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The work of the All-Party Parliamentary Penal Affairs Group June 2010-July 2012
Prisoner Rehabilitation:
A jail sentence shouldn’t be about society’s revenge, but rather a chance to change
the direction of a life.
Lord Corbett, Chairman, All-Party Parliamentary Penal Affairs Group 2002-2012
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The Prison Reform Trust aims to create a just, humane and effective penal system.
We do this by inquiring into the workings of the system; informing prisoners, staff and the
wider public; and by influencing parliament, government, and officials towards reform.
© 2012 Prison Reform Trust
The Prison Reform Trust is grateful to the Barrow Cadbury Trust for its kind support.
All rights reserved
First published in 2012 by Prison Reform Trust
ISBN: 978-1-908504-02-9
Photo credit: Andrew Aitchison www.prisonimage.org
For more information contact the Prison Reform Trust
15 Northburgh Street
London
EC1V OJR
020 7251 5070
www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk
[email protected]
Registered charity in England & Wales no. 1035525
Company limited by guarantee no. 2906362
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Prisoner Rehabilitation:
the work of the All-Party Parliamentary Penal Affairs Group 2010-2012
CONTENTS
Foreword
iii
2010
22 June - Vulnerable women in the justice system
1
6th July - Crispin Blunt MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Justice
7
19 October - Aileen Murphy, National Audit Office
13
2 November - Children and young people in the criminal justice system
21
7 December - Restorative justice
29
2011
18 January - The Archbishop of Canterbury
37
1 February - Perspectives on Breaking the Cycle
43
15 March - Toe by Toe: empowering prisoners to rehabilitate prisoners
49
10 May - Nick Hardwick CBE, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons
55
21 June - Arts in Prison
61
28 June - Rt. Hon. Kenneth Clarke MP, QC, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of
State for Justice
67
18 October - Community Justice
73
22 November - The Sentencing Council: 18 months on
79
2012
24 January - Multi-faith prison chaplaincy and community chaplaincy
85
6 March - Public or private prisons?
91
24 April - Working in prison
99
15 May - Youth Justice Board
107
19 June - Prisons and Probation Ombudsman
111
26 June - Intermediaries for vulnerable defendants
117
3 July - The future place of resorative justice in the criminal justice system
123
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Foreword
The All-Party Parliamentary Penal Affairs Group aims to increase its members’ knowledge of
penal affairs and to work through parliamentary channels for reform of the penal system. With
the prison population in England and Wales now above 85,000 despite cross-party agreement
on the need to reduce numbers and at a time of radical cuts in public expenditure, there has
never been a greater need for an active and informed group.
This report comprises presentations made to the group between the general election in May
2010 and the summer recess in July 2012. They highlight good practice and innovation that
should be supported regardless of the austere financial climate – indeed, in many cases the
urgency and importance is heightened by these challenging times. Together they provide
evidence that prompts important questions about fairness, effectiveness and value for money
across much of the criminal justice system.
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale had been the elected chair of the group in each year from 2002 until
his death in February of this year. Robin believed that a jail sentence should not be about
society’s revenge, but rather a chance to change the direction of a life. The Robin Corbett
Award for Prisoner Rehabilitation has been established in his memory. It will be presented each
year, at a meeting of the group, to a small charity that has made a significant contribution to
prisoner rehabilitation.
Our election as co-chairs of the group in 2012 will, we hope, ensure active interest in both
Houses of Parliament. We are delighted that Claire Perry MP as vice chair and Lord Hodgson
of Astley Abbotts as the group’s secretary will continue to provide support and guidance. There
are 99 Members of Parliament and 95 Peers in membership of the group.
Finally we would like to thank the Barrow Cadbury Trust, who supports the Prison Reform Trust
to provide the secretariat, company secretary of the Prison Reform Trust Geoff Dobson OBE,
who is clerk to the group and Julia Braggins our minute taker, for their valuable assistance.
General Lord Ramsbotham GCB, CBE
The Rt Hon Paul Goggins MP
Co- Chairs, All-Party Parliamentary Penal Affairs Group
Summer 2012
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2010
22 June 2010: Vulnerable women in the justice system womens’ centres and the Corston agenda.
This meeting was held with the Women’s National Commission.
Speakers:
Clare Jones, Joint Chief Executive, WomenCentre, Calderdale and Kirklees and Chair of
Women’s Centre Forum
Rokaiya Khan, Chief Executive, Together Women, Yorkshire and Humberside
Pip Tibbetts, Partnerships Manager, Bradford, West Yorkshire Probation Area
Sister Lynda Dearlove, Director, Women at the Well, King’s Cross, London
Clive Chatterton, Governing Governor, HMP and YOI Styal.
And Gemma, Soraya and Dorothy, who attend the centres.
Lord Corbett opened the meeting, with special thanks to Baroness Gould and the Women’s
National Commission with whom the meeting had been organised. He was delighted that
Baroness Corston could join the meeting, and extended a particular welcome to all new
MPs and peers for this first meeting of the new Parliament. He mentioned the report of the
group’s work during the last session, Too Many Prisoners, which was sent to all those who
had expressed an interest. He welcomed early indications of the new Government’s
thinking about spending on prisons – whatever the reason. He then went on to welcome
the evening’s speakers, starting with Clare Jones, joint chief executive of WomenCentre,
Halifax, and Chair of the Women’s Centres Forum, who would set the scene for the meeting.
Clare Jones explained that the Women’s Centres Forum was the new umbrella body for the
38 women’s community and diversion projects now operating across England and Wales.
This gave her a good insight into what was going on across so many areas, to provide ‘the
holistic and women-centred community-based approaches, offering real alternatives to
custody and opportunities for women. You will hear more about the situations in the lives of
some of these women that result in their offending in the first place, and how they get pulled
into a cycle that is impossible to get out of without some real support, and that’s what our
projects are there to provide.
It is fantastic to have Baroness Corston here, because it was from the recommendations in
her report that we have been able to make the case for monies to be made available for our
projects to be run, to be able to make differences to people’s lives. The results show the
impact this work is having. The problem for us is that funding is only available until March
2011. We are working with 2,000 very vulnerable women, enabling them to keep out of the
criminal justice system and to make significant differences in their lives. Our main concern is
that we will go back to square one by the next financial year, unless we have commitments
that there will be some sustainability.
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My day job is as joint chief executive of WomenCentre, formerly known as Calderdale
Women’s Centre but now working with Kirklees as well. We offer a one stop shop. Every
project works slightly differently, but the big similarity is that we trust the value of the women
themselves, and build up a trusting relationship with each individual. We believe in those
women, and we understand the context of those women’s lives. Many have had childhoods
that have been full of abuse and neglect, and for many their day to day lives include
substance misuse, domestic violence, mental health issues, housing issues, debt, finance
issues, homelessness: a whole range of issues that really need specific help to help people
make differences.
I’m now going to hand over to Clive Chatterton, Governor of Styal Prison, who is going to
talk about his experience of working in the women’s estate.
Clive Chatterton thanked the group for the opportunity to speak. He was really grateful,
because he felt quite strongly about this issue. He continued: ‘I joined the Prison Service
thirty five years ago, and over that time I have served in fourteen male establishments – all
kind of establishments, top security, Victorian locals, remand homes, juvenile
establishments, and I got to the point after all those years coming through the ranks that I
thought I’d seen most things. But I got more than a slight shock last July when I was given
the opportunity to go and run Styal, the third prison that I’d governed. When I got there I
was quite shocked by what I found. So much so that the first couple of months while I was
there, driving home past the airport, I was thinking ‘Am I up for this? Can I handle it? What’s
this about?’ because I’d never seen anything like it in my life. I asked myself: was I going
soft?
For all those years, being so close to the criminal justice system, I was unsighted to the
issues in women’s establishments. And it struck me that if I was unsighted, if I hadn’t been
exposed to these things, there must be lots of my colleagues in other criminal justice
agencies who were also unsighted. The Baroness in her report uses the phrase that the
statistics about female offenders are ‘shocking’, and that has stuck with me since I read it.
I’m not attempting to be a judge and jury. But one of the things that troubled me on those
drives home in the early months was the level of self harm. I’d never experienced anything
like it, and I know my colleagues in male prisons hadn’t. In a male prison almost twice the
size, you’d probably have, on a daily basis, about half a dozen prisoners on ACCT
procedures – at risk of self harm. At Styal there are about fifty a day, on special observation
for self harm.
The second thing that struck me was the level of mental health issues. The place generally
runs on its medications. A lot of the ladies are substance abusers and anything from 4060% can be on methadone maintenance programmes. I’ve never seen such a concentration
of damaged fragile people. Trained prison officers, dedicated committed professionals who
do a fantastic job, are being asked to look after people who have clearly got severe mental
health issues, and a large percentage of the population have got other social care needs.
We are trying to do something that we’re very good at, but it’s not what we were trained for.
The other thing that struck me was the use of short sentences: there are hundreds.
Yesterday I got the stats to prepare for this meeting. 107 ladies are on remand: we can make
an educated guess that probably 50% are not going to receive a custodial sentence. 119
prisoners are doing 12 months or less: 72 of them six months or less. I’ve done a
presentation to the North West Criminal Justice Boards, and one of the slides I used was
from a two month period last year. During October and November at Styal we received 34
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ladies doing eight days or less. Eight of those were sentenced to one day. One lady was
discharged before she slept for the night. She was a fine defaulter. Quite frankly I find that
startling. I’m not judge and jury and I’m not saying I want to be. I would like to inform the
discussion. If I am asked in my professional capacity about short sentences – the Prison
Governors’ Association (PGA) has made a statement on short sentences, but these are my
own views - when I see a young lady that I saw last year, with a ligature which left her
unconscious, and if we hadn’t rescued her she would have died, almost every part of her
body was covered with slashes, she then set fire to herself, and received burns that meant
that again she almost died, and when she had recovered from that she drank disinfectant….
And I am asked: do short sentences work? I remain to be convinced by that.
Clare Jones thanked Clive Chatterton and introduced the next speaker, Rokaiya Khan,
Chief Executive, Together Women, Yorkshire and Humberside.
Rokaiya Khan began by explaining that the Together Women Programme (TWP) was one of
the two pilot demonstration projects following Baroness Corston’s recommendations. She
continued: ‘We set up one stop shop centres across Yorkshire and Humberside providing a
range of support structures for women at every stage of the criminal justice pathway. We
also provided services for women at risk of offending, from first time offences right through
to women being released from prison. The pilot demonstration project ran for just under
three years, and the model was to work with a range of existing voluntary sector
organisations and services that provide healthcare, benefits advice, access to education
and employment, bringing those services together within a gender specific centre. This was
modelled around breaking the barriers of access to services for women offenders, so we
provided childcare, and some of the therapeutic elements that the women required, as well
as dealing with some of the challenges and addressing their offending behaviour.
We are awaiting the results of an independent evaluation but the indications are that in any
one year we have provided support for 1500 women. For us, the challenge was around
sustainability. How could we mainstream our services within local commissioning? We have
been fairly successful in attracting gender specific commissioning, from local authorities, the
police and the probation service, to provide a range of different interventions. In Bradford
we run intensive alternative to custody orders. That’s a particular pathway of addressing
intensive support for women on the cusp of custody. The compliance rate for women on
these orders is nearing 90%. We’ve done lots of work with sentencers because it’s about
providing a robust package, so that they can have some faith that it’s not a soft option, and
that women are going to need to address the root causes of their offending.
We did a cost benefit analysis recently around what it costs to support a woman in a
community based intervention like ours. To provide intensive support for a woman for up to
six months costs under £1,000. And you’ll know that keeping a woman in custody for a
year costs in the region of £40,000. So it absolutely makes sense to invest in community
services like ours.
One of the things I’m particularly proud of is the ground-breaking work we’ve done with
West Yorkshire Probation, who have taken bold decisions about investing in a community
service like ours. I’d like to introduce you to Pip Tibbetts, Partnerships Manager, Bradford
Probation, who’s going to tell you more.’
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‘After TWP came to our area, we decided that we wanted to do things differently with
women. Every district now has a link manager for women offenders whose responsibility it is
to try to educate magistrates to reduce short sentences, custody etc. Every offender
management team, the group of people supervising the 3,500 offenders we are working with
in Bradford at any time, has a semi specialist – that’s somebody who’s learning how to work
with women better, learning about different agencies who provide gender specific services,
and half of their case loads are women.
Then last year we decided we wanted to take it one step further, and to develop a model of
working with the most complex and hard to reach women on our case load, with Women’s
Centre, Calderdale and Kirklees and TWP involved. So we are developing an integrated
women offenders management model, for want of a better phrase, and what that means is
that we are locating three members of our staff in Bradford, two in Leeds, and one in the
WomenCentre in Calderdale and two in Kirklees, whose entire case load is made up of
women. So half of all women are now supervised within a one stop shop centre. The
sentence plan, which is part of a community order, is jointly decided with the women, with a
women’s centre key worker and with the offender manager, and delivered together.
So probation is able to do the bit it does best, and the women’s centres are able to deliver
what they do best – and that is intensive support. In terms of how we risk assess, if the
woman is deemed low risk that means they get a limited package of support from
probation, but that’s most of the women we supervise. We wanted to do more for those
women, so that they don’t become high risk, and so that they don’t get sent to prison. This
model is offering that opportunity. We’ve got an 87% completion rate for community orders
that are supervised at these one stop shops, which is an early indication that this works.
And 88% of all appointments that are offered to women at these one stop shops are kept.
For women who are chaotic, who have complex interconnected needs, this is an amazing
achievement. And I think this is testament to how you can work in partnership to deliver
better services for women.
I am joined today by Gemma, a client attending TWP in Leeds, who will share with you
some of her experiences’.
Gemma began: ’I had a really abusive upbringing and childhood. Even though I did well at
school, and I haven’t been to prison, I must have been lost. I met someone and it wasn’t a
healthy relationship at all. If it wasn’t for TWP I probably wouldn’t have made the right
relationships. I wouldn’t have known how to come across, and meet people easily. I didn’t
like having to go down to the probation to see a probation worker, it felt daunting, and also it
was full of lads and people I didn’t want to get involved with. It put me off track when I
wanted to go in the right direction, for the kids’ sakes. Now I’ve been to TWP I feel like I’ve
benefitted loads from it, and I feel like one day I’ll be able to volunteer, and move on.’
Clare Jones thanked Gemma and then introduced Soraya, from the Women’s Turnaround
Project in Wales.
Soraya began: ‘I’m 31 years of age. I’ve been in and out of gaol from the age of 19, all
short sentences. I never touched drugs at the time. My first experience of drugs was in gaol
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and I came out with a heroin habit. I was ashamed to tell my family – I came from a good
background, and I didn’t want to disappoint them. My pattern then was shop lifting, to fund
my habit. I turned to heroin, crack, alcohol. When I was in gaol last year on my last
sentence, I saw a leaflet about the Women’s Turnaround Project. I picked it up and when I
came out I asked my probation officer to refer me. She said you’ve got to do self referral, so
I did. I was with them in October. By November they’d got me on a methadone script. From
December I was clean of everything. I’m now off my methadone and now my plan is to go to
college and give something back. I’ve got first hand experience, so I can understand where
other people are coming from. If I can help one person like Women’s Turnaround has helped
me it’s a big achievement in my life. I know that with help from Women’s Turnaround and
with the passion in my heart I might one day be the next Baroness up here.’ (Applause)
Clare Jones thanked Soraya and introduced the next speaker Sister Linda Dearlove,
Director of Women at the Well in King’s Cross.
