Rebel Justice - changing the way you see justice
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Rebel Justice - changing the way you see justice
E: 63 Latte and Liberation The Fresh Brew of Social Change in UK Prisons
When Max Dubiel decided to swap his strategy consultant hat for a barista's apron and an entrepreneur's vision, he brewed up more than just a coffee business; he created a lifeline for UK inmates. This podcast serves you the story of Redemption Roasters, where Max and his team are transforming the lives of young offenders with the rich aroma of specialty coffee and a shot of hope for a better future. As you sip through this episode, you'll be captivated by the transformative journey from the confines of a young offenders institute to quaint London coffee shops, where former inmates become baristas, roasters, and symbols of second chances.
Listen closely as we explore Redemption Roasters' remarkable blend of social entrepreneurship and criminal justice reform. Max reveals the operational hurdles they faced inside prison walls, the challenges of scaling a social enterprise, and how they've crafted a sustainable business model that doesn't sacrifice impact for growth. This isn't just a chronicle of a coffee company; it's a narrative of redemption and resilience, a testament to the power of community and the belief that everyone deserves a second shot at success, even if that shot is in an espresso cup. Join us for an invigorating conversation that will stir more than just your morning brew.
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Welcome to the View Magazine's Rebel Justice podcast. This week our guest is Max Dubiel from Redemption Roasters, a specialty coffee company which is working to lower reoffending rates in the UK through coffee. Dr Nigel Gould- Davies spoke with Max about Redemption Roasters and their work within prisons to create better futures for people trapped with little or no help in the justice system, with transferable employment skills and a community once they leave the prison walls. The company's aim is to help prisoners learn employable barista skills which will aid their rehabilitation. Max is here to explain how it all works and how the Redemption Roasters program has benefited prisoners and reduced reoffending.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :So, Max, could we begin by learning a little more about you? Could you tell us about yourself, your background and your journey? Who are you and what led you to found Redemption Roasters?
Max Dubiel :Of course, my name is Max Dubiel and I'm one of the co-founders of Redemption Roasters. I was born in Germany and then moved to the UK for my studies. I studied up in Scotland, St. Andrews, and that's also where I met all of the business partners that I've ever started a business with. I went off to work in the city after my time in St Andrews, worked in consulting, strategy consulting for about three years, and then I started my first coffee company, but I'm sure we'll talk about more about that in a second.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :So, from the city to coffee and then to prisons. What led you to take that step?
Max Dubiel :Yeah, it's not a straight line, as you've already suggested. So I think ending my job in the city was a decision around wanting to start my own company, wanting to start a company around a product that I can identify with, that I have a passion for, and working with the people I choose to work with in both cases my best friends. So Black Sheep was founded by three of my best university friends and I, and we got together. We had no clue what we were doing, but we knew that we wanted to do something quick, something impactful, something meaningful and with very little background but the ambition to do it. And coffee was something that came to us in inspiration, because we all felt passionate about coffee but none of us actually had a real background in coffee and founded a company called Black Sheep Coffee. We didn't quite know whether we wanted to roast coffee or run coffee vans or open coffee shops, and then we ended up just focusing on the retail rollout and scaled that quite quickly. I was always more fascinated with the wholesale aspect of that business, so I looked after wholesale. It's from a scalability perspective it's not quite as exciting, but it has a convincing bottom line. It's more profitable than the retail. And so when we decided with Black Sheep that wholesale wasn't going to be something we wanted to pursue, I essentially created a spin out and spun out the wholesale business into a new co and took my now business partner, Ted, on board, who was also a university friend who worked in the city as a lawyer. He was a disgruntled lawyer. At that point. He didn't want to work in the city anymore.
