In a shaded Oxford pub garden, on a calm summer’s day in this most genteel of English cities, a man called Steve is explaining what Tap Social means to him. “If I hadn’t met these people, If I hadn’t come to this company, if I’d have gone back to London, God knows what I’d be,” he says, before pausing briefly, a rueful half-smile, half-grimace playing across his face. “I’d probably be the oldest fucking drug dealer in town.”
Steve, 58, whose last name has been withheld on request, is a sous chef at Tap Social’s pub, The White House. Until recently he was serving a life sentence for murder. He’s one of dozens of ex-prisoners who have been and are employed by Tap Social, an Oxford brewery set up in 2016 to address the British state’s failure to help prison leavers break the cycle of crime.
This matters because Britain locks up a lot of people, by European if not American standards. Almost 79,000 people were behind bars in England and Wales in 2021, with a further 8,500 incarcerated in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Although this represents a fall since 2020—largely due to COVID-era lockdowns—England and Wales still have the largest prison population, and Scotland the most prisoners per capita, in western Europe.
Very little assistance is offered to prison leavers. There’s a £76 ($89) “discharge grant,” provided to all prisoners who have served longer than 15 days, but not much else. According to Andrew Neilson, director of campaigns for the Howard League, a charity that focuses on penal reform, about 40% have no settled accommodation to go to; an eighth will be released to sleep on the streets. Universal Credit, Britain’s social security payment system, can only be applied for once you have already left prison.
Getting a job often proves impossible. “Eight percent of people will be in paid employment six weeks after leaving prison,” Neilson says. “After a year, that figure rises, but only to 17%, which gives you an idea of the scale of the problem.” Perhaps it’s no surprise that 60% of people who’ve served short sentences go on to reoffend; they often have mental health or drug and alcohol addiction problems, linked to the lack of a house or a job—a lack exacerbated by being sent to prison.
This is why Tap Social exists. Founded in 2016 and run by four friends with backgrounds in criminal law and hospitality—Amy and Tess Taylor, Paul Humpherson, and Matt Elliott—it has become the leading light in a group of hospitality companies that offer employment opportunities to former prisoners, from HM Pasties in Manchester to New Ground Coffee in Oxford and Redemption Roasters in London.
And it is thriving. Despite COVID, the last few years have seen the opening of the business’s Oxford pub, a bakery (Proof Social Bakehouse), and an expanded brewery (in Kidlington, north of Oxford). This success prompts one clear question: Does Tap Social’s model offer a way forward for prison rehabilitation not only in the U.K., but around the world?
When Tap Social’s founders announced their plans in July 2016, comments on the Oxford Mail website were less than encouraging. “The ‘business’ will be bust inside a month,” insisted one commentator. “Bleeding heart numbskulls the three of them!” “It won’t take long for Botley hand-wringers to express fears about criminals working a short distance from where children are tucking into their happy meals,” added another.
Tess Taylor can laugh about it now. “I think those are some of the only negative comments we’ve had,” she says. “We’ve had a really positive reception—people are supportive. We’re quite lucky to have set up in Oxford, a place that is engaged with social issues in general.”
The idea for Tap Social was born in London in the early years of the last decade. Amy Taylor met now-partner Humpherson when he interviewed her for a job; Tess Taylor arrived from Canada, where she and Amy were brought up by English parents, and worked at two of London’s well-known craft beer pubs, CASK Pub & Kitchen in Pimlico and the Craft Beer Co. in Brixton. Elliott was an old friend of Humpherson’s, enlisted as the plan started to take shape.
The motivation was simple. “As a criminal barrister, you get to see a large number of clients for a short period of time,” says Humpherson, now 35. “You might get a good result, but then you don’t see them again, until you do—and there’s not a great deal you could have done about that. The damage was done in the five, 10 years running up to that. It was depressing to just be there right at the end, when it was too late.”