Sister Lynda Dearlove said that she was not going to concentrate on the work of providing
one stop shop support and services for women involved in street based prostitution, but
rather ‘on some of the barriers that seem to be inbuilt within the criminal justice system that
prevent us from providing the best service we could to those women. There are some
particular aspects of the law that do that, for example the overuse of ASBOs to police
prostitution, which isn’t what they were intended to do. The way in which they are being
used, which is hugely geographical, actually prevents the intention of the ASBO which is
about rehabilitation and reform. If the ASBO itself prevents the women from accessing the
support services they need in order to address the offending behaviour then by definition
those women are unable to do what needs to be done. And so those women frequently
breach their ASBOs and they end up in prison.
Once they are in prison, with the disruption to their lives, they lose their benefits, their
accommodation, and quite often their methadone script or whatever else they were having
to enable them deal with their substance misuse. And when they come back out again we
quite often find we are back to square one. But sometimes we are behind that. We paid for a
hotel for someone for thirty weeks, to keep them off the streets, to get their benefits sorted
and to get them housed. The particular issue there was that the local authority was saying
‘we intend to extend the ASBO’. They were taking over as judge and jury from the
magistrates because they decided that it was a foregone conclusion. And so they were not
putting her into the accommodation that should have been available. We had to negotiate
with another borough. In London it’s a particular issue, because each borough is its own
local authority. All of your services are tied to that local connection. So by introducing large
geographical area ASBOs we are preventing women from accessing the services they need.
Another aspect is that conditional cautioning is frequently not being used as we would like
to see it. We are in a situation now in Kings Cross where women are not being cautioned at all.
The first thing that happens is that they have been seen and they are being summonsed to
court to answer a charge of prostitution. But many say they weren’t working at the time. It’s
very hard to prove, if the incident happened a week or ten days ago. Many of us don’t know
what we were doing yesterday. We are managing to challenge that very strongly with a very
good firm of criminal solicitors that we use. But those women may be getting back into the
criminal justice system and back into prison for things that aren’t reasonable.
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Yet another aspect that’s hugely important is that women are quite often issued with a
tagging order. The taggers arrive and they don’t have any photographic ID. So because they
don’t have a passport, or a driving license, or quite often they don’t know where a lot of their
life is let alone their passport or driving licence even if they had one, they are then not
tagged. As a result of not being tagged they are then recalled, and they will be sent to
prison.
Those things are innate within the system. We manage when we know about it to get
solicitors involved and we challenge it. But if those are the things that are recalling women
to prison, how can we say that the criminal justice system in working?’
Sister Lynda Dearlove then introduced the next speaker, Dorothy.
Dorothy began: ‘I’ve lived in the Kings Cross area for the last two or three years. I’ve not
long come out of prison. I was in there for breaching my license due to the postal strike. I
didn’t get my appointments. I didn’t get a chance to appeal because you don’t go back to
court for a breach, you go straight to prison. I’d just got a hostel place, I’d just been put on
a script, I’d got all my benefits sorted out, and being recalled meant that all this went to pot.
Everything stopped. I did my 28 days, and on my release I got my discharge grant of £47
which was supposed to last me till my next benefit. I was also told to approach the housing
office in the borough where I live. I went to the housing office and was told they couldn’t
help me because I wasn’t a priority. I wasn’t vulnerable. Luckily enough I knew the ladies at
the Women at the Well which is just round the corner. So I went round there and Lynda
asked if she could come round with me to housing again. So basically she accompanied me
and dealt with the staff and got me into a hostel where I’m living now. They helped me get
all my stuff sorted back out again. I’m now on a college course. I go to the centre every day
and use their facilities. I get help with my bus fares to go to college, and I get food every
day. There’s acupuncture there, there’s cookery courses, there’s lots of things you can do to
get back on the right path.’
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6th July 2010: Crispin Blunt MP, Parliamentary
Under Secretary of State for Justice
Lord Corbett welcomed the speaker, Crispin Blunt MP, Parliamentary Undersecretary of Sate
for Justice.
Crispin Blunt MP thanked Lord Corbett very much for the invitation, and his introduction. He
was conscious that there were ‘lions of penal affairs in the room’, including one of his
predecessors in the role, and it was a privilege to be invited to speak. He would be speaking
from a prepared text:
‘As a minister for all of two months I am grateful for the opportunity to address colleagues
tonight – on a subject of interest to us all – and certainly of great interest to our constituents.
And one which has been at the forefront of national debate in the wake of Ken Clarke’s speech
last week.
It will not surprise you to learn that I wholly endorse Ken’s typically perspicacious contribution.
I would be excited in any event by the challenge of the post I hold, but am especially
privileged to have the opportunity to work with such a distinguished politician – and one who
clearly wants to get policy making on sentencing and criminal justice to be based on what
actually works. And I am even more excited by the fact that I believe we have a once-in-ageneration opportunity to transform our criminal justice system and that I can contribute to
that change.
That’s why I am spending as much of my time as I can visiting a number of prisons, probation
trusts and youth offending teams across the country. I want to hear the views of staff – the
people at the sharp end who know what does and does not work; to find out more about the
challenges they face on a day-to-day basis; and most importantly to listen to them on how
they would improve the system. I have already met very good people out there, doing some
fantastic work. I know the commitment and professionalism of the staff. I am proud to be
ministerially responsible for over 70,000 people directly employed in offender management in
the prison and the probation services. They are in the business of providing security to the
people of Britain as in different ways are our armed forces and police. Whilst the risk is less
intense it exists and is present on everyday of their working lives with offenders. I hope we
can get that recognised and appreciated more than it is, as well as the realisation that their
success in rehabilitating offenders in their care makes all our futures more secure.
But it is just as clear to me that in many areas the criminal justice system is failing – it’s failing
the people who serve in that system, it’s failing the offenders managed by that system and by
extension their victims and the victims of the future we are creating – it’s failing in summary to
serve the public.
Criminal justice is founded on the central obligation of any state – the security of its people.
Yet we face the wretched reality that everyday we will fail. However effective we are at
securing the realm from our external enemies, every day hundreds, in fact thousands, of our
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fellow citizens have their own security shattered by their homes being invaded by burglars,
their peace ruined by intimidation and violence, their lives scarred by criminally inflicted
injury and for about two families every day their lives shattered by the homicide of a family
member. And there is no magic wand by which we politicians can wave all this away.
Everyday we are and will be reminded of our failure through the graphic and awfully
compelling stories in our media of the reality of crime experienced by individual victims.
The causes and solutions to crime are not absolutes, or simple; do not lend themselves to
easy nostrums presented in a single press release or even a single speech. Success will be
measured over a generation, and that is a singular challenge for policy makers in the age of
the 24 hour rolling news cycle.
Today I want to share some of my early thoughts on the challenges we face, and to explain
what will guide us as we look to revolutionise the system First, we face an unprecedented
economic situation. Our ambition to reform the system must be seen in the context of the
constraints on the public finances. Achieving savings will mean driving value for money and
delivering more from less. The test of an effective criminal justice system is not how much
money we’re spending on it, but on the outcomes it is achieving. Over the summer we will
be developing options on how we serve the public in the future with a significantly lower
budget.
Second, victims of crime are too often poorly treated. According to the British Crime Survey,
80% of the public believe that the criminal justice system respects the rights of the
accused. Just a third believe it meets the needs of the victims. Regardless of what people
perceive, we know that a failing criminal justice system is failing the public. It means more
crime. That means more victims.
Third, we are just not dealing with offenders properly. Half of all crime is committed by
people convicted in the past. And of that half, a small group of these are committing a
disproportionately large number of offences. This much is clear: there is just not enough
rigorous intervention to stop the ‘revolving door’ of offenders entering our criminal justice
system. Most short sentenced prisoners receive no supervision or support on release. Half
of adult offenders reoffend within one year of release from prison – and the rate of
reoffending has risen in recent years. And it is not just about adults; we need to manage
young offenders effectively. And if you don’t get their treatment right, the young offenders of
today are the repeat offenders of tomorrow. All this must change.
Many offenders need a great deal of support. They might have been failed by absent
parents. They might have suffered childhood abuse. Many have failed in the education
system, abused drugs and alcohol or ended up homeless. 45% of sentenced offenders
have emotional wellbeing issues including mental illness and one in three reports that they
have an accommodation ‘need’. These figures are shocking enough. But we believe the
problem to be even greater. There is a cycle to crime – from generation to generation.
Children with a parent in prison are more likely to engage in criminal behaviour and have
contact with the criminal justice system in later life.
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And fourth, the sentencing framework is highly complicated, utterly confusing and ultimately
disingenuous. Sentences bear no resemblance to the time actually served in prison. This
leads to confusion for victims of crime. It creates a sense of injustice when the public
discover that a criminal will actually serve a much shorter time in prison than was specified
in court, and undermines public confidence in the criminal justice system as a whole. Our
challenge is to bring consistency, honesty and transparency to sentencing – for the public,
victims of crime and practitioners.
These are hardly new challenges. Indeed they are all too familiar. But this cannot go on. We
just cannot continue to spend more on a system that does not have the faith of the public
and which does not break the cycle of crime. We have a once in a generation opportunity –
to think carefully and creatively how we reform the criminal justice system to more
effectively protect the public, to prevent crime, rehabilitate offenders and cut reoffending.
And we are going to set out in detail our proposals for rehabilitation and sentencing reform
in a Green Paper after Parliament returns in October.
Serious offenders who commit serious crimes are still going to go to prison, whatever
interpretation the excitable try to put on Ken Clarke’s speech last week. But we must end
the revolving door of reoffending. Time in prison must be an opportunity for offenders to
gain skills so that they become productive members of society. Prisons must focus on
getting offenders off drugs, on work and prepared for release – with homes and jobs to go
to and as far as we can helping them not reoffend.
And as part of their rehabilitation, offenders can and should pay back to victims and society
for the harm they have caused. So we want to allow for deductions from the earnings of
prisoners in properly paid work to contribute towards services for victims, as a way of
helping make amends for their crimes.
This involves a wide range of partners from across communities and government. It includes
early intervention work; improving life chances and voluntary sector mentoring and support.
It involves challenging families to tackle the intergenerational cycle of crime. The Justice
Committee’s excellent report, ‘Cutting Crime: The Case for Justice Reinvestment,’ will
inform our work as we go forward. I want to see much better recognition of the fundamental
links between poor social outcomes and crime and reoffending, right across communities
and government. The ministerial group on homelessness offers us a vital opportunity to
reinvigorate action over housing provision for offenders.
The government is just as committed to welfare reform so that work is the best solution for
people, offering them a route out of poverty, and for offenders, providing them with stability
to stop offending and become a better member of society. The Cabinet Committee on
Social Justice, which will meet for the first time tomorrow, was set up to consider issues
relating poverty, equality and social justice, to begin coordinating this agenda.
It’s clear that centralised direction and targets will either be inefficient or ineffective. We
can no longer afford either. So we need to empower local agencies – both criminal justice
agencies and others such as local authorities, primary care trusts and Jobcentre Plus - to
work together in tackling those entrenched social issues that many offenders face.
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We must work with communities to build public confidence in the system. Funding and
decision-making must be devolved to local groups; greater volunteering; and engaging the
voluntary sector to run innovative services that tackle the root of the problems and provide
value for money.
We must build confidence in the criminal justice system. And that means an evidencebased approach, spreading information about what works in the system and ensuring those
who work in it are equipped to do the job. We want to move away from a plethora of new
initiatives and announcements – we want the criminal justice system to be judged by its
ability to deliver results not on the basis of a fanfare of announcements. Put simply, we are
moving to evidence based policy making from policy based evidence making.
And the incentives need to be right. We will move away from a system where targets are the
incentives to one where we offer stronger incentives by opening up competition in penal
services and paying providers by results. As many of you will know, we are currently running
a competition to select national framework providers of community payback services.
Probation Trusts are also taking a Best Value approach to reviewing their current community
payback provision. And we are enthusiastic about the work starting soon on Social Impact
Bonds in Peterborough Prison. We will pay social investors there if, and only if, they reduce
the reoffending of short sentenced prisoners.
We have a historic opportunity to look at how restorative justice can be introduced into the
criminal justice system. I met with representatives from the Restorative Justice Consortium,
and I have asked them to work with my officials, to put forward proposals on how
restorative justice measures could be used across every phase of the criminal justice
process: from pre-trial right through to interventions in prisons to prepare offenders for
release.
I expect these will be radical changes. And they give us the chance to empower those
organisations left out of the process for so long. We want to listen to new ideas to improve
the criminal justice system, and we want to listen to a wide range of groups: from the
established and respected voluntary organisations such as the Howard League for Penal
Reform and Prison Reform Trust, to the small community-based organisations – our door is
open. I am keen to explore how we carry out this engagement in a structured and effective
manner. As part of that process, I am organising round-table events with voluntary sector
organisations to discuss these ideas in more detail.
Finally we will assess the sentencing framework - a comprehensive look at how we can
increase consistency, honesty and transparency. It will look in detail over the coming
months at the full range of penalties and restorative measures available in the criminal
justice system in both the adult and youth sentencing framework, ensuring that appropriate
links are made between the two.
We will specifically examine proposals for reform through a system of minimum/maximum
sentencing. Our aim is to increase public confidence in the criminal justice system by
improving honesty in sentencing. The offender will serve a minimum period in prison as set
by the judge in court. The victim, family and witness will know that the offender will not be
released any earlier than this point. The judge would also set a maximum period to be
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served and the offender has to earn any release earlier than this point by, for example,
complying with the prison regime and actively engaging in rehabilitation. This is just
common sense.
For too many decades the sentence passed by the court does not reflect the time served in
custody. It is through legislation that I want to see the minimum custodial sentence being
exactly that, the minimum time that must be spent in custody. I am not advocating doubling
sentences or increasing sentence lengths. But I do want to do away with countless
legislative changes that have meant sentences don’t make much sense to anyone unless
they are an experienced criminal lawyer. Actually since my brother is an experienced
criminal lawyer I know that isn’t true either.
This is a complex subject, even for judges. Making it simpler benefits everyone and
increases public confidence. This is an opportunity for anyone to influence how the
sentencing framework should look and operate in the future.
The Coalition Government understands the need for a new start. We know this will not be
easy in the current economic situation. We will have to make some very tough decisions and
the Ministry of Justice and our partners will have to make radical changes to the way we
deliver services together.
As I said earlier – this is a once in a generation opportunity. We will take the time needed to
get this right and will consult widely before bringing forward plans for reform. We will publish
detailed proposals in a Green Paper in the autumn, leading to a coherent package of
legislation in the second Parliamentary session.
In summary victims of crime today must be front and centre of our consideration and part of
our plans for sentencing and rehabilitation reform. We must ensure that offenders are
rehabilitated and potential offenders diverted from their current path into the revolving door
of today’s criminal justice system. Only by doing that will we reduce the number of victims
of tomorrow, and if we do that we will build public trust in a criminal justice system we can
all be proud of.’
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19 October 2010: Value for money in the criminal justice system
Speaker: Aileen Murphie, Director, Home Affairs and Justice VFM, National Audit Office
Lord Ramsbotham then introduced the speaker, Aileen Murphie Director of Justice VFM,
from the National Audit Office. He had had the pleasure of working with Aileen frequently in
the past, when the NAO had collaborated with the Prisons Inspectorate over matters of joint
interest, and joined the inspectors in visits. He had always appreciated Aileen’s interest in
the context of what was being assessed, which gave everyone confidence in her work. It
was particularly pertinent that she should have been invited to speak at this time.
Aileen Murphie then began: ‘Thank you very much Lord Ramsbotham for that introduction,
and to the group for the invitation to speak today about what value for money means in the
context of the criminal justice system. There could be no more apposite time to discuss
value for money than the night before the Spending Review announcement. To reduce
departmental expenditure by 25%, 30% or 40% is not something that can be done by
merely cutting a percentage off everyone. It means a permanent reduction in what is termed
a department’s ‘run rate’: that is the amount of money that it routinely uses. In order to make
reductions of this size, our Guide to Structured Cost Reduction (copies provided) makes
clear that several things are critically important, one of which is the cost to value ratio. That
is, what value are we getting for the cost which we are putting in and how can we assess
that?