Max Dubiel :And then we initially started wholeselling Black Sheep Coffee, which was exciting because we had a little business that was already doing a decent amount of turnover and had a very good profitability because we were running it out of my living room. But it wasn't that exciting at the same time because we were essentially just distributing someone else's brand. So when we met someone at a trade show from the Ministry of Justice saying that they were looking for initiatives behind bars to train currently serving offenders employable skills and generally give training to make sure that they can find employment on the outside, we were quite taken by that idea. To that point I think we were both part of that privileged part of society that was ignorant about criminal justice system, which is assumed it works. If you've never been in touch with the criminal justice system, you assume it sort of works.
Max Dubiel :We then started doing a bit of research and found out some of the figures and they really are terrible, especially in the UK when it comes to reoffending, and the reoffending rates are 53% Plus. It's almost a flip of a coin when you leave prison whether you'll go back within a year. And the UK locks up more than any other country in this part of the world. It's 144 per 100,000. The European average is just over 100,000, so significantly more. And that creates so much misery, misery amongst those people who get locked up and get released and don't find work and then commit a crime again, but also amongst victims of crime and also amongst all the people connected to these ex-offenders, reoffenders, families, communities. And we thought we have access to exceptional skills and that's specialty coffee and why not, with these skills, try and reduce this problem of reoffending and really tell this story and really turn that idea into a company rather than just do a little bit of barista training on the side. And the idea of redemption roses was born.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :Okay, so your first passion was coffee. You weren't initially thinking about working in or with prisons, but prisons found you in a chance encounter with the Ministry of Justice, but once that happened, you became committed to a new mission, it sounds like, and that's what's taking you in this new direction. So could you tell us then, more specifically what Redemption Roasters does, how it works with prisoners and in prisons, how the model functions?
Max Dubiel :Yes, of course. So initially we built a roastery in a prison. The result of our first conversations and negotiations with the Ministry of Justice was essentially a rental contract. We rented a space in HMYOI Aylesbury a young offenders institute just north of London to carry out our roasting, our coffee roasting and with that rental contract we went out to friends, family and fools who thought we weren't quite as crazy as most people and raised some money because it needed some capital investment and about a year later opened our first coffee roastery in Aylesbury. It was a small space, about 150 square metres, and we roasted our coffee there and at the same time taught young offenders coffee skills on our coffee roaster but also on our coffee machines that we had in this space. We roughly at the same time opened our first coffee shop in central London in Lambs Conduit Street, just by Holborn station, and then, about two months in, started hiring our first graduates, as we called them back then. One of the guys who had been taught in the roastery and was subsequently released into the shop.
Max Dubiel :And that was a really exciting moment but also really daunting. Basically meant we had to put our money where our mouth was. We've been talking about reducing reoffending, but we hadn't actually employed any ex-offenders up until that point and we were a bit nervous. Some people on the team said, "oh, maybe we can push it back by a week, and we said, no, we can't. He's getting released tomorrow and he needs to start work here. I think, in terms of all of the support we were given we were giving, it was very incidental and not planned. None of us were trained social workers. None of us had had trauma training or anything of that type. We didn't understand how universal credit worked or the housing charity sector, but it worked. We supported him and two months later our second guy came out and then another month later, our third, and it was a really exciting journey hiring these guys into the shops. The other thing that happened around about the same time was that we were getting plenty of press exposure just because of what we were doing as quite unorthodox Coffee and prisons is not something you normally hear in the same sentence and so the BBC produced quite a few pieces on us We've on ITV, sky News, financial Times, the Guardian did a piece on us, and we started getting phone calls from prison governors up and down the country who said, oh, I'd like my own prison roastry.
Max Dubiel :"an you please set up a roastry? In my prison and we say, well, hold your horses. Really expensive to set up a prison roastry and a logistical nightmare, so maybe not quite a roastry. But why don't we do the following why don't we set up a coffee academy, which is a mix between a classroom and a coffee shop, and teach employable skills in your prison and help the guys on release and girls on release to then find work on the outside, whether that be in one of our shops or in our coffee network? And we started rolling out these academies and we did that quite successfully. Up until COVID we had nine academies running up and down the country in places as half long as Wales and Scotland, and some of these academies we taught ourselves, as in. We sent trainers in ourselves and then others we subcontracted through some of your national prison education providers about five companies that do prison education in the UK, so we subcontracted those.