Having decided London had enough breweries, the four settled on Oxford, where Humpherson and Elliott had been undergraduates together, and where Amy Taylor had recently got a place on a PhD program. It was a good choice. Not far from Oxford is Spring Hill, an “open prison,” meaning that prisoners can leave during the day for work. This is an unusual arrangement—only about 10% of prisoners in the U.K. live in open prisons—but it’s crucial to Tap Social’s model, as it allows the brewery to employ people before they have to face the multiple difficulties that come with leaving prison.
“As a criminal barrister, you get to see a large number of clients for a short period of time. You might get a good result, but then you don’t see them again, until you do—and there’s not a great deal you could have done about that. The damage was done in the five, 10 years running up to that. It was depressing to just be there right at the end, when it was too late.”
COVID, of course, put a stop to that: British prisons locked inmates in their cells for 23 hours a day. Before then, about 30% (“A minimum working target,” according to Humpherson) of employees were prison leavers, and figures are nudging up towards that total again now. Over the past six years, around 40 prison leavers have worked with Tap Social on a “deepest intervention” basis (a minimum of nine months’ work), across the business. Somewhere between 20 and 30 prison leavers, meanwhile, have undergone shorter work-placement contracts, with training.
Spring Hill is not the only prison that Tap Social works with. Artwork on cans and the walls of the White House is produced by prisoners at HMP Huntercombe, where most of the residents are foreign nationals. Both prisons are male, meaning all of those who’ve worked with Tap Social have been men. That’s regrettable but unavoidable, Tess Taylor explains: 95% of prisoners in British jails are men, and the closest women’s prison to Oxford is on the other side of Gloucester, 50 miles to the west.
The nature of an open prison is that—contrary to what many imagine—the residents have committed serious crimes, and are serving out the last part of lengthy sentences. This means those who work with Tap Social have generally committed serious crimes, a fact that has given some observers pause. Is it morally right that they should be given a leg-up?
Humpherson tackles the question head on. “98% of people in prison are going to not be in prison at some point,” he says. “So fine, punish them—but there’s going to be a point when they’re out again. And then what? [The British state has] spent £300,000 ($353,000) locking them up for 10 years. Given that, why wouldn’t you want them to be a reasonably well-adjusted person who can rejoin society?”
It’s a point lost on many. To those for whom prison is something that happens to other people, the iniquities of a system that disproportionately deals with minority (25% of prisoners are from a minority ethnic background, as opposed to 12% of the wider population) and working-class people, that is still prone to false convictions, and that is struggling under the weight of years of underinvestment, can seem abstract at best.
This means that the realities of what happens when people leave prison are best laid out in terms that the listener understands, even if that doesn’t reflect the views of the Tap Social team. “I recently did a talk with the Women’s Institute,” Tess Taylor, 31, adds. “And someone said, ‘The people on the bar, pouring drinks, are they from prison?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘a lot of them are.’ She said she was uncomfortable with that, with her daughter being served by that person. I asked her: Would you rather he was serving your daughter drinks, or unemployed and homeless, on the street corner, when your daughter is walking home?”
Tap Social moved into its new brewery in May. It’s a classic industrial-estate unit, box-shaped but airy, housing a 17-barrel, single-infusion, two-vessel brewhouse; a kegging machine; and a canning machine. Brewing takes place two or three times a week under the aegis of 43-year-old head brewer Jason Bolger, a native of Sebewaing, Michigan. He came to the U.K. after online training at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago, subsequently joining Tap Social right at the outset, six years ago.
It was the concept that drew him in. “I feel like we all need to make the world a better place,” he says. “That’s what I really wanted to do. To use my passion to do that just feels good.” Laidback but hands-on, a baseball cap permanently lodged on his head, Bolger seems well-suited to the job. Brewing can be tough and dull, but his enthusiasm and willingness to get his hands dirty (“I won’t give anyone a job I wouldn’t do myself”) are clearly infectious—and, anyway, as he points out, making beer is actually the perfect fit for what Tap Social is trying to achieve.
“You can come in with zero experience,” he says. “None whatsoever. If you have a good attitude, and you’re willing to work, you’ll be fine. And there’s progression—you can work your way up. I don’t think that’s the case in some industries.”