So it is against the backdrop of the need for structured cost reduction that I would like to
explore value for money in a CJS context and I will illustrate with a number of issues drawn
from evidence we have brought together in our vfm studies. I have been working in this area
since 2003 and have completed 17 reports to Parliament on a variety of crime and justice
topics, from efforts to reduce crimes like burglary, to NOMS’ efforts to manage prisoners on
short sentences, or people on community orders, together with aspects of management
such as the management of sickness absence and the procurement of routine items. It is
worth pointing out that the size of the justice sector is much bigger than it was only 10 years
ago: the budgets for police, courts and correctional services have all risen by large
percentages and the size of the prison population is at unprecedented levels. However
budgets do need be weighed against the estimates of up to £20 billion of the costs of crime
to society.
Just for the information of members of the group, the NAO is headed by an Officer of the
House of Commons, the Comptroller and Auditor General who reports to Parliament. The
Public Accounts Committee uses our reports to examine the Accounting Officers of
departments: the Permanent Secretaries and Chief Executives on their use of public funds.
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The first issue I want to touch on is what is meant by value for money. Value for money is a
slippery concept, meaning different things to different people and it is worth exploring what
we mean by it when we use the term. The second issue relates to outcomes: how you can
measure them and what the causality might be from expenditure on the criminal justice
system (CJS) And the third is about context: what makes the CJS both different and
problematic to the external evaluator and how might the problems be overcome?
Value for money
Value for money has no set or statutory definition more precise than referring to examinations
of economy, efficiency and effectiveness in the NAO Act 1983, despite the National Audit
Office commonly being said to have a ‘value for money remit’. The terms are not defined in
the Act. For the sake of discussion, I would refer members to the NAO definition that “Good
value for money is the optimal use of resources to achieve intended outcomes.” The NAO
uses a structured framework for the assessment of value for money, based on identifying
inputs, outputs and outcomes and using them to construct a case by case assessment of
value for money.
So to take an example, when we reported in March 2010 on the management of prisoners
serving short custodial sentences, our assessment of whether MOJ and NOMS were
achieving value for money related to 2 aspects:
• how well NOMS was meeting prisoners’ immediate needs on arrival in custody
• whether NOMS was helping those prisoners reduce their risk of reoffending.
Our conclusion was Yes to the first and No to the second: In other words, that NOMS was
successfully achieving its objectives in terms of keeping the vast majority of short-sentenced
prisoners safe and well, a notable achievement in the face of the prison population and in this
respect it was delivering value.
However, we go on to say that there is little evidence to indicate that NOMS is achieving its
goal to reduce the risk of short-sentenced prisoners reoffending, beyond the deterrent effect
that prison may have for some of them, and to this major extent the delivery of value for
money falls short. And this is a major shortfall in VFM because custody is the most expensive
disposal available to the sentencer: up to £200,000 per year for the most expensive on the
youth side and therefore its use and potential effect on the offender has to be considered
carefully before resources are committed.
So the inference that the reader of the report can draw is that beyond the deterrent and
incapacitating effects of custody, NOMS is not meeting its intended policy outcome of
rehabilitation for these prisoners, is not achieving value for money and is therefore using
resources sub optimally.
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This example illustrates what we mean by the optimal use of resources, very often what a
department can achieve cannot be set in motion cleanly or quickly and therefore an optimal
outcome has to be weighed against what is possible. Often too the potential speed of
implementation is not what policy makers would wish and previous attempts at change or
innovation cannot be shrugged off. For instance, as an example, I would cite the length of
time that the new community sentence took to be fully implemented and all requirements fully
available in all parts of the country. It was some considerable length of time: almost three
years I think. Therefore, it is not possible to ignore the context in which the agency is
operating, the main contextual element being the size of the prison population which tends to
dominate thinking in the correctional services.
The second issue that I wanted to explore relates to outcomes: how you can measure them
and what the causality might be from expenditure on the CJS? The first thing to consider is
what the outcome is. What is it that an organisation, be it government department or
whatever, is trying to achieve?
The CJS is a very complex system and its beginning and end are not clear. Neither is the
outcome that the whole system is aiming to achieve. In terms of the beginning of the process,
one could assume that it starts when a crime is recorded as such by the police, because this
action triggers the use of resources by both the police and other public sector agencies,
almost regardless of what happens next, whether or not a case comes to court. Immediately,
that complicates the structural picture: in policy terms preventing crime is the business of the
Home Office and through the block grant, of individual police forces; yet reducing reoffending
and public protection falls to the Ministry of Justice.
Or to take the resettlement of offenders, the key activities are likely to be getting someone
accommodation and/or a job, which involve the activities housed within another two
government departments and far removed from the policy making centres of all departments.
Why does this matter? It matters because of a lack of clarity for people working within the
system. If there is not one clearly agreed outcome or series of outcomes that people are
working towards then they cannot see why they do what they do and why it matters. And it
matters because without an outcome, value for money cannot be measured.
An example illustrating this is the accretion of measures to combat antisocial behaviour. In
our report on Tackling Antisocial Behaviour in 2006, we listed 17 different forms of intervention
which policy makers and legislators had set out for use in situations of antisocial behaviour
over a period of years and attempted to evaluate some 6 of them, including the ASBO. What
was not clearly defined though, as we pointed out, was the outcome aimed at: every area had
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to agree to have something to do with respect and public perceptions in their local area
agreement. Not something around which effort can easily be coalesced or resources
allocated efficiently.
My second issue is about assessing and evaluating outcomes in something as complex as
the CJS. The first problem the evaluator comes up against is the fact that assessing
complex policy outcomes is difficult to do. Many if not all major public policy issues arise
from a combination of causes. For instance, it is often said that the factor least important in
determining the health of the population is what the NHS actually does, with education and
income having a far higher influence. The same could be said of crime. It would be
nonsense to suggest that the causes are not rooted in human and societal causes.
Then again, causal factors also do not necessarily operate in a simple linear way. Poor
employment prospects may lead to crime, for example, but a conviction will further limit
employment chances. So what’s the cause and what’s the effect? These complexities raise
the question of how best to evaluate the value for money or cost effectiveness of policy
interventions, given that evaluation of specific policy initiatives may be misleading if there
are other system wide factors that can change over time, while evaluating an entire casual
network is expensive and may not be practical.
So, where to begin? Our recent report on short sentenced prisoners points out that we do
not know enough about the basics. A job and a place to stay are key in not reoffending but
as we say in the report, NOMS does not know how many short-sentenced prisoners are
having accommodation and employment needs addressed successfully whilst in custody
and it is not possible to identify the specific contribution that prisons make to solving these
problems by looking at existing Key Performance Targets. So to put it a different way, we
don’t know who gets help and whether that help works.
And in our report on offender learning in 2008, we found that there was little evidence on the
impact that learning and skills provision in general has in reducing reoffending, other than
improving basic skills. The evidence base for the particular mix of learning and skills
provision for offenders most likely to achieve greater employability and reduce reoffending is
poor. This means that there is not a clear statement at the national level as to what the mix
of learning and skills provision at each prison establishment should be. So the provision to
prisoners and in the community at any particular location was our report concludes, a
historical accident, with no real idea of what it could achieve in terms of outcomes. This is
not likely to result in good value for money.
Again in our report on community sentences, we pointed out that there was no national data
on non completion of community orders. Thus even the basics of information on assessing
effectiveness is missing. It is worth noting though that the report says a comparison
between the actual reconviction rate and a predicted rate shows community sentences can
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reduce reconvictions proportionally more than a custodial sentence. However, we need
more evidence on the effectiveness of individual requirements (for example supervision) and
on the mix and sequencing of interventions.
And the third is about context: what makes the CJS both different and problematic in terms
of evaluation? The first issue, which I have touched on above, is complexity. Delivery of the
service involves a very wide range of organisations, including three government
departments, their agencies and non-departmental bodies, third party organisations as well
as the independent judiciary and operationally independent police forces.
The function the CJS delivers: justice is unlike any other function of the state because of the
need for it to be delivered objectively and impartially. The judiciary, which constitutionally is
the third arm of the state, is independent of both the legislature and the executive.
Independence is important so that judges can discharge their responsibility to be fair and
impartial including protecting citizens against any unlawful acts of government. Judges
have to be able to decide cases solely on the evidence presented in court by the parties and
in accordance with the law. The operational independence of the police is a fundamental
part of British policing, because the decision to arrest and take action against an individual
should not be under political influence. Although independent of government, the majority of
police funding comes through the Home Office and the costs of the judiciary are reflected in
the accounts of Ministry of Justice. This adds further complexity to the governance and
regulation of the system.
As well as complexity in breadth, this is also mirrored in depth: each of the bodies involved
in the criminal justice system has long delivery chains, from the centre out to the local
offices, and these are geographically dispersed. This makes management of the
organisations more challenging in the sense of implementing a consistently understood and
delivered policy.
And the fact that responsibilities cross different departments and involve a wide range of
delivery partners means that it is much more difficult to establish and adhere to a single
focus. Partnership working is crucial and delivery partners’ successes in meeting their own
objectives may not necessarily contribute to the overall system. Delivery partners have their
own objectives but cannot achieve them in isolation. But to achieve them all, each partner is
dependent at least to some extent on at least one other. But the interrelationship between
different parts of the system is not always properly understood by those working within
organisations or indeed at depth level.
When we reported on the CPS’s work in magistrates’ courts in 2006, 17% of cracked trials
(nearly 20,000 a year) were attributable to the Crown Prosecution Service at a cost of £24m.
The police and the courts contribute to the inefficiencies that result in prosecution delays:
often the police do not provide the evidence in time for the hearing; and Her Majesty’s
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Courts’ Service staff move cases at short notice, so that prosecuting lawyers have to
present cases they have not prepared. One part of the system entirely depends on smooth
working with the rest.
In another example, our report on the Parole Board showed that the Probation Service’s
move towards greater consistency in breaching people on community orders led to a rise in
the workload of the Parole Board, which it did not have the capacity to meet. In 2006-07,
the Board had failed to meet its target to review decisions to recall offenders to custody, in
part because of the large rise in the number of recall cases. The effect of a change in
practice in one part of the system was not modelled through to others resulting in the
creation of a large backlog of cases which the Board is still attempting to reduce some four
years later.
And the final aspect of why evaluating the CJS is problematic is because at the heart of
correctional services is the creation of a functioning human relationship between the
offender and those charged with their supervision. Assessing what makes this relationship
work – offender engagement to use the current phraseology – is inherently difficult and not
amenable to straightforward analysis.
On the positive side though, there are two examples from the Prison Service where
managers have delivered change effectively and brought about considerable improvement
in value for money: the first is the management of sickness absence and the second in the
procurement of routine items like prison officer uniforms. In both, the key elements of
success in improving management and saving resources - £84m in terms of procurement were:
• clear policy goals – in sickness absence to reduce the average to nine days a year
• managers at all levels knowing what the policy was and their part in it
• overcoming of resistance to change – centralised procurement is never popular
• much improved information available to all levels of management.
Managing staff absence and buying routine stuff better sounds dull but these typify the
basics of good financial management. And if you look up our financial management review
of the MOJ, published in July 2010 and soon to be taken by the Public Accounts
Committee, you will see that the Ministry has made progress in improving its financial
management but still falls short of best practice in the consistency of its approach, its
understanding of its costs and the integration of its financial management systems
throughout all of its delivery bodies. Without full information on its costs, which it still does
not have, the Ministry’s ability to allocate resources on the basis of the relative financial and
operational performance of individual prisons, probation services and courts is reduced.
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So in conclusion, what needs to be done, especially now, in the likely event of considerable
resource constraint? Our Guide on Structured Cost Reduction sets out some useful
principles in how departments can move towards transforming service provision while
reducing costs:
Much better information is essential on all aspects of service delivery and the costs of
provision, tied into a research strategy that has at its core the assessment of the
effectiveness of interventions delivered.
Well founded partnership working is crucial if the criminal justice system is to function as a
whole system and if different organisations are not merely to pass costs, either actual or in
activity, to one another.
This should be based on agreed outcomes for the whole system and based on integrated
financial management and a thorough understanding of the costs of provision.
Thank you very much’.
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2 November 2010: Children and young people in custody
Speakers:
Penelope Gibbs, Director, Out of Trouble Programme, Prison Reform Trust
Jim Hopkinson, Head of Leeds Youth Offending Team
Rory, a young person with experience of custody
Baroness Stern welcomed everyone to the meeting. She explained that she was taking the
chair in Lord Corbett’s absence in hospital. He was doing well, she was glad to report. It
was her pleasure to introduce the speakers, beginning with Penelope Gibbs.
Penelope Gibbs said she would start by introducing the Prison Reform Trust’s Out of
Trouble Programme, and then the other speakers. She continued. ‘This programme started
more than three years ago. When I took on the job of running the programme I was told that
its aim was to reduce child and youth imprisonment in the UK, which seemed a pretty
daunting task. This was a task set for the PRT by The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial
Fund.
For the last three years it has to be said that we concentrated on under-18-year-olds (whom
I will call children from now on) in England and Wales, to do our best with partners, such as
the Youth Justice Board (YJB), to try and reduce numbers. I will start with the absolutely
great news that numbers have reduced significantly. I don’t think this is a story that has
been out there that much. In 2002 there were on average over 3,000 children in custody at
any one time. I heard this afternoon that the numbers were down, on a week’s basis, to
fewer than 2,000. At the moment the average is slightly over 2,000 at any one time. So we
are talking about a significant reduction in the number of children in custody at the same
time as the adult prison population has risen. So it’s a very special and good situation, and
one which we hope we have had some influence over – though of course there are bigger
forces at play as well.
So what have we done over the last three years and what have other people done? At PRT
we have been keen throughout to produce an evidence base for our argument that there
was an unnecessary use of imprisonment on both the remand and sentencing side. We have
produced a raft of reports which are on our website and which I hope the members of this
group have received over time. The one I want to talk about today is Punishing
Disadvantage, which was published about a month ago. It is the first profile of every child in
custody. If anyone wants a hard copy do let us know.
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Even though we knew bits and pieces about the kind of children who were in custody and
why they were there, we wanted to bring it together and do a quantitative study, the first
time since Professor Norman Tutt did such a study more than 20 years ago. The Kings
College researchers looked at the whole population of children in custody. One thing we
have looked at quite a lot is: Why are the children there? There is a huge proportion on
remand. 25%, or a quarter of the number in custody, are on remand, which is far higher
than the adult population. One thing that concerns us about that figure is that we also know
that the majority of those children either get a community order or get acquitted. So that
suggests that the reasons for the remand, in at least some of those cases, were not as
sound as they might be. I would not be surprised if there were more receptions on remand
than there were sentenced, because they are in for a shorter time.
This study did a very interesting look at both what the offences are, and the seriousness of
those offences. Half of the children were in custody for non-violent offences, and that’s quite
a consistent pattern. 58% according to this study are in for offences which are deemed to
be of low or medium gravity by the youth offending team that is dealing with the child. One
of the key offences which worries us a lot is breach. Of all those children in custody, there
are more in for breach (21%) than anything else. This means technical breach: not turning
up for appointments, not complying with orders. We are not in any way condoning that
behaviour, but we would say that imprisonment for non-compliance with an order is an overpunitive response. We would urge a change of primary legislation to make that less
possible. Violence against the person is the next biggest offence group, and then we have
robbery, car crime, burglary and so on.
Unfortunately the most popular sentence is the four month detention and training order. So
the vast majority of those in custody are not in for four months, they are in for two months.
This again is probably a worrying statistic in that there is little you can do of benefit to a
child within the space of two months.