Max Dubiel :The thing that happened during COVID was all prison education and work ended as well. To stand down, it was a terrible time from an outcomes perspective. Prisoners were locked up for 23 hours on end, no activities, no training, no schooling. It was a very difficult time. One thing that prisons are particularly good at is locking down. So the spread was much reduced, but I think the impact on mental health and employable outcomes was significant and we've seen that up until today.
Max Dubiel :We then pivoted and started going from redemption to prevention, as we called it. We opened an in the community training academy where we trained ex-offenders as well as those at the risk of crime in coffee skills. To continue with our mission and as things opened up again towards the end of 2021, we started operating prison academies again as well, but with a much stronger focus on outcomes. We realized in hindsight that operating an academy in Leicester or in Cardiff prison doesn't really yield the kind of outcome for us in terms of employability, simply because our main footprint is in London and this is where we have our coffee shops and where we have our network. So that's where the academy model went and it's operating. Our in the community training is strong and we now operate for in custody academies coffee academies.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :Thank you. So just to be clear, it's not only that you find jobs in your coffee shops for ex-offenders, you're actually training them how to make coffee roast and then make coffee in the prisons themselves. Is that right?
Max Dubiel :We have one coffee roastery and that's HMP The Mount. We moved it from Aylesbury to the Mount when we outgrew that 150 square meter space, so we only teach roasting skills at our roastry. The coffee academies, on the other hand, they teach coffee skills. So making of coffee, your typical barista courses, and that's a lot less involved. It doesn't involve a packaging line and warehousing, but at the same time those are the most employable skills, the lowest hanging fruit, if you will.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :So the coffee academies train baristas. A prison is a complex environment. There will be special challenges to coming in from outside and working effectively there, given the nature of the security needs of a prison. So could you say a little bit about those challenges and how you've navigated them?
Max Dubiel :You're absolutely right, Nigel. It's one of the things that we vastly underestimated when we embarked on this. I'm not sure if we would have done it had we known how complicated it is to work in prisons. So there are various things here. Sometimes we hear a question around are you doing this to save costs? Is it much cheaper to operate a rotary in a prison? I'd say absolutely not. If we did this on a cost basis, we'd rent a warehouse in Tottenham and it'd be significantly cheaper. But we do it because we are Redemption Rosters and it's part of our brand.
Max Dubiel :Operating behind bars is significantly more difficult when it comes to things like logistics. Prisons have regular lockdowns Moving things in and out during a lockdown becomes impossible. So we work with dedicated logistics companies that don't mind sitting outside of a gate for an hour and a half. We do a lot of our logistics ourselves. It comes to security. Vetting is another aspect. All of the staff who work in the roastery etc. The vetting process can be quite arbitrary. It can take days or it can take months, depending on how the vetting service is doing at the moment, which means you sometimes have people sitting on your payroll just waiting to be vetted and you can't really use them yet. Big cost to the business. The technology is very difficult in prisons. Prisons are phone free zones. You're not allowed to bring in any phones. Cameras are highly restricted. So simple things are getting a delivery from a supplier and as the box has been damaged in transit, they will say, oh, just send us a picture and then we'll make an insurance case out of it.
Max Dubiel :Not that easy when you haven't got a camera or access to a camera, so plenty of things like that, the way you can get a picture of the prison's firewalls. In terms of IT, very difficult to have Wi-Fi in your spaces. So yeah, technologically it's a big challenge. And then the day-to-day logistics, just going in and out, everyone is security screened every single time you go in and you go out. It's a little bit like the Apple, just a bit stricter and more serious. So there are a lot of challenges doing what we do, but it is at the very heart and core of what we do. We would never hollow out that purpose because it's inconvenient to us. Funny little anecdote from when we started was I remember we also packaged teas. So the first time we brought teas in bulk we brought these green bundles of shrink wrap green tea into the security gate and the security officers weren't quite sure whether that actually was tea. They're rather doubtful.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :You were able to reassure them, though. We were ok. So what's been the experience of working with the prisoners? How have they responded to this opportunity?