The beer range is fairly classic for a modern British craft brewery: IPA (which makes up close to 50% of sales), American Pale Ale, Session Pale Ale, Lager, and an Oatmeal Stout, Bolger’s favorite but a slower seller than the others. There’s occasional cask ale, and plenty of collaborations.
Bolger’s office is sparse but tidy; next door, delivery man Suhail’s (last name withheld) office is busier but nonetheless a model of order. Cans are stacked on one side, flat-packed paper boxes on another, rolls of labels on shelves in the corner. Suhail, who came to Tap Social via Aspire, a charity in Oxford, two years ago, after completing his prison sentence, is visibly proud of how well-ordered, how tidy, everything is.
Although he doesn’t drink, the job suits him, he says. “I couldn’t work in a job where the boss is watching you 24/7, making you nervous,” the 42-year-old says. “Everyone here is friendly; you don’t feel like you’re working under someone, you feel like you’re your own boss. We’re all coming in to get a job done.”
Soft-spoken but happy to chat, he’s clearly taken on the ethos of the company. He shows me the app on his phone that divides deliveries into different categories: wholesale, home, courier, and so on. “I enjoy the challenge,” he says. “I like meeting new people—you could say I’m the face of the company out there. I see our customers more than anyone else, I can tell them about new products, what we’re doing.”
If the White House is open, chances are Daley (last name withheld) will be there. The 37-year-old works front-of-house, serving food, meeting and greeting, pouring pints, on his feet for hour after hour. “I’m literally here every day—long shifts, too, from 11 in the morning to closing time,” says Daley, who grew up in Kilburn, North London. “Some of the days are tough physically and mentally, but the benefits outweigh that.”
Owned by Oxford college Brasenose and run by Tap Social since 2020, The White House is a solid 19th-century pub, set amidst well-to-do terraced streets a stone’s throw from the River Thames. A large concrete backyard, decorated with potted plants, sits in the shadow of mature trees; inside, the pub is spotlessly clean and eclectically decorated, from the paintings by residents of HMP Huntercombe to large Persian rugs. 12 beers, including two cask ales, are on offer alongside an extensive menu and other drinks.
“When you’re in prison, you think the rest of society hates you. When you come here and people know you’ve been to prison but they’re still warm to you, still happy to sit down and have a conversation, it makes you realize you can be part of this life.”
It’s a place to be proud of, and Daley, laidback and thoughtful, clearly is. A former drug addict, he spent a number of years in prison for bank robbery. “I made a lot of bad decisions,” he says. Prison was another trial. “You spend so much time in a little cell, you become very socially awkward, you don’t know how to interact with people,” he says. “This place forces you to become social again. Having conversations with regulars, or even people who just come in once—it’s great to have that confidence and to enjoy life a little bit.”
Daley is one of a number of ex-prisoners working at The White House. Tony (surname withheld at his request), also 37, also a Londoner, from the eastern fringes around suburban Chingford, is another. He was involved in gang-related violence; 10 years of prison later, he ended up in Spring Hill, and heard about Tap Social from a fellow prisoner. “He was a chef in the kitchen, and he was telling me how lovely it was,” he says. “My first day out, I came to Oxford, and something about the city just hit me. I knew I needed to be here. I decided I was going to work for Tap Social one day.”
And that’s how it has worked out. He started in the kitchen but it didn’t suit him, so he tried front-of-house. Like Daley, it’s been a joy, he says: “I just love socializing again. That’s what prison is, right? It takes away that social element.”
That aspect is clearly crucial to both men. “When you’re in prison, you think the rest of society hates you,” says Daley. “When you come here and people know you’ve been to prison but they’re still warm to you, still happy to sit down and have a conversation, it makes you realize you can be part of this life.”