The other aspect of this study which is perhaps the more depressing side is that we looked
at using ASSET for the social, health and welfare needs of these children. 28% have
witnessed domestic violence,12% have experienced the bereavement of either a parent or a
sibling, a very high proportion have family involved in criminal activity, 40% have been on
the child protection register and 51% have been living in deprived households. These stats
really underpin what we knew, but bring it all together. The cohort of children who end up in
custody are absolutely the most socially excluded and deprived, and there is an indication
there that they have at some point been failed by us, by the system, and by children’s
services so that they end up not only offending but in custody. And around a third of those
in custody are looked after by the local authority.
The report also has case studies of children, taken from the ASSET files which the YJB let
us go through in order to do this study.
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I have with me Rory who has very kindly come along to give a bit of an insight into the
experience of a young person in the criminal justice system. Rory is 18 now, and he lives in
Wandsworth. He is with us because he is defended by Shauneen Lambe, who is part of the
Standing Committee for Youth Justice, and who works for a charity called Just for Kids Law.
Shauneen has worked defending Rory for quite a few years.
Penelope Gibbs (PG). To start with, Rory, can you tell us how long do you think you
spent as a teenager either on a community sentence or in prison?
Rory: About four or five years.
PG. You are 18 now, so it started when?
Rory. When I was about 14.
PG. What kind of things did you have to do on community sentences?
Rory. Just basically go to appointments, and do community service: fix stolen bikes and
give them back, paint, clean graveyards.
PG. Have any of the things you’ve done on community sentences worked for you, or had
an effect on you?
Rory. I don’t think they’ve really helped me that much, to be honest. They told me they
were going to help me a lot and I’ve never heard from them. So I don’t think they’re
doing much to help.
PG. So you’ve spent four, or probably three, years with the YOT and nothing worked for
you. You’ve also experienced child custody. How many different places have you been
in?
Rory. Four. Hassocksfield in Durham, Feltham, Huntercombe, and Oak Hill.
PG. Were you in there for remand or sentence?
Rory. Sentence and remand
PG. So of that time can you work out how much time you spent on remand?
Rory. Just over a year.
PG. At one stretch?
Rory. Altogether I’ve done a year and a half. The longest I’ve done at one stretch is six
months.
PG. Can you remember what reasons the court gave for remanding you, because
presumably you pleaded innocent of the crime?
Rory. Failing to return. Not turning up. Breaching bail. They said they had no choice in
the matter.
PG. In terms of your experience of being in custody, whether for remand or sentence,
what kind of activities did you do? Education? Training?
Rory. In prison it’s quite hard to get some sort of an education. You have to wait on a
waiting list. But I got mechanics, health and safety, and a cleaning course.
PG. What effect overall do you think that being in custody had on you? Did it change
you for the better? Did it help you stop offending?
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Rory. Personally I think it made me worse. I was mixing with kids who’d done things
much bigger than me. I was influenced by the older kids and in with the wrong crowd.
PG. So was this when you were in the Young Offender Institution? How old were you
when you were in there?
Rory. When I first went to Feltham I was fourteen and I was in there with people who
were seventeen.
PG. In terms of the people you saw in custody, which did you think should have been
there, and which not?
Rory. To be honest it’s hard to judge because there are a lot of people in there. I don’t
know so I can’t talk about their cases. But there were a lot of kids being bullied in jail.
There’s not a lot they can do. They can’t go to the jailers or they’d get bullied even
worse. And they don’t give you much help anyway, to be honest.
PG. In terms of the staff themselves, they were fine?
Rory. There were some that tried to help, but there were a lot that didn’t really care. They
didn’t see a lot of things going on. In the showers they had their backs turned and things
like that.
PG. In terms of coming out, the last time, did you then come out and go straight back
into education?
Rory. No. I’d missed the enrolment time. There was no help to get back into college so
late in the year.
PG. So you came out to..?
Rory. Nothing. Just the estate and to the people doing nothing with their lives.
PG. You haven’t been in trouble for a while now?
Rory. No, about twenty months.
PG. So what do you think has changed?
Rory. I’ve grown up. Started to realise that it’s not doing anything for me, being in jail. I
need to get somewhere in life. I’ve realised that for myself, the hard way.
PG. Looking back, why did you get into crime?
Rory. Boredom. There was no-one there to tell me. My father wasn’t there. When I got
out of school, I was hanging around with older kids who weren’t in school. I was
influenced by other kids. There was a lot of peer pressure.
PG. So at what age were you last in school?
Rory. Thirteen.
PG. And they weren’t on your case to get you back?
Rory. No. I was in the youth offending team about ten times and they never mentioned
anything about education.
PG. What do you think overall anybody could have done earlier on to try to help you not
to commit crimes?
Rory. Mostly it was because I had nothing to do with my life. I was always around on the
estate. If I had had something to do to keep me busy I wouldn’t have got into some of
the stuff I did.
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PG. So it was linked to not being in school. The stats in Punishing Disadvantage suggest
that only about 10% of children in custody were in mainstream school. Thank you very
much Rory.
Another part of the Out of Trouble project has been working not only on the bigger scale of
legislative change, but also locally. One of the initial things we highlighted was that the use
of custody appeared to be startlingly different across local areas. So if you look at 2008-09
you find that Merthyr Tydfil imprisoned 20.2% of the children who were convicted in court,
whereas Newcastle imprisoned 1.6%. The interesting thing is that there is quite a consistent
pattern there. Merthyr Tydfil may be small but it had been at the top of the league of
percentage imprisoned for at least ten years. And Newcastle, in fact the whole of the North
East, has been very low for the last ten years. We said to ourselves, we may or may not be
able to move political minds in the centre about changing primary legislation, but shall we
have a go at talking to YOTs and seeing if we can persuade them to really go for it, to try to
reduce custody in their own area. We sent letters to chief executives and leaders of councils
in the high custody areas. And one of the people whose chief executive got a letter was our
next speaker, Jim Hopkinson from Leeds. He accepted a meeting, and was subsequently
happy for us to come along and help him look at what was happening in his area, in terms
of the high custody rates. I’d like to introduce Jim to give you a bit of a picture about what’s
been happening in Leeds.
Jim Hopkinson began. ‘Thank you very much. I’ll just spend the next five minutes telling
you about the Leeds custody story. We have a lot of gratitude to PRT for helping us on our
road to reducing our numbers in custody, although we still have a way to go. Leeds has
historically been a high custody area, and perhaps as a YOT we started to accept that and
to accept the mantra that there is a level of offending in Leeds that means that some people
need to be in custody. Leeds has a population of more than 750,000 people. We have
180,000 children in Leeds. 75,000 of those are 10-17, and if they offend they would come to
our services. We have 1,400 looked-after children in Leeds - and I’ll talk in a moment about
the linkage between looked-after children and custody - and as a YOT we work in any year
with about 2,000 young people whom we supervise.
At the time the PRT got in touch with us, about 11% of youth and crown court sentences
were for custody. Actually what does that mean? It’s better to talk in terms of numbers. In
2006-07, we had 240 young people in Leeds sentenced to custody, and on any one day
there would be round about 89-90 young people from Leeds in custody. That’s no small
amount of young people and no small amount of public money being spent on incarcerating
them. In fact we calculated that the cost to the public purse for incarcerating those young
people was about £5-6m. This cost was the same as the youth offending service budget we
had for working with all of the rest of the 2,000 young people.
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So in 2006-07 we had 240 young people incarcerated. The actions that we took meant that
by the following year we had 220 young people incarcerated. The year after that (2008-09)
we had 190 young people incarcerated and last year that figure had fallen to 153. So we
have done an awful lot of work in terms of reducing the numbers of young people in
custody. But we’re not complacent, and we recognise we’ve got a long way to go.
In fact there’s another way of looking at this and that’s to look at the ratio of the 10-17 year
old population to those who are in custody. In Leeds our current ratio is about 1: 447. In
2006 our ratio was more like 1:300. But if you look at an area like Surrey their ratio is
something like 1:5000. So there’s an awful long way we can go. Now clearly our
demography is not the same as Surrey, but there are wildly different ratios of custody rates
even in areas with fairly similar demographics.
So how did we reduce this level of custody with the help of PRT and what were our
strategies? The first of our strategies, and I need to take responsibility for this, was to ask
whether we really knew our custody population. I send that challenge out now to my
colleagues in other youth offending services and the leaders of their youth offending service
management boards. I would have to say that I didn’t. If you had asked me in 2006 how
many of our young people were in custody, I would have been able to tell you. But what I
wouldn’t have been able to tell you was how many of those were looked-after children; how
many came from black or minority ethnic groups; which offences were getting those young
people into custody; how many were breaches; how many were persistent offenders; how
many were first time entrants into custody, who hadn’t had earlier interventions through
prevention projects or referral orders. I couldn’t tell you what the average length of sentence
was. I couldn’t tell you what the split was between those sentences that took place in the
crown court or in the magistrates court. I couldn’t tell you about the age profile; how many
of those young people were under 14; how many were aged 15, 16 or 17. I couldn’t tell you
about the gender split, or about which of those young people went into custody from being
in school or training, or how many were not in school or training at the time they went in.
Doing that research and coming up with a series of action plans based on every one of
those parameters, was very, very helpful in terms of the work that we’ve done to reduce our
levels of custody. And we still have further to go.
The way we can reduce custody is, firstly, to prevent young people offending in the first
place; secondly to work with those young people who have offended to make sure they
don’t offend again, so better community sentences that are successful; and thirdly – and I’d
like to concentrate for a minute on this one - having the confidence of the court. If the
courts are confident in your youth offending service, they are prepared to make community
sentences where otherwise they would make custodial sentences. With the help of the YJB
and prompts from the PRT we set about a consultation exercise with our courts and our
legal advisors on how we could reduce custody in Leeds.
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At that time I had an excellent relationship with our youth court bench, and I think they
would say they had an excellent relationship with us, but it wasn’t impacting on our custody
rates. So we knew we had to take that to a different level. With the assistance of the YJB
and one of the board members, district judge David Simpson, we set about holding a half
day seminar with our youth courts and our legal advisors to really get to grips with custody
in Leeds: to talk about the cost of custody, to talk about a national indicator that we had at
the time about reducing the levels of custody, and what the responsibility of the court was to
assist us to do that, and to talk about practical strategies that we could do together to
reduce the numbers of young people in custody. The deal we offered the court was this: you
come up with the ideas and we as the youth offending service will deliver them.
It was a very useful half day seminar. Very few JPs were aware of the cost of custody. They
all said they liked our pre-sentence reports, but they said they’d like to see the pre-sentence
report writer in court, to speak to that person about their report. We said: we’re a very big
youth offending service, we have a dedicated court team. We listened to the court, we
adapted to what they said, and we now send our pre-sentence report writers to court when
a young person is at risk of custody, rather than saying we have a dedicated court team, we
can make an economy there. And that has reaped huge dividends. There has been a lot of
anecdotal evidence to say that the pre-sentence report writer’s ability to be questioned has
helped the court to take a judgment call on a young person who might otherwise have
received custody.
The second one is that the court said: we don’t get positive feedback from the youth
offending service. They see the failures, they see the young people who end up in court for
breach, but do they see our positive success stories? Answer: No, not well enough. So the
court asked for positive feedback on a sample of cases. We might have said: we’re very
busy, that’s too much work to write progress reports. But that’s what the court wanted,
that’s what we chose to deliver, and again it’s had a huge amount of impact, to demonstrate
that for most of the young people we work with we have successful outcomes, because of
course the court only sees the cases that are not successful.
Thirdly, if you took a straw poll of magistrates and asked: how many of you have visited our
local institutions - HMYOI Wetherby, and Eastmoor, a secure unit - most of them would
probably put their hands up. If you asked them how many of them had come out to a youth
offending service, to observe one of our programmes, to sit next to one of our youth
offending service workers and really get to grips with the work that they do, few have. And
we made that deal with magistrates: we wanted them to come out and shadow our youth
offending service workers, talk to them, sit in on our groups if possible, and really
understand the complexity and depth of the work that they do. So Rory would talk about
seeing his youth justice officer twice a week or so, but we want our magistrates to
understand that it’s not just twice a week. Most of our youth offending service workers
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would be working on some aspect of that young person’s life pretty much day in day out –
whether that’s a negotiation with health, or education, or a substance misuse agency.
Finally the courts said that they wanted the looked-after children’s social worker to attend
court and they weren’t doing that well enough. We would agree with that, but again it gave
us the momentum to make that happen. And we would say that the most important aspect
– what has helped us most to reduce our custody rates in Leeds - is securing the
confidence and the investment of the court.
At the same time, we have got better as a youth offending service, and we know that has
had an impact on our reoffending rates. Our prevention programmes work well and the
numbers of people offending for the first time have gone down. Custody levels follow that.
Our numbers of young people who reoffend have gone down. Custody levels follow that.
Our use of evidenced based programmes has increased, with successful outcomes:
custody levels follow that. We have invested in new things like speech and language
therapy, and programmes with looked-after children.
Last but not least I want to talk about breach rates. We know that breach is a real precursor
to custody. When young people breach, it can tip them into custody: they breach and they
have some other offences. We put a challenge out to our youth offending service that we
wanted a 10% reduction in breach. We actually used the mantra: ‘Each one breach one
less’ and we thought that that would reduce our custody levels quite significantly. That’s
nothing to do with the court, or with not following national standards. It’s a call to our youth
offending service officers to better engage young people, to get out there and prevent
breach. We believe that that’s been important. We still believe that there should be a graded
approach to the response to breach, because we go by the letter of national standards as to
whether we do breach people. We need people to be realistic about conditions, and about
their maturity.
On the To Do list: we still need to better engage our district judges. We still need to work
with our local authorities and the courts about transferring the costs of custody to the local
authority. What would that mean for their practice? We still need to get better at prevention,
and to think about where ring-fenced prevention budgets may or may not go. And we still
need to get better at remands because we still have made little impact on the numbers of
young people who are being remanded in Leeds. Thank you I’ll stop there’.
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7 December 2010: Restorative justice
Speakers:
Lawrence Kershen QC, Chair, Restorative Justice Council
Lizzie Nelson, Director, Restorative Justice Council
Jo Nodding, a victim of crime
Lord Corbett welcomed everyone to the meeting. He noted that the group had received a
memorable presentation two years ago on the theme or restorative justice (RJ), featuring a
burglar and his victim. He was very pleased to introduce the speakers on this occasion.
Lawrence Kershen began by outlining the shape of the forthcoming presentation. He
continued: ‘I worked as a barrister, as a QC, and as a Recorder of the Crown Court for a good
number of years. My work was in both the commercial and the criminal fields. One of the
problems for me in the criminal field was that I felt that what was happening was not
achieving what we wanted from society, namely that victims got some sort of satisfaction and
resolution out of the criminal justice process but also that offenders were brought to book and
were faced with the consequences of what they had done. Our system is set up so that the
criminal does not have to say anything other than ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ most of the time. So I
started to think that the real missing link in many cases would be the opportunity for the
victim to confront the offender and to let (usually) him know what had happened, to ask his or
her questions of the offender; and also for the offender to have the opportunity to speak, not
through a barrister, not through some paper document, to tell their story, and for
understanding to grow. And that’s when, having invented it in my mind, I discovered that there
were brave people out there actually engaging in that process, actually doing it, as
practitioners; and more important that there were victims of crime willing to engage with their
victimisers, to face them and talk through those events. And so I began to be involved with
the Restorative Justice Consortium, as it then was, now the Restorative Justice Council (RJC).
I am at present its Chair.
The RJC is the independent third sector membership body for restorative practice in England
and Wales. I say restorative practice because we don’t confine the application of these
processes only to criminal justice, but also to education and organisations. There are about
100 organisations that are members of the RJC, both from the statutory and the voluntary
sector, and in addition we have individual members who are both practitioners and trainers.