Max Dubiel :So overall very positive. I think as soon as people understand what we're doing and why we're doing it, they are very keen to get involved. A because it's probably one of the most exciting workshops in a prison. It involves coffee, it involves all the lovely aspects of it, including the smells and the preparation, but also it involves the chance of real employment.
Max Dubiel :I think when you are in prison you're thinking around. Becoming turning your life around feels really distant and there's so many little brochures and things that are well-meaning in terms of what to do once you get released. The reality is quite different to what it is in theory and I think that's part of the frustration of a lot of the guys and girls behind bars is that I think they'll never be able to find a job again. So why even try? And when we come in there and we're quite small as a company and as an organisation, it becomes a lot more graspable and we can point to real success stories of guys and girls we've put through our training, given a job, they've moved on and they're still not back in prison and earning a good living and supporting their families.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :So how long has Redemption Roasters been going now?
Max Dubiel :Redemption Roasters has been going for seven years now.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :Okay, in that time, what impact do you feel you've made and how can you measure or assess that?
Max Dubiel :Yeah, that's a really good question and it's a question we ask ourselves very regularly. I have a lot to say on this, and probably much more than would be feasible to put into this podcast. If you want to find out more detail, I definitely urge you and your listeners to look at our social impact report. We published one at the end of 2022 and we're just about to publish our next one. I think it would be live in about six weeks. So, in terms of headline figures, when you talk about impact, you talk about an impact funnel. There's breadth and depth of impact.
Max Dubiel :So the breadth of impact could be that you've worked with top end of the funnel. You've worked with thousands of individuals who you may have given a very quick introduction course to coffee, be that in custody or on the outside, and that may or may not have had an impact on there, where their life went. And now that's breadth of impact. And then at the very end of that funnel, at the tip of that funnel, is the depth of impact. Let's say we've worked with one individual over multiple years. Not only have we support them in terms of training and employable skills, but we've also helped them with confidence building. We've helped them with housing. We've helped them with when there was a tricky time and they were kicked out of the hostel and we helped them through our hardship fund and then we've mentored them and then we've helped them with CV writing and then we've helped them into another employment with someone else. And that would be high intervention, turning someone's life around, and that's a real depth of impact story.
Max Dubiel :Now we work at both ends of that funnel and all the way through. So if I was to tell you about the top end of the funnel, I could say we've worked with over 1700 individuals. Some of them may not have been as high intervention as the others. If I was to tell you about a bit of that bottom bit of the funnel, say that 20% of our workforce comes from our program participants. So these are ex-offenders and those at the risk of crime and there's a sliding scale on how much intervention you can and want to give one individual. And it's a tricky decision making process that we have to do on a day to day basis because we're not a charity, we are an enterprise that needs to make a profit in order to grow and in that sense we sort of have to deal with a double bottom line here and it's a day to day. Tension that we have is the decision between profit and purpose.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :Resources are always limited, so it requires great thought and care and how you allocate those to achieved outcomes that you want. And, in this regard, is there a specific gender dimension to the work that Redemption Roasters does or to the impact that its had?
Max Dubiel :Yes, that's a very good point, Nigel. So we have worked with both men and women as part of our impact work. The large majority have been men. Only about 4% of the UK prison population is female. The rest of them are male, and I'd say we have probably worked with about 10 women on the outside, so a much smaller percentage of our total participants on the outside. But at the same time, women usually have much stronger links, usually have ties on the outside in terms of family. A lot of them will have children, and so there's a stronger potential for rehabilitation, which is very much in line with what we're trying to achieve.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :Yeah, it may not only be a matter of absolute numbers, but also the relative challenges as well, because there is research that suggests it's harder for women coming out of prison to find work than for men to do so. There may be a case for saying that it's disproportionately valuable to help the women, even if, in absolute terms, it's a smaller number.
