jamie initially launched a football academy before Covid hit in which he would give talks to children in schools before being recalled and then suffering further set-backs due to the pandemic. But now he remains keen to use the power of sport for good through his Stop the Silence Speak out through Sport initiative.

Jamie was jailed in 2006 after being handed a one-year indeterminate sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) - given to people considered 'dangerous' but whose offence did not merit a life sentence.

This had followed a conviction for violence in 1999 when he was ‘on drugs’.

The controversial IPP sentences were abolished in 2012 with them described as the ‘single greatest stain’ on the criminal justice system by former Supreme Court justice, Lord Brown. This was due to offenders often serving significantly longer sentences than they were handed - sparking a rise in hopelessness and suicides.

Despite the sentences no longer being present in the criminal justice system, over 1,700 are still serving IPP sentences, while there was no retrospective change for those who had already been sentenced under the legislation when it was scrapped.

It has left Jamie being recalled to jail under the terms of his IPP licence on several occasions, which he says were unfair.

In 2006 he was handed the sentence after getting arrested by police for threats to kill. ‘I got pulled over by police. I was in a bad place on drugs and ended up getting mouthy with a police officer and joked I was on my way to kill someone and ended up getting a one year tariff that was effectively a life sentence. That’s how bad IPP sentences are.’

He ended up getting released after six years before being recalled in 2015, 2016 and 2019.

For the most recent recall in 2019, Jamie spent another year in prison after a disagreement with someone on Facebook who told police Jamie had ‘threatened to shoot’ him.

‘I ended up getting recalled. I didn’t get charged at the police station and the investigation got dropped but I spent another year in prison because of the licence conditions,’ he said.

‘They class IPP sentences as an inhumane sentence now but there are still people who are suffering in prison and those outside struggling on licences they don’t need to be.’

Jamie is determined to help others through his work with offenders and youngsters after putting his time in incarceration to good use by studying.

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Jamie, speaking of his mission, added: ‘It gives me a purpose and is something I really enjoy.’

A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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