RJC works firstly as a public voice, to speak on behalf of restorative practice; as a
professional voice, speaking on behalf of those practitioners; and also to set standards. We
believe that high quality is absolutely essential in the delivery of RJ, and that without it there is
a risk of harm being done, when healing is what RJ is about. In practice we also cover
various consultancy projects.
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So that’s an overview. I now practice in mediation in the commercial fields, so you’ll
understand that for me the idea of resolution of disputes by dialogue – the idea of people
talking face to face – is absolutely essential to what I believe is an effective justice system both
in criminal and in commercial experience. Having said that I am going to hand over to Lizzie
Nelson, who will take us into a little more depth on this subject.
Lizzie Nelson began by thanking the meeting for its invitation. She continued: ‘We are really
very pleased to be here, particularly given the publication of the sentencing Green Paper
today. I’m just going to say something about the research, about what’s available now, about
what we understand is in the Green Paper, and some key questions coming out of that. Then I
am going to hand over to Jo, because I think that’s going to be much more interesting than
anything I have got to say.
It is very important to note that the previous government funded a £7m seven year research
programme, which some of you will have heard about already. This included an independent
evaluation by Professor Joanna Shapland. She found that in serious offences with adult
offenders - robbery, burglary and violence - 70% of victims wanted to participate in a face to
face meeting with their offender. In Northern Ireland, 79% of victims participated. Satisfaction
rates for victims were 85%, and in Northern Ireland again, 90% of victims come away from
these meetings satisfied.
When the final report in that research was published, back in 2008, the government said the
research was inconclusive on the question of recidivism. The researchers found that RJ
impacted on the frequency of offending, but they could not say by how much. Since this
government came to power, there has been a renewed interest in RJ. The MOJ research
analysts have gone back to the raw data and done a meta-analysis. They have found that RJ
reduces the frequency of reoffending by 14%. That research finding will be published
alongside the Green Paper today. Academics in the field have said that they think the actual
statistic is closer to 27%, but the MOJ position is that it is 14%.
Having a clear government position on the question of reoffending is absolutely essential
because now they can actually model what the cost savings and benefits would be. We did
some work with Victim Support earlier in the year, and using some very conservative
assumptions – 40% take-up rates, looking at 75,000 serious offences – we found that using
RJ could save the criminal justice system £600m in two years, in cashable savings, through
reductions in reoffending and changes in sentencing patterns. So there are huge advantages
to the tax-payer as well as to the individuals who are involved in the process.
Moving on to what is currently available in our criminal justice system, a lot of police forces are
now using restorative skills in street policing. ACPO did a survey recently and 33 forces said
that they were using restorative practice in some way to deal with low level anti-social
behaviour type crime. Within youth justice, leading YOTS are using RJ in all sorts of innovative
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ways. But overall, in the referral order, which was the primary vehicle for RJ that the previous
government brought in, the national average is only around 10% of victims participating.
However the PRT and the Youth Crime Commission, who published their report earlier this year,
highlighted that in Northern Ireland, where they brought in youth conferencing through the
Justice Northern Ireland Act 2002, victim participation rates are at 79%. So there is a huge gap
between what’s possible in terms of delivering RJ in our system, and what’s actually happening
now. One of the things we are really pleased about is that the Green Paper is looking at how we
can build on the best of good practice that is already there in our youth justice system and get
this process off the ground for the majority of victims of crime who we know want to
participate.’
Alun Michael MP enquired as to what things had made a significant difference in Northern
Ireland.
Lizzie Nelson ‘ In Northern Ireland the legislation says that victims are ‘entitled to participate’,
whereas in our legislation it says that the referral order panel ‘may invite.’ the victim. I think that
makes a huge difference to what YOTs see these meetings as being about and who the panel
meeting is for. Also the referral order panel volunteers are not trained to do the preparation with
victims, whereas in Northern Ireland the training is very good. They use conference facilitators,
and they spend 30 hours on average per case, which includes about 20 hours preparation with
the victim and the offender. All the evidence is that you need to do that preparation work - in
Northern Ireland they go to the victim’s home and encourage them to tell their story, to talk
about the impact of the crime on them and all that happens before they actually meet the young
offender. That is what I think makes the difference in participation rates.
Coming on to adult justice in this country, there is very little provision. One or two prisons have
some kind of RJ available, and in Thames Valley the probation service offer RJ as part of a
community sentence. But basically that’s it. We have calculated that fewer than 1% of victims of
adult offenders in this country have access to a RJ process. The Green Paper, as far as we are
aware, looks at RJ in terms of policing anti-social behaviour; at its potential as a diversion, for
both adult and young offenders; and at the option of pre-sentence RJ for adult offenders. All of
this is very welcome. Moving forward in response to the Sentencing Green Paper, we would
emphasis three key questions.
First, we think that RJ should be available to all victims of crime, at all stages of criminal justice.
It should not be dependent on the offence type. Some victims and some offenders are not going
to be ready to participate at the diversionary point or pre-sentence, so it should also be
available post sentence. But it is a huge step forward. If the government is serious about
introducing it at the pre-sentence stage that is fantastic and the research evidence, which
looked at pre and post sentence, showed that victims of crime were happy that they could
come at the right time for them. For the most serious crimes, it should be available postsentence.
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Lawrence has already mentioned quality assurance and this is absolutely critical. It is
wonderful that the government wants to expand the use of RJ, and their vision for a big
society means that they want to encourage all sorts of providers in the third sector,
community groups, church groups, statutory and private sector organisations, to take part in
this and offer RJ facilitation. But the risks are real. If the preparation does not happen there
is a real risk of re-victimising victims. So we are absolutely committed to there being the
highest quality standards. We have developed national occupational standards with Skills
for Justice. We are involved in a pilot of new accreditation. We are developing a system for
practitioner registration, which would be searchable on-line, so that any victim considering
participation could just go and check: does this person have any accreditation? We think
that setting those kinds of standards, which would apply whoever is offering this process, is
essential.
A third point, on pre-sentence RJ, would be the need for judicial oversight – though not in
the sense of shutting down the options. A real strength of pre-sentence RJ is that the case
goes back to court, and the judge will make their sentencing decision in the light of
whatever has come out of the RJ process. But it is very important that the victim and the
offender are both clearly told that there is no automatic relationship between participation in
RJ and the sentence you get. The victim cannot be held responsible, and nor can it be a
‘say sorry and you get off’ for the offender. The judge will take whatever comes out of the RJ
process into consideration in their sentencing, alongside all the other aspects that they
would generally consider. So those are the some of the key points we will be bringing up as
we work with everyone in the sector to develop our response to the Green Paper.’
Lawrence Kershen (LK) thanked Lizzie Nelson and introduced the third speaker, Jo
Nodding (JN). He continued: ‘I am going to ask you what happened to you, and how you
came to be here, but before I do I think you would call yourself a survivor, rather than a
victim of crime. You sought out the RJC because you found the RJ process that you went
through so valuable, and you felt so lucky to have the opportunity to have done it, that you
want the same for others. Thank you so much for coming, and struggling through -13
degrees from County Durham to be here today.’
JN: ‘I am an education manager for an independent fostering agency so I deal with children
in foster care. In 2004 I was working with a young person who was in foster care. I had been
working with him for about two months. He was not able to be educated in school so I was
educating him out of school. I picked him up one particular morning and unfortunately I was
left alone with him and he raped me. And for a long time that put my life on hold.
I got told the next day, that although he stole my car, he would not admit to the rape. He
said ‘I don’t know what she’s going on about.’ So I had to go through three months not
knowing whether I had to go and give evidence in court. That put me through a lot of extra
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stress. Once the DNA evidence had been presented to him he pleaded guilty but I still went to
court because I wanted to face him. At that time I did not know anything about RJ so I
thought that was my only opportunity to show him that I could face him’.
LK. ‘So he was sentenced and I believe it was a life sentence. And then after that what
happened?’
JN. ‘I had a meeting with my first victim liaison officer (VLO) after about a year. She came to
see me at my home, and she was the only person who ever mentioned RJ to me. She asked,
if I ever got the opportunity, would I like to have a meeting with the young person. Straight
away I said yes that was something I wanted to do. It was never mentioned again. After
another four years, in November 2008, I had a new VLO and I actually brought it up with her.
Her response was very negative: she said it was very unlikely, with a serious crime like rape.
But I was very determined, and so I asked her to go and speak to the authorities. I was
determined to fight.
I got a phone call in March last year, to be told that the Aim project were going to come and
see me, and see the offender, to see if he would be willing to have a face to face meeting. I
had a couple of meetings, they went to see the young person, and I was told that he had
given permission for the meeting to go ahead. What you both said about the preparation work
is so, so important. A lot of people think RJ could do more harm than good. If the preparation
work is not there, and the people who do this are not properly trained, I do believe it could.
They have got to make sure that the victim and the offender are really well prepared.
I had quite a few meetings. The young offender had more than me because he was younger
than me and needed them. Neither of us knew what the other was going to say, but they
make sure that you know what is going to happen on the day, that you know the structure of
the meeting, and that you are not going in with any expectations. If you go to a meeting
expecting answers, and you don’t get them, that could do more harm than good. My
expectations of that meeting were just to let him see me. The judge made the comment to
this young person in court that he had destroyed my life. I did not want him to think he had
destroyed my life, not only for myself but for him. He was only young when he did this crime,
and he is only young now. I thought it could do him more harm to think he had destroyed my
life.’
LK. ‘What did you want to achieve?’
JN. ‘I wanted to achieve things for myself and for the young person. I wanted him to see that I
was still doing a job that I loved and that I had survived. On the day of the attack I thought
that he was going to kill me. I was petrified, and that’s how he saw me. He had complete
power over me. I wanted to show him that he didn’t. I am here now, and I am not scared of
him any longer. I wanted him to know the impact it had had, not only on me but on my family.
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My VLOs kept telling me he was doing victim empathy work. Someone can sit there and tell
him how a victim of rape feels, but, to me, the only person who can actually tell that
offender is the victim themselves. I was the only person who knew how he had made me
feel’.
LK. ‘Is that what happened at the meeting?’
JN. ‘Absolutely. It was all set up in Manchester. I requested that he was in the room first,
because I felt that I was more able to walk in. It lasted an hour and twenty minutes. I had the
opportunity to be able to go through the whole events of the day, to tell him how it had
made me feel. I think what shocked him was when I said I thought he was going to kill me.
He had tears in his eyes at that point. It also gave me the opportunity to tell him how it made
my family feel, because it wasn’t just me he affected on that day. He affected my Mum, my
Dad, my brother, my husband: they had to watch me suffer. I wanted him to realise that. I
did ask him questions. I did not go to get questions answered but it did give me an
opportunity to ask him some. And it gave him the opportunity to say sorry. I didn’t expect
that. He thought I was going to be angry with him. So it gave him the opportunity to see that
I wasn’t angry. He’s only young, and I want him to be successful in life. He has lost all his
teenage years. I was able at the end to forgive him. And the reason I wanted to forgive him
was, for me, because hatred eats you up, but secondly more for him. Because I wanted –
not to make what he did any less severe – but for him to be able to go forward in life.’
LK. ‘You said that he said sorry. Did you believe him? What made you feel it was genuine?’
JN. ‘It was the way he said it, the way he looked at me. He had tears in his eyes. We had
proper eye contact. He wasn’t looking at the ground when he said it. We sat opposite each
other. He looked straight into my eyes and said ‘When I say sorry I mean a proper sorry’. He
said ‘I won’t do this again. I do realise…’ And also I had the opportunity to make him think
about his family as well. It wasn’t just my family he affected. His Dad had to get a phone call
that night saying ‘Your son’s in custody for rape.
His step-mum was at the meeting and that was quite good. His step-mum hadn’t been
around at the time. You are allowed to have a support with you, and they have to go through
the preparation with you. They have to be at every meeting so that they know the structure
of the meeting. They are not allowed to have an input unless you ask them. What was really
good was that soon after we started the meeting the young person started breaking down in
tears so I gave him the opportunity to have a break. But his step-mum looked at me and
said ‘No. He needs to hear this. He needs to stay in this room, and face up, and listen, to
what he did to you and your family.’ I think it helped her. She was able to take it back to his
family, and tell them how it had affected me. So I think it did his family good as well’.
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LK. ‘The last stage, perhaps, and then I believe you are willing to answer questions’.
JN. ‘Absolutely. I led the meeting, because it was me who called it. I was asked if there was
anything else. It was the only time I got a little bit tearful. I looked at him and said ‘What I am
about to say to you a lot of people are not going to understand. Hatred eats you up, and so I
want you to know that I forgive you for what you have done to me. I want you to go on in life,
and to have a successful life. ‘The Youth Justice Board asked the Aim project to write a
report, and I think that’s the thing that he and his took away from the meeting, and that his
step Mum took away from the meeting. That he’s forgiven, and if he had any guilt it lifted
some of that. He has said now that because I said that, because he saw me, and knows I am
ok, and that I’ve got a life, he can go on and he can have a life’.
LK. ‘Thank you very much. Since that time, has it changed how you feel about the events?’
JN. ‘I left that meeting feeling absolutely on top of the world. For me it was closure. It has let
me move on. I know what he looks like now. He may move back up to the area. It was always
a worry of mine: am I going to look over my shoulder and see him? I don’t have that worry any
more. I’ve seen him. I do believe he has moved forward. I do believe he’s done some good
work. And it was my closure’.
LK. ‘Thank you so much for telling your story, and for having the courage to share it with us’.
JN. ‘I just want other people to have the opportunity because I know I was very, very lucky.’
Lord Corbett thanked Jo very much indeed, and said how brave she was. He wondered why it
had taken so long to get this meeting.
JN explained that she had been offered the opportunity after a year but then no-one
mentioned it again. There had been a very negative response, especially regarding this
particular crime. She had had to fight for it herself.
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2011
18 January 2011: The Archbishop of Canterbury
Speaker: The Most Revd & Rt Hon Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
Response: Juliet Lyon CBE, Director, Prison Reform Trust
Lord Corbett welcomed everyone to the meeting, expressing particular pleasure that
Archbishop Rowan had found time to be with them. The Archbishop would speak for
around 15 minutes and has invited Juliet Lyon, Director of the Prison Reform Trust to
respond. He would throw the discussion open to the floor.
Archbishop Rowan began: ‘I am very grateful for the opportunity to come and introduce a
bit of discussion on what is at the moment a particularly timely subject. What I would like to
do is to begin with some reflections on a couple of general principles around penal policy, to
turn to a couple of thoughts about the current Green Paper and how it bears on these
principles, and to suggest one or two of the areas of question which I think the Green Paper
still needs to deal with, and which all of us interested in penal reform ought to be interested
in if we are to give the kind of consolidation and support that the best ideas in that Green
Paper require.
So I want to start by enunciating a basic political principle and a basic theological principle.
As you will see they are not a million miles apart. My basic political principle is that the
prisoner is a citizen. If we lose sight of the notion of the prisoner as citizen, any number of
things follow from that, and indeed are following from that. The notion that in some sense,
not the civic liberties but the civic status of a prisoner is in cold storage when custody takes
over is one of the roots of a whole range of issues around the rights of prisoners, and indeed
touches a little bit on the particularly neuralgic subject of votes for prisoners. But maybe
more of that later on.
The prisoner as citizen is somebody who can on the one hand expect their dignity as a
citizen to be factored in to what happens to them, and can reasonably expect that penal
custody will be something which contributes to, rather than takes away, their capacity to act
as a citizen in other circumstances. Thus issues around restoration, around responsibility,
around developing concepts of empathy and mutuality are all part of what seems to me to
be a reasonable working out of what it is to regard the prisoner as a citizen. I apologise if
that is a little bit telegraphic, but those are some of the themes which, as Juliet will
remember, I outlined a few years ago in a lecture for the Prison Reform Trust, especially
around issues of mutuality, and the taking of responsibility for others as well as oneself. So
the prisoner as citizen is my political principle.
