Written evidence from Rob Allen

 

  1. I am an independent researcher and consultant and co- founder of Justice and Prisons (www.justiceandprisons.org). From 2005 -10, I was Director of the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College London. I was a specialist adviser to the Select Committee during their Inquiry into Justice Reinvestment from 2008-10.
     
  2. The submission argues that :
    *the government’s approach to reducing crime is confused and incoherent
    *key aspects of the so-called rehabilitation revolution are lacking in evidential support *spending reductions are having serious deleterious consequences in prisons
    *the plans for the Probation service are deeply flawed and
    *alternative models are needed to implement a justice reinvestment approach  

    The Approach to Cutting Crime
     
  3. Changes in infrastructure have confused organisational responsibility for reducing crime and re-offending. Police and Crime Commissioners see it as a core responsibility for their offices but multi agency community safety partnerships are still active at local authority level. The proposed reforms to the prison and probation service will create new and untested ways in which the rehabilitation of offenders will be organised. Electronic monitoring is contracted at a national level, limiting scope for local innovation. Health and education reforms have reduced the incentives for involvement by those agencies in crime reduction activities.
     
  4. There is nevertheless much promise in local interagency practices. Integrated Offender Management and the plans to reduce re-offending in community budget pilot areas look to be well crafted and costed although evidence of impact is not yet widely available. However the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms may complicate the partnership arrangements that are key to these initiatives. It is not clear whether the contributions which local agencies will need to make to resettle short term prisoners will be included and costed in to the rehabilitation contracts   being let by the Ministry of Justice.
     
  5. Similarly, distinctive approaches to young adult offenders which have started to get off the ground in some probation areas may be put at risk if the new contracting arrangements do not specify customised work with this age group. 
     
  6. Overall, the government is missing an opportunity to reduce the size of the prison population and reinvest savings into the community along the lines recommended in the Select Committee’s Justice Reinvestment report. Instead they have made it clear – since autumn 2012 at least - that their aim is to make prison “cheaper not smaller”. The dangers of this approach are discussed below.  Just as enforced contraction provides a positive opportunity to reappraise what the police should be doing, so it does for the criminal justice system as a whole. In straitened times we should be looking to develop a narrower approach to the use of prison and with it a broader approach to community justice.  

Evidence
 

  1. The various measures which make up the so-called “rehabilitation revolution” have different levels of evidential support.
     
  2. The introduction of mandatory supervision of short term prisoners after release has been almost universally welcomed although the way this is structured in the Offender Rehabilitation Bill will lead to high levels of breach action for non- compliance. This is also true of the more punitive community sentences, introduced in the face of evidence about effectiveness. Breach action may well be made more likely by the need to limit the discretion available to supervisors in order to reduce the risk of fraud by providers. The attractiveness of a version of what amounts to a version of Custody Plus to sentencers   could lead  to an increase in ineffective short sentences
     
  3. As for the content of rehabilitation programmes, according to Ministry of Justice   researchers   the effectiveness of mentoring offenders coming out of prison  – the apparent cornerstone of the Government’s  rehabilitative philosophy- is  categorised as  “mixed/promising”.  By contrast, what the evidence does show are some general characteristics of effective work with offenders, whatever the nature of the programme. These are the importance of skilled and trained practitioners, well-sequenced, holistic approaches and the delivery of high quality services and interventions in a joined-up, integrated manner.  Progress in all of these areas would be much more likely by building on the experience of Probation Trusts and their local partners rather than creating yet another elaborate set of structures in great haste.
     
  4. Added risks are contained in the novel form of financing –payment by results –by which it is intended to fund the new structures.  All that can really be said at present is that PBR has  yet   itself to show sufficient results in any area  of social provision to be able to design with any confidence an operating system that does not risk huge unintended consequences. It may well in the end prove neither workable nor desirable.   Failing to mount proper pilot schemes and to wait for their results before rolling out PBR is a serious error in public administration.
     
  5. It is known that officials in the Ministry of Justice themselves consider some aspects of the Transforming Rehabilitation policy to be at high risk of failing.  The views of the Major Projects Authority set up   in the Cabinet office at the behest of the Public Accounts Committee to monitor such risks seem not to be known.
     
  6. As for the government’s policies on prisons, while there is some sense in designating certain prisons   as resettlement prisons, considerable doubts remain about how easily this can be done. The MoJ has also developed plans for large scale prisons- the Titans that the last government eventually rejected – in all but name.    With a population of 670,000 North Wales needs a prison of no more than a thousand. If more progress were being made on the plan in the Coalition agreement to find alternatives for mentally ill and drug addicted offenders, the numbers could be smaller still.  Yet a 2,000 place prison in Wrexham was announced as part of    of a strategy to close costly and inefficient places in the ageing UK prison estate. Work is underway to replace the struggling Feltham Young Offenders Institution with another Titan prison for London. Prior to 2010, the Conservatives were amongst the many critics of so-called Titan prisons, proposing in   Prisons with a Purpose that while they would sell off old prisons  these would be replaced by  building smaller local prisons . Evidence still supports this approach rather than what is now in train.

 

Impact of Cost Reductions
 

  1.                   The Prison Inspectorate reported earlier this year on a local prison where only 10 per cent of prisoners spend ten or more hours out of their cell on a weekday: where a third say they have felt unsafe, and fewer than a third say a member of staff has checked in them personally in the last week to see how they are getting on; where less than a quarter think it easy to see the doctor and a fifth report that they have been prevented from making a complaint.
     
