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VPSG was established in 1994 to highlight problems and campaign for the better care of vegans detained in police custody or within the prison system.
It offers information on any aspect of veganism, conducts research on any product, and has a free helpline available seven days a week for the use of police stations, prisons or any vegan prisoner who requires information or seeks our help.
Our services are provided free of charge.
The majority of nutritional information is obtained from The Vegan Society, who have their own Prison Liaison Officer, who deals with the majority of prisoner enquiries.
The main role of the VPSG is to try to ensure that rules/regulations are updated, to compile information from vegan prisoners and to campaign to ensure that equal opportunities are offered to any prisoner following a vegan lifestyle.
Although The Vegan Society deal with the larger proportion of prisoner enquiries VPSG takes on individual test cases, allocating the prisoner a Case Worker which enables us to be kept informed as to how prisons are progressing over the years when dealing with vegan prisoners.
Amongst these cases are prisoners who have received sentences of just a few months to others who have received much longer sentences.
These test cases have also constantly supplied us with information on problem areas that different police stations and prisons encounter when dealing with this minority group and also on how they try to deal with such problems.
Obviously during this period our Case Workers have also gained considerable experience as to how the Prison System works and the many complications that vegan prisoners encounter in their day-to-day lives. It also highlights which prisons are striving to ensure that this minority group are not discriminated against because of their beliefs whilst under their care.
The purpose of our information pack [distributed to all prisons February 2003] is to help give some overall basic background information on this subject and also to offer some guidance, mainly to prisons, dealing with any strict ethical vegan.
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