My theological principle is a little harder to express in brief and snappy terms, but I will do it
in what may sound a rather shocking phrase: the prisoner is gifted. That is to say, the
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prisoner is someone who, in theological terms, has received dignities and liberties as a
human being, a person, and someone whose gifts received from the Creator are given to be
shared. When those gifts are overlaid by failure, by crime, by any number of distortions, then
they need release – to use what is perhaps an appropriate term. Penal custody ought to
have in view the question of how gifts are released for sharing. You can see that those two
principles are in fact very closely allied. Because both of them presuppose that the
restoration of an offender is something to do with the restoration of a capacity for relating, a
capacity for taking responsibility, a capacity for self-understanding and the understanding of
others. If there is any element of restoration in penal policy, that needs surely to be its
direction. And that applies not only as we think about the general issue of restorative justice,
and the restoration of relationship, but also has something to do with healthy relationships
within penal institutions, with the working structures of a penal institution being so
understood that they don’t simply turn still further on an erosion of civic dignity and human
giftedness.
So those are my starting points and they relate a bit, again, to a point I made a little while
ago, speaking to PRT, that at present we are in danger of perpetuating a penal philosophy
and system which actually leaves everybody as victims. It leaves victims of crime as victims,
their victimhood unaddressed and unaltered, and it leaves those under sentence as victims
in other ways. We ought to want to move beyond a situation where claims around victimage
are driving policy, but also a situation where the victimising of the prisoner by the denial of
those basic civic issues is perpetuated. So that’s the broad framework within which I’ve
tried to think about penal policy myself.
I want next briefly to turn to one or two things in the Green Paper, with which you’ll all be
fairly familiar I am sure, which touch on some of the issues which I have mentioned and
which are in tune with them, before moving on to a couple of areas where I’d like to hear
more. One of the strengths of the Green Paper is the affirmation that custody needs a
purpose. A very strong theme that comes through is that we have allowed ourselves to be
controlled in our attitudes here by understanding the prior overwhelming need as the
protection of the public. And early on in the Green Paper we read about how the protection
of the public for short sporadic bursts, so to speak, by custody without purpose, doesn’t
actually make anybody safer in the long run. And here there is an important balance to be
drawn.
We all know the sort of argument that says: prisoners in custody have quite a comfortable
and secure time. It ought to be made more uncomfortable. And at that point, of course, one
needs to say: look, the punishment is custody. The punishment is not being made as
uncomfortable as possible in custody. The punishment is to be deprived of liberty. But we
need to balance that by saying: at the same time, the deprivation of liberty – the fact of
custody – needs some purposefulness about it, if it’s not simply to be a temporary act of
damage limitation, which in fact turns out as rather worse than a temporary act of damage
limitation because most of the evidence suggests that it intensifies long term damage, both
to the individual and to society.
So I welcome that concern about the purpose of custody. The stress in the Green Paper on
work, on restorative strategies, on responses other than automatic remand, especially as
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that applies to the young: all of that recognises very fully and very rightly that custody in
itself is not the answer. We need to ask: what is the content? And I would want to underline
the insight because it is one that has wide application: that if public protection takes over
and drives nearly everything in the field of penal policy, there is a real difficulty, in many
areas of civil liberties, human dignity and so forth, especially as that takes over beyond even
detention as a matter of public protection – that seems to be then the default setting for a
lot of other exercises of policy.
I mention only in passing, but not because I think it’s unimportant – quite the contrary – the
welcome fact that this is a document that does take seriously many issues around the youth
justice world, and particularly about the rightness of custody for the young generally.
So I believe there is much here that does do some justice to those notions of civic dignity
and human giftedness with which I began. I won’t elaborate on that, because perhaps in the
discussion there are specific areas of the text that we might like to reflect on. But before
handing over for response and further discussion, I’d want to pinpoint a couple of areas in
which I’d like to hear more. The Green Paper begins, very plausibly and perhaps rather
predictably, by aligning what it says with the whole philosophy of the Coalition Government
in terms of localism. There’s a great deal about how Westminster driven solutions are not
going to help us here. Like a good many in this room, I suspect, I have some sympathy with
what’s being said, and some sympathy with the localist agenda. It seems to me we need
this spelled out and thought through with some care. Because all of us will be aware of how
one of the most problematic areas of the penal estate and the penal system at the moment
is the transfer of prisoners from institution to institution when there is a lack of parity of
various services, pastoral, educational and relational and so forth. If an appeal to localism
fails to recognise the importance of some sort of parity, some sort of proper expectation
that in any institution certain basics, certain kinds of continuity are secured, then I think it
will be a serious failing.
I am thinking here of a visit to one institution a couple of years ago where I discussed with
some prisoners and some staff at length issues around two particular programmes which
this particular institution was really very good at: programmes around family relations and
programmes around anger management. It was perfectly clear that those in that institution
were profiting very seriously, very extensively, from what was on offer, and equally clear that
part of their daily anxiety was transfer to institutions where these services were not on offer,
or not at the same level, or of the same quality or intensity. So localism may be a very good
slogan to sail under generally but I would really want to push that question about parity, and
about equality of expectation, especially as regards matters such as those I have just
touched on. And if the prison population continues at anything like its present level of rather
chaotic mobility, this is quite a central problem, I would suggest.
That takes me to one other area where I should like to hear more. And that is to do with the
vulnerability in a lot of institutions precisely of these imaginative programmes of restoration
which deal with the management of relationships, and which deal also with questions
around the imagination. I know you are going to be hearing some discussion in a few weeks’
time about the arts in prison. I don’t think again this is a marginal or luxury item in our
consideration. I was reading over Christmas an extraordinary collection of essays by
American writers on drama in prisons, in various institutions in the US. It contained some of
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the most moving pieces I have read in a very long time about precisely education in
empathy, and the equipment of people to see themselves afresh in this context.
Now in a financial situation such as the one we are in, things like this are almost bound to
look to some people like luxuries. I’d like to know what the safeguards will be of that kind of
work which really does enable people within penal institutions to see themselves afresh in
these imaginative or artistic ways, as well as in the more obvious ways of counselling
programmes of a more traditional kind. I am aware, I hear it reported today, that support
networks of various kinds, in this case a women offenders’ support network, and some
programmes of mentoring in prison, are likely to be at risk as funding is squeezed. So those
are some of the areas where I should like to hear rather more robust assurance in the Green
Paper and discussion. These are questions touched on from time to time. But the emphasis
tends to be, understandably and not entirely wrongly, on the use of existing mechanisms of
control, rather than what might be said about mechanisms of opening up the prisoner as a
person. ‘Understandably’ I say because that is in one sense how you sell some of this to a
not always very sympathetic public, but also because inevitably prison is about the exercise
of force and we can’t deny that. But how we put flesh on the excellent things said in general
about restoration here, I will wait with interest to hear.
So, my intention has been to set out two principles, or what is rather one basic principle,
from different points of view; to flag up my own major enthusiasms about the Green Paper;
and to note one or two questions I would like to see asked and further discussed. I hope
this afternoon may be an opportunity for some of that discussion to begin. Thank you very
much’.
Lord Corbett thanked the Archbishop most warmly for his presentation.
Juliet Lyon began: ‘It is a great honour to respond to the Archbishop. Archbishop Rowan,
you spoke of the things that matter. You allow people to think and give people a pause for
reflection. You speak of principle and not of expedience. It has been so painful for many of
the people in this room, who believe in the personhood and dignity of everyone, including
those people in prison, and it’s very difficult to consider the whole prisons debate as one of
expedience, or entirely one of budgetary considerations.
I appreciate that the Prison Service is in a position unlike any other public service where it
cannot manage its own boundaries, where it has to accept whoever is sent to it by the
courts. It can’t, as schools can, exclude pupils. It can’t use diagnosis, as the health service
can, to exclude would-be patients. It has to take everyone. As a result it becomes more and
more reactive, unable to reflect, unable to think, unable to plan. That’s where the Green
Paper does offer an opportunity for consultation, notably a rather better opportunity than
many of the other departments, in terms of time to reflect, and time to think about whether
the government’s proposals are right. The strands that you have drawn attention to, on
restoration and restorative justice, are clearly embedded in that.
The other thing that you won’t allow to happen, which people here might well appreciate, is
that you won’t allow schisms to be created. For example, in relation to penal reform groups,
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there’s the tendency to say: there are the groups that support victims, and there are the
groups that love offenders, and there is no way that those two groups could have discourse.
But actually of course there is far more that unites groups of that kind than divides them. It’s
the false positions that are often pushed on us, by over-casual media reporting, or casual
political statements, that are depressing, and in the end quite dangerous.
In preparation, I drew out a phrase from Solzhenitsyn when he gave his Nobel Prize address,
which was in the Swarthmore Lecture given by Tim Newell, where he said: ’If only there
were evil people, somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, it were necessary only to
separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts
through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own
heart?’ I think that prepares us to think of things in a complex way, to encourage politicians
to see things in the round, to see that there is more scope for consensus on prison reform
than there is for division. That is helpful and appreciated.
I am glad you mentioned voting, because voting has swum into the news again today. I was
thinking of what they said in South Africa about voting. The South African government,
when they did enfranchise everyone in April 1999, said: ‘The universality of the franchise is
important, not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a
badge of dignity and personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts’. You have
brought to us the belief that everybody does count, and that it behoves those who have the
responsibility to translate that into policy, and then into practice, to think along those lines. If
we were only able to think of prisoners as people, people amongst us, we wouldn’t get into
the muddle and the predicaments that we do get into. So thank you very much for offering
those principles and those reflections. They are badly needed.’
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1 February 2011: Perspectives on ‘Breaking the Cycle:
Effective Punishment, Rehabilitation and
Sentencing of Offenders’
Speakers: Eoin McLennan-Murray, President, Prison Governors’ Association
Sue Hall OBE, Chair and John Budd, Vice Chair, Probation Chiefs Association
Lord Corbett welcomed everyone to the meeting, especially the three speakers. He noted
that the last time he had met Eoin McLennan Murray, President of the Prison Governors
Association (PGA), he had just been fired as Governor of Blantyre House, as a result of a
‘coup’ by the Regional Manager. This had led to an Inquiry by the Home Affairs Select
Committee, of which Lord Corbett was then Chair.
He was also delighted to welcome Sue Hall and John Budd from the Probation Chiefs
Association, to discuss issues of immense topicality and high importance in the Green
Paper. He noted that the group hoped to secure the presence of its author, Rt Hon Kenneth
Clarke MP, to address a meeting in June or July.
Finally he apologised for the room change, which had been necessitated by the presence of
200 beds in the previously booked room, because of the proposed all-night sittings in
relation to the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Lord Corbett then introduced the first speaker.
Eoin McLennan-Murray thanked the group most warmly for its invitation. He began:
‘I have been about thirty years in the Prison Service. I have worked in about ten prisons and
they have all been very different: from maximum security to open, male, female, young
offender – the complete gamut. I have been a governing governor of two prisons, for about
ten years. One was Blantyre House, which was my personal career highlight, and the other
was Lewes, in Sussex, which is wonderful place as well. About ten months ago I was
elected as President of the PGA which is why I am here this afternoon. The PGA is a trades
union. It is also a professional association. It was founded in the early eighties, and we
represent in excess of 90% of the governors and senior managers in the Prison Service.
In terms of the Green Paper, ten or fifteen minutes is really not going to do it justice. So I
thought I’d make a few general comments and put things in context a bit. Over the last
decade and a half we have seen crime fall by about 30%. We have seen a corresponding
rise in the prison population by something in the order of 25,000. So the population has shot
up and the crime rate has fallen.
You might not be surprised by that because of the incapacitation argument. You have got
people locked up in prison, and not out on the streets committing crime. So it makes sense
in one way. However of that decrease in crime, only about 5% - a sixth of recorded crime can be attributed to the rise in the prison population. So to get a 5% reduction in crime we
have locked up 25,000 people: not a very cost-effective way of going about things.
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Why are we in this position, with such a huge prison population and falling crime? Over the
past ten or fifteen years we have seen the political parties vying with one another about who
could be toughest on the criminal. We have seen some amazing legislation passed. It’s as if
the populist vote is being chased by politicians. Unfortunately it reflects the lowest common
denominator of public and tabloid opinion and so we have had some fairly bizarre
outcomes. We have people believing that they are more likely to be a victim of crime today
than they were fifteen or twenty years ago. So the perception of crime is far greater than the
reality.
We then have this crazy situation where we are locking up hundreds, if not thousands, of
men for life, on indefinite sentences, not for crimes they have committed but for crimes we
think they may commit in the future. Preventative detention for public protection, an
absolutely awful piece of legislation, has contributed to the increase in the prison
population. So we are in this topsy-turvy world with low crime rates, a high prison
population, and locking people up like it’s going out of fashion. I am really pleased that
there are a number of elements in the Green Paper which address some of these issues,
particularly on sentencing reform. Hopefully the awfulness of the indeterminate sentence for
public protection will be addressed and reviewed, and that will be a wrong which is put
right.
Just to turn back to the prison population: it is not homogeneous. Prisoners offend at
different rates, depending really on how long they are serving. Short term prisoners, the
revolving door men, they commit the volume crime, and they have the highest reconviction
rates. They commit the nuisance crime, irritating, but at the lower end of the seriousness
spectrum. Longer term prisoners do not recidivate at the same rate. Recent results
published by the Prison Service show that if you are serving in excess of four years,
reductions in reconviction rates have been in the order of 13%, which is quite a respectable
achievement. Between two and four years there’s about a 10% reduction. If you are serving
between one and two years it drops to about 5%. I guess you can see where I am going
with this, because, in one year we don’t make people much better but we don’t make them
any worse in terms of reoffending. But, with less than a year, we actually make people
worse. We increase the likelihood of them reoffending by incarcerating them, particularly
compared to community punishments, which have a much better outcome. I am sure Sue
will say more about that.
So really this Green Paper, because it wants to reduce reoffending rates, should be targeting
that fraction of the prison population – quite a large fraction - that commits volume crime,
very petty crime. What we have been doing with those individuals is sending them to prison
for very short periods of time, where we haven’t touched them, in terms of reducing their
reconviction rates. The Green Paper offers a number of very helpful suggestions which are
welcomed by most people, particularly those of us in the PGA, about diverting people from
custody wherever you have the opportunity. For instance the mentally ill, people with
learning difficulties, drug users: these are groups that we should be diverting from prison
rather than getting them into the system.
The paper is quite aspirational. If you divert these groups and you stop them going to
prison that is great. But what do we then do with them? There has to be something in the
community that is going to support those individuals. The Green Paper is short on how we
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are actually going to provide interventions on the scale to address the numbers of people
that need them. I don’t fault or disagree with the sentiment. I am just concerned about the
practicality and the do-ableness of delivering what is wanted there. For those people who
do go to prison for a short time – and there will always be some, as Ken Clarke has made
clear – they want prisons to be places of hard work and discipline. But how you inculcate
the idea of work, if you have only got people in prison for a short period of time, is
something the Green Paper does not address.
We in the Prison Service have spent a long time building and developing purposeful
regimes. We understand the importance of having a constructive regime in a prison, and we
try to maximise that wherever we can. However the Green Paper talks about a forty hour
week. Our staff don’t work a forty hour week. Maybe prison governors do, but officers don’t.
To have prisoners working a forty hour week would require an injection of resources
because you need to supervise those individuals. You will only have the hard work and
discipline mentioned in the Green Paper if you have the staff to supervise. It’s possible in
some prisons to have a long working week. That’s easy to do in those prisons which are
less secure, the open estate, resettlement prisons. But a lot of our prisons are secure closed
prisons and it is very difficult to extend the working day unless there is an injection of
resources. There are lots of practical issues that have got to be overcome, and the Green
Paper does not address any of those.