  2.                     This is not an unusually poor establishment. The findings are from what was described as “a very positive inspection: much of what the prison did appeared to be very successful and we identified much good practice that should be emulated elsewhere.”    But running it more cheaply – which inevitably means reducing staff numbers – is unlikely to enable the jail to address its many serious shortfalls:  to increase the number of prisoners – 11% at the moment- who feel that a member of staff has helped them prepare for release; or raise from 23% the number of prisoners who say their cell call bell is normally answered within five minutes.
     
  3.                   At Oakwood, the UK’s biggest cheapest prison with running costs allegedly less than half those of comparable jails, the local independent monitoring board have  described how resource constraints impact on the prison. The board have concerns about the amount of drugs, hooch and mobile phones that are being found and known to be in the prison. Much of the contraband is thrown over the fence, which is alongside a public highway but budgetary restraints have limited security cameras and extra netting in the area. Lack of work placements for prisoners is causing unrest with a fifth of prisoners locked back in their cell at 9.am as a result of not having purposeful activity; prisoners have little faith in the complaints system and do not feel that the staff are able to resolve their issues.
     
  4.                   Currently within prisons there is “too great a degree of tolerance of poor standards and of risk “to borrow a phrase from the Francis report on what happened in Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust. Such a tolerance was one of the reasons why numerous warning signs did not alert the system to developing problems.
     
  5.                   As for rehabilitation within prisons, the Government has announced that it will move towards a system in which certain serious sexual and violent offenders, unless they address their offending behaviour, can expect to serve their entire custodial term in prison. A Recent Inspection of HMP Bure found that as elsewhere in the prison estate, there was a backlog of prisoners requiring sex offender treatment, including a number of indeterminate sentence prisoners who were over their tariff. Despite this , the Government have announced their intention to extend the numbers of prisoners who can expect to serve their entire custodial term in prison unless they address their offending behaviour .
     

Transforming Rehabilitation
 

  1.                   A range of practical objections have been raised to the dismantling of a hundred year old Probation service, not least about the  fragmentation or atomisation of  offender supervision the success of which depends crucially on  cooperation between agencies, reliable exchange of information about risks and needs and partnership working to address them.  Some scepticism is also in order about the viability of funding a whole new tranche of work – the supervision of short term prisoners on release – through savings to be made from the privatisation of the majority of existing probation services.
     
  2.                   There are however two broader questions which have not received so much attention. The first relates to the legitimacy of supervisors in the eyes of those made subject to community sentences and post release supervision.  As noted above, while the Secretary of State for Justice might be right that there's no-one better than a former offender turned good to help someone turn their life around, the evidence about the effectiveness of peer mentoring is more limited. But insufficient consideration has been given to the impact of the changes on the bread and butter supervision requirements that form part of almost all community sentences, all of which are to have a punitive element in the future. How will offenders react to being punished for profit?   Recent Cambridge research has modified earlier  claims that the private sector offers a more courteous prison environment than the public sector  in the light of findings that   public sector establishments were better   at ‘getting things done’; a distinct component of respect in prison, according to prisoners . It is plausible to think this is important to those on probation too. Comparative research also found that in the public sector prisons, officers are confident and knowledgeable, delivering routines that are safer and more reliable than in the private sector. Research on the involvement of private companies in the enforcement of on the spot penalties has found high levels of failure to comply.
     
  3. The second question relates to how magistrates and judges will relate to the implementation of sentences by profit making companies. Their sentencing decisions will suddenly take on a commercial dimension. Work at Rethinking Crime and Punishment a few years ago gave judges and magistrates the chance to visit community based programmes to try to boost their understanding and confidence about what is involved when they impose a particular sentence.  But the context of a corrections market may inhibit these kinds of endeavours. The Guide to Judicial Conduct makes it clear that the requirements of a Justice’s office and terms of service place severe restraints upon the permissible scope of his or her involvement with any commercial enterprise.

 

Conclusions
 

  1.                   The key to successful approaches to reducing crime and re-offending lies in coordination at the local level. The current arrangements are not optimal and with the creation of 21 rehabilitation companies will become even less coherent.
     
  2.                   There is a great deal to be said in the arguments for common boundaries between agencies and the development of services which are designed and paid for jointly by those agencies. As the Howard League Commission on Prisons said in 2010 “the current criminal justice system not only wastes money but it is overly centralised and driven by misleading and often meaningless targets.” It argued that the National Offender Management Service should be broken up and “replaced by an agenda rooted in localism and in engaging with communities to seek meaningful outcomes”.
     
  3.                   On the face of it such an agenda could be driven by the Police and Crime Commissioners as has been proposed by Think Tanks Reform and Policy Exchange. But there are other ways that this could be done. Outside London the democratic mandate, and breadth of competence is simply too thin to carry forward such a wide ranging agenda. Governing through crime commissioners is not necessarily the best way forward. 
     
  4. An alternative model could build on local authorities, developing perhaps a hybrid body to commission services to prevent crime, implement sanctions and rehabilitate offenders. This is a direction of travel proposed by the Local Government Information Unit in their 2009 report Primary Justice. Such a model would build in incentives to reduce costly and unproductive imprisonment and invest instead in the kind of targeted measures which reduce crime and demand on the criminal justice system. 
    Such an approach would show that that most of the answers to crime and public safety lie not with the police but with the social agencies.



    October 2013