Steve would surely agree with that, not least on the value of talking. He credits the turnaround in his life not just to Tap Social but also to therapy he underwent in prison, which helped him take crucial steps away from his old life, spent between the neighborhoods of Brixton and Fulham in London, to how he lives now. Having served just under 15 years in prison, his passion for cooking led to an interview with Tap Social and a job offer.
He’s effusive in his praise for the Tap Social team, who’ve helped him in a variety of ways, including, crucially, housing. He’s been promoted twice since he joined the White House team, to junior sous chef, working with head chef Michael Carr, whose CV includes stints at Michelin-starred restaurants like The Walnut Tree in Abergavenny, Wales.
“The best thing about this place is the people,” he says. “The management is so good. Paul has set up a legal surgery [office hours] once a week, so staff can get free legal advice from a fully qualified barrister. I can’t sing their praises enough.”
It was Tap Social that inspired Joel Grates to set up his own business, the wholesale coffee company and cafe New Ground, along similar lines—or, more specifically, it was Tap Social’s first ex-prisoner employee who provided the inspiration. “Tap Social’s first recruit was a guy called Colin,” he says. “He said to me—you’ve got to help people like me. We need work, we’re hungry, we’re remorseful, and we don’t have the opportunities.”
Grates, 37, and business partner Dickon Morris, 35, founded New Ground in late 2018, in Oxford. Inspired by Tap Social’s commitment to quality products, they focused on a shared passion: coffee. Progress in the era of COVID has been slow but steady: four prison-leavers have worked with the company so far, with two more currently being recruited.
Some have stayed with the company, and others have moved on. “That’s a success,” says Grates. “If people use our business as a way to build confidence and skills before moving on elsewhere, we completely deem that a success.”
This fall, they’re launching a training program in order to increase the number of people they can help. “We’ve got quite a large wholesale network now, and since Brexit there’s a gap in hospitality,” he says. “Our customers are desperate for trained coffee professionals. There’s a finite amount of people we can employ, but we can train a lot more. We believe in second chances.”
A second chance is what Lee Wakeham, founder of HM Pasties in Manchester, got after two periods in prison for violence-related crimes in his youth. After the second stint, he took a job at a lighting company. “They were patient, they stuck with me,” he says. “They could and probably should have fired me, but they gave me the wraparound support I needed.”
Now 46, Wakeham has spent the past decade giving other ex-prisoners that sort of opportunity, firstly as part of the Salford Prison Project and, since 2017, with HM Pasties, a bakery in Bolton, near Manchester, where 40% of the employees are ex-prisoners, drawn from HMP Thorn Cross, an open prison. The pies are now sold at the Etihad Stadium, home of Premier League champions Manchester City, and elsewhere.
Wakeham is clear that this is not an easy way to do things. “It’s not a quick fix,” he says. “It takes a lot of hard work, and you’re going to get it wrong as often as you get it right. Of the 18 people we’ve employed [from prison] we’ve had some real difficult times with a lot of them. We’ve got to be honest with employers about what they’re taking on.”
Much still needs to change, he adds. “If we’re asking employers to do better, then we need to ask the prisons, the Ministry of Justice, to do that as well,” he says. “I’ve been working with one prison, waiting 18 months to get someone out to work with us. I’ve been working for two-and-a-half years with a maximum-security prison to get a bakery set up inside. The prison system needs to modernize.”
If things are frustrating in the U.K., it’s a whole different world across the Atlantic. The United States has the largest incarcerated population in the world: Around 2 million people are held in its prisons and jails, according to Vera, an organization that aims to end the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty. Nearly 16% of people imprisoned around the world are in American prisons; nowhere else locks up so many people, either as a total number or proportionately.
“We’ve got quite a large wholesale network now, and since Brexit there’s a gap in hospitality. Our customers are desperate for trained coffee professionals. There’s a finite amount of people we can employ, but we can train a lot more. We believe in second chances. ”
Greg Thompson, 64, used to be part of that 2 million population. The co-founder of Prison Break Brewery started doing drugs as a teenager, quit school, and ended up smuggling marijuana and cocaine into the U.S. “We had a plane,” Thompson, who lives in Riverside County, California, says. “We were bringing pot into the country, kilos of coke. I went in prison in ’88.” He served just under six years, returning to prison in 1996 for a marijuana case in Rhode Island, for which he served nine years. His final sentence, 10 years, began in 2006.