Max Dubiel :You're absolutely right. I think the stigma associated with prison leavers is particularly strong with females. Crime is not usually associated with females and we, as part of sort of the thought leadership that we see ourselves as, is also educating that in, I think it's 75%, more than 75%, of women who have committed a crime have had crimes committed against them by by men, but prior to that crime, whether that be domestic abuse, other forms of abuse, substance abuse. So it is very important to make sure the public is aware of that.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :Yeah, absolutely so. Redemption Roasters has been going for seven years. It's been a remarkable success story. You have opened nine coffee academies, an in prison roastery and a number of coffee shops, and in fact there's one I go to here in Kings Cross regularly. So what next for Redemption Roasters? What are your future plans and aspirations?
Max Dubiel :Good question. So, yes, we have 10 coffee shops in London, anything from small coffee kiosks such as the one in Broadgate all the way up to big, full full service coffee shops such as the one in Angel or the one in Hampstead. And, what's important for most, we believe in the path of least resistance, which sounds funny for someone operating a coffee roaster in a prison. So we think we can scale easily with our existing pipeline and our existing operations in central London. There's a lot of demand for coffee. It's just about finding the right locations and with that we can scale our impact. I mean the 20% figure of our participants split amongst our total employees is one important aspect of how to lock in our purpose, create a bit of a lockstep mechanism for every bit of business growing we do, we grow our impact. But there's many other things that we can and have to do over the next couple of years as we grow the business from 10 coffee shops to 20 coffee shops, to 40 coffee shops, and that is a not growing too quickly. I think it's one of the big dangers of bricks and mortar businesses is scaling too quickly and I think we've all seen the occasional concept in the UK that is scaled too quickly and unfortunately had to shut, and that is not just for the financial interests of our investors and ourselves and our employees, but most importantly because we have vulnerable stakeholders in the business, beneficiaries to this business that wouldn't otherwise have the opportunities that they've had through us. So we need to make sure that what we do is sustainable.
Max Dubiel :So growing, growing our retail arm, continuing to employ, but also scaling our impact, scaling our impact alongside in lockstep, but ideally outscaling our impact vis-a-vis our profit line and that would be something to be tremendously proud of having achieved as a founder, is profit making enterprise that achieves more impact pound for pound than a charity, just because we've set it up as a very lean operation and cannot afford to waste resources.
Max Dubiel :One thing that we are doing right now is we're launching a foundation to be live in about six weeks, and that's going to be a really exciting aspect where we can bring in external oversight in terms of our impact activities, where we can have full transparency as to the monetary flows, what our impact activities cost, where the money comes from. That's very exciting. But then, also in terms of locking in what the future brings, we will take on more investment in the future and we may have big investors, including venture capital or private equity, and we need to make sure that, before we do that, whilst we still have full control of the business, that we lock in our impact and that somebody cannot just acquire us for the real estate that brings with it or that, the brand equity we need to make sure that it gets locked in over time.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :Hmm, so you've now accumulated substantial experience of working in prisons with current and former prisoners, providing education, skills training, helping them to gain employment. What would be your advice to the government in its efforts to reduce the reoffending rate through effective prison or education?
Max Dubiel :I think it's a very tricky one, because politicians will rarely get elected by making criminal justice reform.
Max Dubiel :Usually, people will get elected by saying we want to be tough on crime.
Max Dubiel :Being tough on crime unfortunately doesn't work in the reality.
