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Ruth Wyner writes following the Court of Appeal verdict

I have had a lovely Christmas despite the decision on the appeal. Certainly disappointing. But it was good to have Christmas to be with the family and deal with the immediate angst.

My immediate and urgent concern is to find work and earn a living. I couldn't job-hunt while on bail but now I can.

It may not be possible for me to work in homelessness again but I may be able to help other charities with their fundraising and I now have an abiding interest in prison reform, quite a live issue at the moment - the Lord Chief Justice and the Chief Inspector of Prisons are both urging for arrangements to be made to send fewer people to prison. With the two major political parties vying to be seen as toughest on crime, there's a real struggle ahead.

Approximate justice
by Ruth Wyner

Over the past couple of years I've learnt that justice, British justice included, can only be approximate. Two years of being dragged through the courts has reminded me that humans are fallible, and that our institutions are too.

It's a salutary experience, having to stand in the dock in court while the truth twists and turns, while people say things about you and your actions that you know not to be right, but you cannot speak up to defend yourself. By the time you do get the chance to do so, considerable damage can have been done. And the effect of your eventual statements are then superseded by the cross-examination, which for me consisted of being shouted and sneered at by the prosecution for three days. I felt horrified as reality snaked out through the doors and windows of the court.

It must be unreal, to be convicted of knowingly allowing drug supply at a day centre when I, along with the staff team, had put so much energy in trying to counter the increasing invasion of heroin into the homeless scene, putting stricter policies into place, banning people, setting up a system of policing the toilets (which is where we reckoned most of the illegal activity happened), and hassling for more and better police liaison.

We did get that liaison, at inspector and beat bobby level, but these two officers knew nothing of the police operation against us. How could we liaise effectively when one long arm of the law when it didn't know what the other long arm was doing?

The crunch came, though we didn't realise it at the time, when the liaison inspector asked to see the names in our ban book. We refused, citing our agency's confidentiality policy. The appeal court judges criticised us for not taking this request to our trustees. As usual I had to sit schtumm while reality was twisted again: a trustee had been present when the request was made, and had backed us up.

We were presented with various other "should haves", all of which might make sense in hindsight but at the time were not up for consideration. How can you be expected to act against something if you don't know it's happening? Something shown up by a police eye-in-the-sky surveillance camera isn't necessarily apparent from the ground.

"It happens all the time," a journalist told me. She was talking about injustice: "Didn't you know?" Well, actually I didn't, and wonder how naïve one can be. That the appeal court refused to quash my conviction was to be expected, other people have said. It would have been too risky to do otherwise, would have given out the wrong messages. The decision was policy driven.

Now it's over and I can at least lick my wounds, try to leave it behind and thank my stars that my 5-year sentence was reduced and that I'm out of prison, not like the other 66,000 who continue to languish there.

I've spent 20 years working in homelessness and know that approximate justice, even blatant injustice, are part of the fabric for the homeless. Surely basic shelter is a human right, and food and warmth too. Instead they get woefully inadequate services. Despite the government spin, we know that there are just not enough beds for homeless people, or detox and rehab places for those who are addicted to drink or drugs and want to try to give up. And, since my arrest, there's a much more cautious welcome at shelters and hostels for those who won't or can't.

Where is the justice for a street homeless person who's been in council care, has suffered abuse, has been in and out of mental hospital, who's suffered a breakdown, has been in the forces, has just come out of prison, has been thrown out of home?

I am astonished that there has been so little in the media about the homeless this Christmas, one of our coldest Christmases for some time. The main story we got was Louise Casey, the homelessness tsar, defending the government's campaign to stop us giving to beggars this winter. Begging is after all rather disgusting: we'll have none of it. Rather extreme, but any agency challenging the government policy is these days openly threatened with loss of funding.

Now, thankfully, Crisis has had the courage to make a bit of a fuss about the shortage of night shelter places this winter. The government has refused to fund many of the usual cold weather shelters: after all, putting people into basic night shelters is, like begging, pretty disgusting. Shelters don't solve homelessness, we all know that, but people are sleeping out there, in the snow and ice for goodness sake. A roof over your head is better than nothing, can solve the problem for that one night, staff can help you find other solutions and, at the bottom line, it'll keep you alive.

All this reminds me of what happened in Manchester, maybe 15 years ago. They closed the grotty old night shelter because it wasn't good enough, and in the hope that having people on the streets would force the council to provide something better. Principles versus humanity. Former shelter residents did end up sleeping on the streets but no super hostel was forthcoming and eventually the old shelter had to be reopened again. For those sleeping rough it was no doubt a welcome return to a pragmatic approach.

The government has made an effort to address the homelessness problem. It's set up a Rough Sleepers Unit and put up some extra money, mainly to provide more housing support for people moving into their own places, and for street work. But no extra beds. No more institutional shelters and hostels. They are not acceptable, don't fit the New Labour image of how we should be. And homelessness agencies are having to keep quiet about it: the price they pay for taking New Labour's shilling. Not surprisingly, there have been dark mutterings about government takeover of the homeless sector, about agencies becoming subsumed under the statutory umbrella.

The fact is that shelters can be a lifeline for many, and there are a lot of people who can't cope with their own place, need an institution, but nowhere else will have them. The situation is hardly surprising: with the advent of community care we lost thousands of institutional bedspaces. People who need that sort of help aren't suddenly going to stop existing.

The only institution that is expanding is the prison estate. Perhaps that's it: throw the addicts, the drunks, all the street people into clink. That'll get them out of sight. It will also damage them further. I know from personal experience just how awful and injurious our prisons are. Not a case of principles versus humanity this time, more like doing without both. But no-one in the homeless sector would be able to complain, for fear of losing their funding. Our only hope is that the national agencies like Crisis and Shelter and the National Homeless Alliance will continue to find the courage to speak out against injustice among the homeless. Local groups are just too vulnerable, as I know to my cost.

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