Towards the end of that last stretch, a fellow inmate told him of plans to set up a publishing business that would allow prisoners to submit manuscripts. They kicked the idea around for a while, eventually coming to the realization there were other things they could do to help ex-prisoners—such as brewing. The result is Out Of Bounds Nation, Inc, a company “that provides assistance to those with a criminal past to become entrepreneurs, gain an education, and find worthwhile employment,” of which Prison Break Brewing is one part.
“It’s so difficult getting out of prison [in the U.S.],” Thompson says. “In 2016, when I got out to the federal halfway house, I was working for minimum wage, $10 an hour, at a fulfilment center. When you have that kind of job, you don’t really see yourself going anywhere, and that’s where recidivism comes in, especially for people like me who have been involved in drugs.”
The U.S. is full of socially minded breweries, but the focus is—understandably—often on racial justice and the environment rather than prisoner rehabilitation. One similar business to Prison Break was the high-profile TRU Colors, a controversial brewery in Wilmington, North Carolina, which employed active gang members in an attempt to “end the cycle of gang violence”; it closed in September in the wake of two murders at the home of founder George William Bagby Taylor, Jr’s son.
COVID means that Prison Break is still at an early stage, but the plan is to employ ex-prisoners and give 5% of proceeds to victims of crime. The company, which contract brews at Great South Bay Brewery in New York and aims to expand to other states, has helped one ex-prisoner so far, Nicole Lee, with funding for a Cicerone qualification at San Diego State University.
Their packaging is hard-hitting. Shanked, a Blonde Ale, has an image of a handmade shank, an infamous prison blade, on the label. “We’re not making light of some of the most negative elements of prison, we’re trying to turn that into a positive force,” says Thompson. “It makes people curious. We don’t have the money that other companies do, and this helps us to get people’s attention.”
It’s early days, but Thompson has big plans. “I want to have multiple breweries around the country,” he says. “I want to be able to tell people getting out of prison—if I can do this, with my lack of education, you can too. I want to be a big entity. The bigger we are, the more we can draw attention to the problem.”
If he wants an idea of what can be achieved, then Oxford would be a good place to start. A lot has been done in a short period. “We’re definitely feeling our way as we go,” says Amy Taylor, laughing. “We’ve decided that the next few years are going to be about focusing on what we’ve got now, and making that work. But we’re always open to new opportunities, and we like to be able to react and be flexible.”
There are still plenty of frustrations. The inability to employ those in prison for short sentences—who are much more likely to reoffend—is a problem. “A big success for us would be shifting the policy debate so that a much greater proportion of the prison population were in open prisons, or it was easier for them to get day release,” says Humpherson.
How do they think they’re doing? “It’s really hard to measure,” says Amy Taylor. “The more beer we make, the more we can get cans in people’s hands, and they’re faced with the information that’s on there, the better. Hopefully that will get people thinking about it. We’re doing OK, but there’s a long way to go.” Humpherson says the signs are good. “In terms of other employers, I’ve seen a huge change,” he says. “In my inbox, in [other] people saying, ‘I’d like to do that.’”
The best way to judge how they’re doing, perhaps, is the impact on the lives of those who have come through Tap Social. Many have moved on, mostly successfully (94% haven’t re-offended, according to Tap Social’s own figures, compared to a national average of 50%), and some have set up their own businesses. Daley has plans for a business making training supplements; Suhail is hoping to get into import-export at some point. All of them feel they now have a future.
“This is a great model, a fantastic model,” says Tony. “There are other jobs you can do from prison, but they just want their pound of flesh. As prisoners you become dehumanized—and when you come here, you’re re-humanized. They really care. I believe in them, and I believe in this company.”
Words by Will HawkesIllustrations by Ryan Troy Ford