If offenders don’t go to prison for six or eight months, and they receive a community
sentence, it’s clear from the Green Paper that this is about punishment. And it is important
that offenders are seen to be punished because that appeals to the public. It has that
punitive element which it is believed is so necessary if the public are to accept disposals to
the community. But I have not seen any research anywhere – and maybe people in this
room will correct me on this - which says that punishing people will reduce their likelihood of
reoffending. If they are thinking of just punishing people by making them work hard, painting
things and doing things in the community – all very worth-while - there still needs to be an
input of something else if it is to touch reoffending rates. There has to be some intervention,
some intensive work done with people, or reoffending rates will not fall, and that target
group, the volume crime people, will not reoffend at a lower rate. There has to be a balance
between the punishment bit and the intervention. The Green Paper talks about those things
but it does seem to emphasis the punishment more. We need to be very cautious about
that.
I would like to finish by saying something about prison stability. The bedrock of everything
we do in prisons is based on running a decent, secure, safe regime. Recently we have had a
spate of prison disturbances, some of them quite serious. Probably the most serious was
the Ford open prison disturbance. There isn’t a common theme that unites them. But I think
that perhaps, in the current climate where people are very anxious, when prison staff are
facing redundancy – we’ve always thought we had a job for life – facing the threat of
privatisation, a pay freeze for public servants, prices rising, things are very difficult and
people are very anxious. The anxiety that staff feel is transmitted to prisoners and it may
well be that that anxiety lies at the base of these disturbances that we have been seeing. I
really hope that isn’t the case, but there is a very sensitive dynamic in prisons in the
relationship between staff and prisoners, and if things change and it alters, behaviours can
change as well.
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So what is in the Green Paper we welcome, by and large. Although it is aspirational, it may
be good to aim high. But not enough attention has been paid to the detail about the
practicality of implementing some of the things that have been suggested. And I think we
need to be very clear about the role of punishment as opposed to the role of rehabilitating
offenders, in trying to reduce reoffending. Thank you.’
Lord Corbett thanked Eoin McLennan-Murray and introduced Sue Hall.
Sue Hall introduced herself as Chair of the Probation Chiefs Association (PCA) and also
Chief Executive of the West Yorkshire Probation Trust. She also introduced her colleague
John Budd as Vice Chair of the PCA and Chief Executive of the Peterborough and
Cambridgeshire Probation Trust. She continued.
‘The reason that the PCA came into being is to try to provide an authoritative probation
voice within public affairs. One of the unfortunate by-products of the merging of prison and
probation in the National Offender Management Service has been the loss of a strong
probation voice at the centre. We find increasingly in debates around how you manage
offenders in the community that probation does not have a strong enough voice and there is
not enough information or understanding about what we do and how we contribute. So I
want to give a little bit of information around probation, and then I want to talk about what
we know about what helps people stop offending, and how we find that reflected within the
Green Paper.
There are 35 probation trusts, and approximately 20,000 probation staff, across England
and Wales, and together we manage 239,000 offenders at any one time. That was our case
load at the end of June 2010. So we are a major player at a local level in terms of managing
adult offenders. We have a long history of doing so, and we are extremely experienced in
the management of offenders. We have a budget of something like £900m, which is very
small in criminal justice terms, but I think with that money we provide a good deal of value in
the number of people we deal with.
What do we know about what stops people offending? I want to point to three main types of
research that are done, which overlap with each other. The first lot of research is MoJ
research around the effectiveness of sentences, and that looks at the reconviction rate of
people on community sentences and custodial sentences. You will have heard Eoin quoting
the rates for prisoners serving different lengths of sentence. Where adults on community
orders are concerned the most recent results show that 36.8% were reconvicted within 12
months. The reconviction can be for any offence, from a very minor to a very major
reconviction, so it’s a pretty blunt instrument. However it does show that over 63% of
offenders on community orders do not reoffend within a year.
The MoJ in their last statistics bulletin (‘Compendium of Reoffending Statistics and
Analysis’) published in November 2010 looked at cohorts of similar offenders subject to
short prison sentences (under 12 months) and community sentences, and concluded that
court orders were more effective by 7 percentage points in reducing one year proven
reoffending rates for similar groups of offenders. That’s the first authoritative statement we
have had from the MoJ that community sentences really do make a better impact on
reducing reoffending than short prison sentences. So that’s one set of research that is
around.
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Another set of research is around evidence based practice: ‘What works’ research looking at
which interventions make a difference? We now have really good evidence that cognitive skills
programmes, particularly those that are mixed with skills training, if used for the right
offenders, in the right levels of intensity, can make a difference in reducing reoffending.
More recently there is a very interesting set of research which we refer to as desistance
research, longitudinal research which follows individual offenders across their criminal career
and asks the question: when, how and why do offenders stop offending? And what that shows
us is that those who have a history of offending don’t stop overnight. It is not a one-off event,
it’s a journey. The sorts of things that can influence offenders to stop offending – and some of
this may seem like absolute common sense to you – is getting older and maturing, forming
strong and intimate bonds with their family. It’s recovering from addiction, having steady and
consistent employment, having hope and motivation for the future, having something to give to
society. It’s having a place in a social group where they feel connected. It is not having a
criminal identity – moving out of having a view of oneself as a criminal to having a view of
oneself as an ex-criminal, and being believed in. And if you bring all those things together,
effectiveness of sentencing, effectiveness in intervention, and what actually happens in people
to stop them offending, what that tells you is that if you want a criminal justice system that
really makes a difference, one that really rehabilitates and reduces reoffending, what you
would do is design a system that had the offender at the centre, which looks at their specific
circumstances, which helps to build a stake for them in society and which also involves work
with their families and within their communities to enable community integration. As Eoin said,
it’s not just about punishing offenders. It’s about having that whole picture.
There are some promising things which are happening, and have been happening over the last
few years, around work with offenders. They are referred to in the Green Paper, which
provides a fair analysis of where we are with the research at the moment. One of those
initiatives is the Intensive Alternative to Custody pilots that are happening currently in five
trusts in Great Britain, two in my own trust in West Yorkshire. These are targeting offenders
absolutely on the cusp of going into custody and replacing short term custodial; sentences
with very intensive alternatives, where people have daily contact, where they have access to a
whole range of support, and also to programmes which tackle their thinking and their cognitive
skills.
The other promising initiative I would like to mention is Together Women, which looks at the
one-stop-shop approach to dealing with women offenders, dealing with all their needs. Both of
these are cited in the Green Paper, but sadly, both initiatives are currently at risk because of
the funding cuts. So whilst they are seen as working, the Green Paper in itself does not
recommend particular funding to sustain either initiative.
The Green Paper I feel has been disappointing. We support the notion of reducing reoffending;
we support the notion of rehabilitation; we certainly support the idea of reducing the prison
population and working with people in the community. But what the Green Paper does not
provide is a vision of how we make that happen. It proposes two mechanisms, one is
competition and the other is payment by results. But it doesn’t clarify how that will build the
sort of holistic, integrated approach to dealing with offenders that experience shows us will
work. There isn’t a vision within the Green Paper about where accountability lies for making
that happen. I would just like to give a couple of quotes, and then open it up for discussion.
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In terms of competition, the Green Paper talks about probation trusts having an important
and continuing role to provide local strategic leadership for managing offenders, but it also
talks about everything we do, with very few exceptions, being competed over the next four
years. The only things that are reserved to the public sector are professional advice for the
courts and potentially some of the highest public protection cases. Everything else is
potentially up for competition. There is no clarity about who will commission the services,
whether it is police and crime commissioners, whether it is local authorities or probation
trusts. It’s not clear who is going to hold the ring in pulling all this together. The Green
Paper talks about the transition of the public sector to a payment by results model. The
evidence report that comes with the Green Paper has a very small section on some
payment by results models that have been tried internationally. It’s a very thin basis on
which to build a system of funding all the work that we need to do with offenders.
What I am left with, I suppose, on reading the Green Paper is a lot of questions. Are we
going to end up with a system that is being competed, with lots of providers in the system,
with nobody clearly holding the ring; a rather fragmented system? Are we going to end up
with a new commissioner coming in who will manage local criminal justice? Would that be a
probation trust or will it be someone else? Are we going to move to a system of payment by
results that is very large scale, and actually how will that work? Where will the cashable
savings be made which will enable the funding of the payment that will go to the investors
who provide the money for the projects?
What the PCA would say is that in the probation trusts you have got ready-made bodies
that are able to make the will of the Secretary of State work on the ground. We are well
embedded in communities; we are well embedded with community safety partnerships, and
with local criminal justice boards. We work with our police in terms of integrated offender
management. We would be a good mechanism for commissioning services on a local level
to fulfil government policy. Our fear is that the Green Paper is not forward thinking enough in
terms of how the criminal justice system will work in the future.’
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15 March 2011: Toe by Toe: empowering prisoners to
rehabilitate prisoners
Speakers: David Ahern, Chief Executive Officer, Shannon Trust, with two prison mentors
Lord Corbett welcomed everyone to the meeting, especially the three speakers. He
introduced the theme of the meeting by saying that it was based on a simple concept that
had proved of immense practical benefit to countless prisoners. He noted also that,
although the Prison Service had not been very good at spreading good practice in the past,
it was improving. He was very pleased to introduce David Ahern, Chief Executive of the
Shannon Trust, and his two fellow speakers, Scott and Mike. He was also especially
pleased to welcome Brian Hirons, Head of Spring Hill Prison, to the meeting.
David Ahern began:
‘I would like to thank you on behalf of Shannon Trust for the opportunity to address the
group about our peer mentoring programme and how we have managed to mobilise many
willing and able prisoners to reach out and engage with some of the most marginalised
people in the custodial system, prisoners who cannot read, or who struggle to read.
During the talk I will outline the work we do and the impact our reading plan has had to date.
I will then hand over to Scott and Mike, who are serving prisoners and peer mentors at HMP
Spring Hill. I would like to say a big thank you to Brian Hirons, who has gone to huge
lengths to enable Scott and Mike to be here, and who has accompanied them down for the
day. They will give you a first-hand account of the practical issues of being a peer mentor
and the impact it has upon them and the lives of prisoners who cannot read. I will then finish
with some of the challenges we face and the opportunities I believe the future presents.
Shannon Trust runs the Toe by Toe (TxT) reading plan, a peer mentored reading programme
where prisoners who can read teach those who cannot. Using prisoners to engage nonreading prisoners enables us to reach many individuals who believe they have been let
down by our educational system, or those who are too embarrassed to admit they cannot
read. Around forty per cent of prisoners have a reading age below that expected of an
eleven year old. In 2010 this represented over 50,000 prisoners entering the custodial
estate. In the same year, 7,000 of our reading manuals were ordered by prisons to teach
prisoners; we also trained some 1,500 prisoners to be peer mentors. To deliver our reading
plan, we have a field force of 150 volunteers who work with staff and prisoners to engage
and teach non-readers. TxT is currently running in 160 prisons throughout the United
Kingdom. I believe we are a good example, in political parlance, of a ‘big society’ charity:
with a staff of eight, we support 150 volunteers, who work with prisons to make our reading
plan accessible, to thousands of non-reading prisoners and peer mentors.
I would like to read to you a letter received last year from a serving prisoner. We receive
many letters expressing similar sentiments but this one is particularly interesting in that it is
an account by a prisoner mentor that captures the impact of peer mentoring and the journey
of one learner:
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Wearing my Toe by Toe tee shirt with pride I found myself being approached by another
inmate. What was to follow made a massive impact upon me. Sheepishly steering me
towards his room, it was quite obvious that he was not at ease and unsure of himself.
Initially I thought he must be in debt or some other problem. Entering his room, with a
sigh of relief, he asked me if I could read a letter which he had received from his wife. He
asked me not to say anything, I gave him my full assurance, which put him at ease and I
read the letter to him. He then rummaging through a box and produced some 30 letters
from his wife which he had received in the last four months. All were unread.
Having promised I would not tell anyone, I continued to visit him some 4-5 times a week.
He did not want certificates as the thought of others knowing he had reading difficulties
really worried him. He believed his prison credibility would in some way be tarnished.
Completing the red book, watching him read his letters from home and respond to them
was one of the biggest buzzes I have had. He now reads to his daughter on visits, he has
completed Level One literacy and uses the library. I now see him moving from wing to
wing with red books, he is now a mentor. Prison credibility is the last thing on his mind.
He has completed a mock exam in literacy Level Two.
I ask that nobody at Shannon Trust, the supporters of the little red book, ever
underestimate the magnitude of the power that is contained within the concept and
delivery of Toe by Toe.
Could I ask you to hold the impressions this account brings to mind. Be it around the isolation
of being unable to read in prison - that secondary incarceration; the challenges and
embarrassment that have to be overcome to start the learning journey; or perhaps the
distance travelled to have the confidence, sense of self-worth, and self-awareness of what life
could be.
I would now like to hand you over to Scott, who is a TxT mentor. He has taught a number of
prisoners to read, but also has considerable experience of peer mentoring in other areas of
prisoner support.’
Scott began: ‘I am a serving prisoner in Spring Hill open prison near Aylesbury. I entered the
prison system back in December 2009, although I must concede it was not my first custodial
sentence, having served three other short term sentences on and off since 1991. What I can
say with all sincerity is that this sentence will positively be my last. Why can I be so sure of
this? Well that is simple. For the first time in my life I was given support and guidance, which I
truly needed. More so because most of that support came from my fellow peers.
The moment I arrived in reception at HMP Bullingdon, I was introduced to a RAPt mentor.
RAPt is the Rehabilitation of Addicted Prisoners Trust. I was on my knees, literally, washed up,
and licked by the illness which I now recognise as alcoholism and addiction. The mentor
inspired me, and I realised that I wanted what he had found in his life: serenity. I was told that
I could find a new freedom and a new happiness in my life, but I should not regret the past or
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shut the door on it. If I comprehended the word serenity, I would find peace. This was
sufficient for me to get help, and I enrolled on the RAPt treatment programme for alcohol
addiction. In therapy I found myself once more. I also found the fellowship of Alcoholics
Anonymous, and today I live by our twelve step principles. I have been sober and clean for
fifteen months.
I soon knew that my experience could benefit others. The feelings of uselessness and selfpity disappeared. I lost interest in selfish things and gained interest in my fellows. I became a
RAPt peer mentor myself, and a vulnerable prisoner mentor. I slowly realised that most of the
guys I came into contact with had other issues apart from addiction, such as poor literacy,
numeracy and communication skills. I was approached and asked if I would like to become a
TxT mentor, in addition to my other mentoring roles. I completed my training and took on two
learners, who both completed the main TxT training manual. One of these guys had addiction
issues also, and once his confidence had been restored through being able to read write and
communicate efficiently, he went on the RAPt programme himself, and I believe he remains
drug-free to this day.
As for my other learner, he followed me to Spring Hill, where I continue to mentor him. He had
recently completed his Level Three examination in literacy and communication, and this is
amazing considering that back in 2010 he was borderline illiterate. Today, some twelve
months on, he is hopefully on his way to a mid-range A level equivalent qualification. A few
weeks ago he told me that I had helped him get his life back, and by God could I relate to that
statement. With enormous pride and gratification, the peer-to-peer circle was complete.
Today I am still a RAPt peer mentor, and I continue to mentor for TxT and Aim Higher. In fact I
commence a community work placement with Aim Higher tomorrow. This is another
educational project which I strongly believe in, and which I have seen working with real
results.
