Note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You have been a long-time supporter of racial equality and justice issues. What initially brought you to this work?

In 1988, the then-Home Secretary of Government Affairs called me and asked if I, along with a Conservative MP – at the time I was not a member of the Conservative Party and I never have been, I have always been politically neutral – would be willing to put my name to the creation of what became Crime Concern, which is now Catch 22. He raised the issues of alternatives to criminalization, alternatives to custody, community support, alternatives for victims – a whole series of agenda issues that were heart positive issues for me. I was thrilled to accept the mantle.

At the time, I was in my mid-20s. I knew the Home Secretary because I was doing development work in support of assisting urban communities, predominantly Black communities, that had experienced heavy rioting in 1981 and 1985 around the stress of unemployment. The government needed, for lack of a better term, a Black interlocutor, and I was asked to bring that understanding, as well as serious investment in employment and skills training, to those communities.

I have a mission to support and empower the poor. I have been about that since I was 16. My best friend asked me what I thought my purpose in life was, and I said that I wanted to speak up for the poor, and that I wanted to bend the power of the prosperous to the potential of the poor. I have been about that since I was 16, and I’m now 66. That’s a long 50 years of commitment.

I have been actively involved in criminal justice solutions ever since then, and it remains a vivid and passionate issue area for me. I fully recognize that serious and sometimes heinous and dangerous crimes take place and the public are irritated and frustrated – but I also recognize that everyone who has been a perpetrator is also a person, and they have a life that needs to be lived beyond imprisonment, and they need to be able to work, and they need the dignity of being an active citizen. Provided they have paid the price of justice, we should give them the opportunity to stand on their own two feet, and to be a contributor and not a taker. In full recognition of the importance of supporting victims, I fully and absolutely am in favor of helping people find their feet again, and going back to that fundamental presupposition that you are innocent until guilty – and then once guilty, served sentence, innocent again.

What have been the most important takeaways of your experiences so far?

Alongside a couple of my sons, we work across six prisons, from youth offenders institutions to Category B lifers’ prisons. I have actually been in three prisons this week already. If I were to sum up my experience, it would be that the public are absolutely pained with their sense of terror and horror about people who are incarcerated. I can fully understand the deep sense of distress many people feel.

However, my experience across all these prisons is that the vast majority of people inside have let go of the conductive evil and foolishness and danger that got them there and are just awaiting a positive prospect. They need release and the ability to reform themselves before friends and family and the community. I have regular correspondence with men on the inside, and many of them write to me and tell me their lives in enormous depth – one man, I’m on my 7th letter from him, and the first was 132 handwritten pages.

What’s interesting is, the more you connect with these men, the more you discover that they have golden hearts inside what might be a rougher exterior. They are honest about their regrets, they’re keen to be reformed, they’re hungry to be educated, and they are desperate to be a showcase of what a person can become – to their wives, girlfriends, sons, daughters. The pride they have in showing that they are people you can trust is immense.

I know the public out there panic about people with criminal convictions and panic about people in prison, and feel uncomfortable, but that is not my experience in nearly 40 years of this work. The vast majority deserve the dignity of respect for their freedom, the opportunity to work and to be contributors and citizens, and the freedom to step away from a conviction. Once spent and done it should no longer be identified as a marker on their forehead.

Why is it important that we work to increase opportunities and reduce workforce barriers for justice-involved individuals?

As we know, we have a huge issue with the labor force. We have a shortage of active labor in jobs that are the backbone of our economy. On the flip side, in the prison system, we have a ton of available labor, and people who want to be effective citizens, but they are blocked from making that vital and positive contribution which is psychologically critical for them. The wellbeing that comes from work, that comes from being a contributor and not a taker – they all want that.

Those who have done time and have clearly now finished their sentence, they face this false necessity from employers to identify their failure and hold it against them and remind them of that – which is plain illogical, let alone unjust. We have this labor force crisis but we also have a public so panicked about crime that if we do not see these people able to work successfully, we are holding open to them the possibility of the return to foolish activity. We might be creating that cycle of pressure by limiting their employment opportunities and confining them to the least possible positive, when what we really ought to be saying is, let’s give you the best possible positive so you can make your life valuable and your community proud.

We could be creating a positive community of people to solve some of our most intractable problems. But we won’t get to that if we insist on identifying their failure.

What advice would you give companies looking to make a difference?

Companies always want to be the place where the best skills are brought to the forefront – where people can “bring their whole self” to work, and their contributions will be recognized financially and through elevation and training and development. They always say that they want and need the best people. Every company wants that. The only way you can match that is for companies to genuinely ditch the algorithms and invest in identifying who is coming their way or could be coming their way with a personality, skill, awareness, capacity, wherever they got it from, that would be of benefit to the business.

If a business opens up its mind and takes away the restrictive mindset, that gives an incarcerated person the freedom to step forward and know they won’t be shut down at step one. And as soon as that person begins working, they will give their whole heart to it. They will put their soul into it. They will bring their energy and creativity to it. But the employer has to be the one to take the leash off, get rid of the mask, undo the box, untie the capacity and skills of those coming your way, and be willing to be adventurous.

Companies have to be creative about this, and if they are, we could see a torrent of positive people entering our workforce and making a difference to build up a positive community. We have a cynical culture that divides people and marginalizes individuals who are other than us– but that is not the inclusive Britain we want to be in. An inclusive country should include not just race and gender and disability equity, but support for those who come with a past so that it no longer hangs over their present.

What role do businesses play in creating a more fair and equal society? What are the most important steps they can take?

I would hope that every CEO and HR director would agree that the employment pressures are serious and immediate, the skills pressures are vivid, and here is an opportunity for employers from the smallest to the largest to open their doors to this new population. Make a space to tell people they matter, that a business is looking for human beings whose skills and creativities will make the business better in the future. That could be somebody who has done no crime. But that could also be somebody who has never been allowed to be set free because of what happened 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.

Create that space. Then create an entry system that isn't about barriers but is about capacities, skills, creativities, and innovations. Look at people according to what they bring, not what they have done. Then take a chance. Be willing to risk it, and the more companies that risk it – every company can do this – the more they will see that when these skills are brought to legitimate businesses, the benefit is immense. Many companies will now find that the people they bring in, who once thought they had no prospects and now have a prospect, could turn out to be the most loyal, the most dedicated, the most effective. That benefits all of us. This is about building a comprehensive and collectively valuable citizenship culture that treats people, not as what they were, but as the future that they could embrace.

When you aren’t working, what else do you enjoy doing?

But I love working! There isn’t much time I’m not working – being a Member of Parliament is a pretty demanding time commitment, and we are all here as supporters of the Constitution so it can take days upon days of considering issues and legislation and thinking and reading about that. But one of the great joys is that we get to hold a vast number of issue-based events and political conversations about the nature of democracy and the world in which we’re working. Those things aren’t work, they’re life.

So there’s Parliament; I am Chairman of SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London; I am a Professor in Leadership at the Huntsman Business School in the USA; I have a number of voluntary appointments like Vice President of UNICEF – those are not “work” but they are engaging.

When I have just total free time, we have so many wonderful friends and people to be around, for which I am deeply grateful. I love the cinema. We love walking our dogs in the country especially. The celebration of positive lives – there’s a lot of that.

What is a fact about you that would surprise people?

I think I am the only person who has received a strident written opinion on a significant subject in writing from the late Her Majesty the Queen [Elizabeth II]. I received that back in 1979 and I have kept the record of it to this day. That opinion from Her Majesty the Queen was profound in not just expressing what she believed but what she found needed to be changed. The opinion was that Her Majesty finds this issue obnoxious.