Max Dubiel :The reality is that the very, very large majority of everyone who's currently behind bars will get released sooner or later, and I think the public would be surprised by how quickly people who are currently behind bars will be back amongst them. I think it's in everyone's interest certainly in everyone's taxpayer interest to make sure that the people will get released, have the best chance of succeeding and not committing another crime. And I think there's a big education piece here to educate the public to want to invest in our prisons and in our prison system to make it better and to actually reform people and not just lock them up, because locking people up doesn't work, and we know that there have been decades of research into rehabilitation and following models that are clearly working better Scandinavian countries such as Norway and Denmark. Germany is doing a good job at reducing reoffending, but even in southern Europe not countries that normally the UK looks up to if you look at Portugal, Spain they do a much better job at reducing reoffending than we currently do, and there's a lot of lessons to be learned there.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :Now, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the people hearing this conversation were inspired to think about following your example and to provide training, education opportunities to current prisoners. What advice would you give them?
Max Dubiel :Yes. Well, first of all, I would convince them to do it more than just by saying it's the right thing to do. I would also say that it can work very well for you. It has worked very well for us, because there's so many stakeholders in your business that will appreciate the purpose that you've given your organization and that you're working with a vulnerable group, and that's a really exciting movement. I mean just looking at the stakeholders and redemption. You could look at our investors, our landlords, our other colleagues and employees, who all really buy into our mission and therefore value us as an employer or as an asset or as a shop in their estate.
Max Dubiel :Lastly, I would like to add that if you would like to work with either currently serving prisoners, prison residents or with prison leavers, I would encourage you to speak to your local prison. Every prison in the UK now has a prison employment lead and has an employment advisory board, where the sole purpose of that role is to engage with local employers. Now, be that simply employing someone who has left prison, or be that actually working in a prison for job interviews or, even more involved, producing something in a prison or training in a prison, all of the above is the job of the Prison Employment lead to liaison with local businesses, and these can be very high level conversations, but they will happily invite you and show you around because that is their job. These roles are very new and it's a very exciting movement. Still a lot to be done, but we feel that prisons are slowly becoming more open places for employment and a lot of questions that were previously unanswered or made it too difficult for employers to work with are now becoming a lot easier and becoming addressed.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :Thank you, Max. And now a final question, and a more personal one. Your work in prisons was something unexpected. It was a consequence of a chance meeting with the Ministry of Justice, but now it's the centre of your professional life and you're absolutely committed to it. How has this experience changed you?
Max Dubiel :It's a really good question and would probably require a lot of thinking about to give you a really well-balanced answer.
Max Dubiel :First and foremost, I strongly believe that if you want to grow something, you should be giving back, and it doesn't mean that you need to constantly be thinking about others and not think about yourself, but I believe that if you can make incremental change around you, that is going to leave the world in a better place.
Max Dubiel :I also believe and some may call it karma that this will come back and whatever you give out will come back to you with interest, and I've touched on this earlier. I think by doing good you can do very well, and that's an exciting time to live in and to start a social impact corporation. But nevertheless, I think my CV hasn't been a straight line, as we said at the beginning, and I'm still very excited to see what it will throw at me. I have a very short attention span and constantly see exciting things. My business partner, Ted, is much better at keeping me on the straight and narrow and reminds me of what we're doing and that we should just continue what we're doing. But I will never rule out serendipity and I will remain open to opportunities that come up and who knows where this business will take us.
Dr Nigel Gould-Davies :Max Dubiel, founder of Redemption Roasters. Thank you very much for a fascinating conversation and for sharing with us the important work that you are doing in prisons and with prisoners.
Max Dubiel :Thank you very much, nigel. I appreciate you all. You're interviewing me.
Madelena Alberto:And this is our podcast for today. Thank you, Dr Nigel Gould-Davie s, for hosting this Rehabilitation Special of the Rebel Justice podcast with Max Dubiel. Redemption Roasters has numerous shops across London and they also sell their coffee online. To find out more about The View, please follow us on our social media. We are Rebel Justice on X, formally known as Twitter, and The View Magazines on Instagram and Facebook, and The View Magazine on LinkedIn. Subscribe to our podcast and stay tuned for our next episode with the creator of the hit crime novel Top Girl, which is soon to be made into a motion picture. You can find out more about our work with women in a justice system by checking out our website, theviewmag dot org dot uk, or you can also purchase art and cards and subscribe to our online magazine. Thank you.