At this point I would also like to acknowledge and thank Mr Brian Hirons, the head governor
at Spring Hill. He and his team have been extremely pro-active and supportive of many peerto-peer projects and initiatives. The Prison Service should take a long hard look at what is
being accomplished at Spring Hill, as in my opinion it is nothing less than a pioneering prison
model in the peer-to-peer development arena. I cannot stress enough the importance of the
peer-to-peer relationship. I have built some solid relationships and friendships as a direct
result of working as a mentor in my various capacities, as well as being mentored myself. My
whole attitude and outlook on life have changed. I now intuitively know how to handle
situations which used to baffle me.
Today I have something which was lacking in my life. I see it in the eyes and smiles of
everyone I have mentored. I would like to finish with this thought. Man can live for about forty
days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air, but only
one second without hope. Thank you for listening and allowing me to share my experience’.
Scott was warmly applauded. David Ahern continued: ‘I will now ask Mike to tell you about
his first-hand experience of managing and co-ordinating the delivery of TxT at Spring Hill’.
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Mike began: ‘I am a serving prisoner, and arrived at Spring Hill in December 2010. I hope to
be departing in July 2011. This is my first time in prison, and having had no previous
convictions of any kind, I have every intention to reclaim my previous law-abiding life. My
working life has been spent in management at all levels, so I believe I have a wide and
experienced view of other people and what makes them motivated, or more importantly
what makes them despondent, and without purpose.
On the very afternoon of being sent to prison from court, it became clear to me that prison
has a problem with literacy. At Spring Hill, which is an open prison, I have the opportunity by
virtue of my employment within the prison to see and meet all new prisoners as they arrive,
and to see their educational assessments. Part of their induction is to attend the Job Club
where I work, and complete a simple questionnaire, which demonstrates their individual
learning style, be it visual, auditory or kinaesthetic. The questionnaire is not complicated and
the wording is deliberately easy. However some prisoners cannot even start to read it. They
ask for help with the simplest of words, or tick the same as their more able colleague who is
also completing the form.
Within the office are computers, for men to use for various training purposes, one being the
driving theory test. I have had men asking for assistance, not because they have got bad
eye sight and cannot read what’s on the screen, but because they simply cannot read. One
example is: ‘what does stationary mean?’ One man even had a problem with the word ‘into’,
although he was classified, according to the Education Department of the prison, as Level
One, which begs the question of how they do the assessment.
Many in their hut environment live as a community, with a good deal of mutual assistance
and understanding. They may be in prison but their humanity and care for their fellow man
still holds strong, in the main. Men ask other men to read letters from home, and even write
replies, taking dictation from the man who cannot read. Men ask others to help them with
their weekly canteen sheets because they simply cannot read them, so if they want a
chocolate bar they don’t know the brand names on the sheet.
The system is compounded by the education system I believe, in that some men who are
obviously illiterate, or so close as to make little difference, are scored as L1, which means a
learning age of 11-13, or L2, which means the equivalent of GCSE level A-D. The gives the
affected man a false understanding of their own literacy, and also raises aspirations which
can be so quickly, and morale-sappingly, destroyed.
Spring Hill is, from what I understand, forward thinking and with pro-active management,
looking towards the need of the prisoners, with an approach that is very ordered,
disciplined, and always fair. This is supported by a prison population that is supportive, and
very helpful towards their fellow prisoners. On arrival at Spring Hill I expressed my concern
about the poor standard of education amongst prisoners, and the knock-on destruction of
hope, low self-respect, poor self-esteem, and lack of self-worth. And as would happen, I
was asked to introduce TxT into Spring Hill, and also take over as facilitator for the other
prisoner-to-prisoner mentoring programme Aim Higher, along with my duties as orderly in
the Job Club. I have been told that I am the only prisoner facilitator in the country for TxT. In
other prisons the role is undertaken by paid staff.
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Both programmes have been a real and meaningful eye-opener for me. I have discovered the
real desire of many prisoners to help others less fortunate than themselves. That help is
sacrificial. Spare time is highly valued, and yet mentors, who are volunteers, are giving up
their time five days a week, Monday to Friday, to help other prisoners with their literacy. The
Aim Higher programme can also involve weekends. I have seen personally, as a mentor, the
restoration of hope in men’s faces. The knowledge that, with a little effort, they can change
their future for the better, and in doing so can improve the lot of their families and loved ones.
This is not emotional rhetoric. It is a reality, happening at Spring Hill now, regularly. Prisoners
are doing it with the support of management, because they see an obvious need. These
programmes, with prisoners being empowered to assist prisoners, work. They cost the
Prison Service nothing in resource. Aim Higher, for example, is operating in five prisons and
has been working for four years. In all that time, not one mentee has been reconvicted. Why
no reconviction? The answer is simple. Hope has been restored, and the realisable availability
of a meaningful and productive future is at hand. I don’t have figures for TxT, but for me it
makes total sense that a man or woman who cannot read, who cannot understand the written
word, cannot develop, and therefore cannot fit into a society which demands the need to
communicate as a rite of passage to personal development. Being able to read is not a
privilege, that concept died out in the Middle Ages. It is a right, a human right. Missing out on
the written word is missing out on life itself.
Thank you for your time. Before I close I will give you a situation that has happened during the
last week at Spring Hill. One of the TxT learners came to me full of excitement. As well as
improving his understanding of written English, he had learned to improve his pronunciation
to such an extent that for the first time he could properly pronounce the name of his one and
only daughter. Within minutes, his mentor came along. He was equally excited, but also quite
humbled, that he had helped a man in this way. Both men, previously unknown to each other,
had created a real bond, a real teacher to pupil, mentor to learner relationship. Both had
benefitted from it. That’s just one minor example, among many, of prisoners helping prisoners
to improve towards a better future, and life with real hope. The prisoners themselves are a
resource that the Prison Service would be foolish to ignore or dismiss. Used in this way, they
can do nothing but improve our society.’
Mike too was warmly applauded. David Ahern concluded:
‘The impact of learning to read goes beyond learning a new life skill, important as that may
be. For many, it is the beginning of a journey of emotional and social engagement. When
non-readers engage in the reading plan we see self-esteem and self-confidence rise, and
improved relationships with staff, prisoners and families. For many it is the dawning
realisation that life can be different and it is within their gift to do something about it. I
genuinely believe that Shannon Trust is in the business of changing lives.
On the 18th January this year, the Archbishop of Canterbury addressed this group. Proposing
that the restoration of the human condition is central to the journey of rehabilitation, he said:
“The restoration of an offender is something to do with the restoration of the capability of
relating, a capacity for taking responsibility, a capacity for self-understanding and
understanding others”. This is a theme that resonates with our experience and also with the
accounts you have heard from Scott and Mike.
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The government’s Green Paper states that prison must have purpose. We embrace this
idea but we are concerned that, with decreasing budgets and staff reductions, many may
get left behind in the rehabilitation revolution. If the basic literacy needs of tens of
thousands of non-reading prisoners go unaddressed, they will be unable to take part in the
offending behaviour programmes they so desperately need. Prisoners need basic literacy
skills to take part in education and meaningful skills training. For those that cannot read,
there is a real danger they will be channelled into low skill activities that do little more than
keep them busy. For this needy group of prisoners, the rehabilitation revolution is likely to
pass them by, with all the consequences for our society this likely to entail.
I believe everyone in this room recognises that the challenges facing the Prison Service
today are many and complex, and in some cases unprecedented. But I also believe this is a
time of great opportunity to challenge the old ways of doing things and embrace innovation
and things that work. Within the prison system there is a huge, low cost resource that is
under-utilised and not fully recognised for its potential. There are literally tens of thousands
of able and willing prisoners, with time on their hands, who would like to make a difference,
and bring purpose to their time in prison. Peer mentoring offers something unique to
prisons that only prisoners can deliver. For prisons to be places of purpose and
rehabilitation, particularly for those most likely to re-offend, we need to exploit the resources
that will best engage these individuals and meet their emotional and learning needs. Peer
mentoring programmes have an important contribution to make in this process, but if this is
to be fully exploited, peer mentoring will need to be recognised and embraced, for the
potential it has to make a significant contribution to the rehabilitation revolution’.
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10 May 2011: Nick Hardwick CBE, Chief Inspector of Prisons
Lord Corbett welcomed everyone to the meeting. He welcomed and introduced the
speaker, a previous chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, and now Chief
Inspector of Prisons, as an old friend of the group. There was a lot going on in penal affairs,
and he was hopeful that when the Minister came to address the AGM on 28 June he would
be able to update the meeting on progress. He warned the speaker that there would be a
vote coming up, unfortunately.
Nick Hardwick began by saying how pleased he was by such a large attendance. He
continued: ‘I have been doing this job now for coming up for a year, so this is a good time to
be here. The problem is to pick my topic: there is a wealth of things I could say. I wanted
first to say something about the inspection process and what I think are some of the risks
and opportunities of an independent process. And then I wanted to make a few brief initial
observations that have struck me in my first year, some of which I am sure Ken Clarke will
mention to you when he comes to speak to your AGM. You have had some of my
predecessors to speak here before. One of the things people have said to me is that I have
a very hard act to follow, and that is true. Dame Ann Owers, Lord David Ramsbotham and
Stephen Tumim are indeed a hard act to follow.
A lot of my first year has been tied up in trying to defend and sell the inspectorate and get it
through what has been a very stormy period. That’s for a number of reasons: first of all
obviously there is the funding question, not just for the inspectorate but also for the
institutions we inspect. Increasingly the gap between what we expect youth custody and
other forms of custody to do, and what they have the resources to do, is getting greater.
That creates a dilemma for us: how reasonable should we be? I will say a bit about how we
have tried to address that.
The other thing is that I am sure there are a number of people in this room to whom I have
cause to be grateful for getting rid of schedule 7 of the Public Bodies Bill. I do think that was
a threat to the independence of our inspectorate and others. Even if I had not allowed it to
affect what I did, the perception would have been that if that was hanging over our heads,
and that was a pressure that we had somehow to address. I am very pleased that has been
got rid of – I know that was a threat to the IMBs too – and I am very grateful to the people
who helped us with that.
Two other things related to that: as you know, a couple of years ago, the idea was that all
the criminal justice inspectorates should merge. I think that’s off the main agenda, but it
bubbles along under the surface and it’s something we have to watch. What goes along
with that is an understandable rhetoric around the idea that in these straitened economic
times, inspection needs to be ‘light touch’, and that you need to make sure that the centre is
not over-prescriptive on what the operational field is doing. That’s a theme in the Green
Paper. I’ve got two things to say to that. One is that inspection means different things in
different places. I think I’m one of the relatively few inspectors who actually goes out and
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inspects, as in ‘looks at things’. We’re very clear that we do our statutory remit, which is
about the treatment and conditions of prisoners. What we are looking at is outcomes for
prisoners. Our starting point is not how efficiently the Prison Service is run. Our starting
point is: what is actually happening to prisoners, and is that in line with the expectations we
have about how they should be treated? That differentiates us from some of the other
criminal justice inspectorates in terms of what they look at and how they look at things.
I also think that there would be a real risk in reducing our inspection input into how prisons
are run. What prisons don’t have are the normal correctives of the market – people can’t
take their business elsewhere if they don’t think they are getting a good service – and you
don’t have the same kind of democratic accountability simply because what is happening is
so invisible. So I think it’s important that you have a rigorous independent inspection
process.
We have been reasonably successful over the past year in tackling the legacy I inherited.
What has been key to that is the decision the last government took to sign up to the UN
optional protocol for the convention against torture, (OPCAT). That creates a legal and
international framework to the work we are doing within the inspectorate. What OPCAT
requires is that each of its signatory states sets up a national mechanism to carry out a
programme of regular preventative inspections of all places of detention. We obviously do
that in the places we inspect – prisons, police custody, immigration removal centres – but
we also coordinate the network of inspectorates - HMIC, CQC looking at mental health
provision, and the whole range of agencies looking at detention facilities throughout the UK.
What’s important about the OPCAT process is the word ‘prevention’. What the UN has
recognised, and I think is absolutely right, is that the sort of inspection we do is
preventative. I don’t see my job as going into prisons and catching someone out doing
something wrong. I see my job as running an inspection programme that prevents ill
treatment and things going wrong in the first place. I think the system I have inherited does
that very well. One key element of that is its independence. I can decide where we go, when
we go, who we’ll talk to, what we will see while we are there. I decide what I’m going to
publish and when. It’s also key that I have the power to make recommendations. They are
not binding on the institution, but the Prison Service does have to tell us whether they
accept our recommendations, and if they do accept them, how they are going to implement
them. And it’s key that part of our inspection methodology involves talking privately to
prisoners. Part of the way we inspect is that we survey prisoners regularly. We talk to
prisoners in groups and we talk to them individually.
All of those processes, which are inconvenient, and which I think are not necessarily
consistent with contemporary thinking about how inspection should be run in other
processes, those elements are key to the success of the inspectorate and how we operate.
One of the surprises to me is how much notice prisons and the Prison Service appear to
take of what we say. It does work. I can think of some random recent examples. We went to
Bronzefield, which was a reasonably well run prison. The big hole was healthcare, which
was a blind spot for the prison. Considering how well the rest of the prison was run, the
healthcare was very poor. We said that, and within days they had made significant changes
to the staffing, and renegotiated the contract with the provider.
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We were in Risley Prison a couple of weeks ago. The last time my predecessor was in Risley
it had been grim. It had been filthy, and staff relationships with prisoners had been very
poor. I couldn’t compare what we saw this time with what we had seen before, but the
inspectors told me it had been transformed. Those responsible had gone through what the
inspectors had said, point by point, and addressed those points in a thoughtful way.
At this point there was a division in the House of Lords, and many members left the meeting,
including the Chair. Claire Perry MP then took the chair, and the speaker continued.
The point I was trying to make about the inspection service is that I think it’s continuously
under threat, partly deliberately, because it’s inconvenient, and because people want to
modernise the process, and because money is short. Part of the point of me speaking to
this audience, particularly when you’ve got Ken Clarke coming, is that I think people who
value the inspectorate need to be active in protecting it. I don’t think it’s ever a done deal.
The second point is that the striking thing that comes out of the work we do with OPCAT,
and the partnerships we have with other agencies, is that there are lots of places where
people get taken where there isn’t an effective inspection regime. I think we are going to get
agreement to inspect court custody, which will be a good thing because if we look at police,
courts and prison custody we can look across the piece at what’s happening, and things
like diversion are very important. I think there are issues around how secure training centres
are inspected and I hope there may be some possibility of our joining with OFSTED to do
that, because I think we would look at different things and with a different perspective. And I
think there are some issues around how places in which people with moderate mental
health problems or frailties, or learning difficulties, are in effect detained. There are some real
problems about the effectiveness of the inspection process and the way in which outcomes
for those individuals are protected and focused on, in the same way that we would focus on
outcomes for prisoners. So I think there is a big job to be done, about safeguarding the
inspection process within the criminal justice system but also addressing the gaps in the
overall inspection regime, where people are vulnerable, out of sight, and don’t have the sort
of protection that we are able to provide at the moment.
I also want to share some observations from the first year I’ve spent inspecting. I have
probably spent about 50 days in prison. Compared with other people, that’s a pretty limited
experience. But the first thing that was really striking was the inconsistency amongst
prisons. I think that Ann Owers would say that prisons are safer now than they were when
she took up her role. But you can still walk into prisons which are alarming in terms of their
lack of safety. I remember Cookham Wood as a really frightening place. I think that the staff
there were frightened of the young people. They just about kept the lid on it most of the time
by running a very hard line regime. And what was making life worse was that the recruitment
freeze that was then going on meant that they couldn’t recruit suitable staff to fill vacancies,
so they were filling vacancies with staff drafted in short term from other institutions. There
was huge churn, staff did not have any relationship with the young people, and that was
adding to the insecurity of the institution. They did fix that – that was something that came
out of it – but it was a frightening place. Young people were frightened to come out of their
cells at meal times.
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You can look across other individual institutions that seem to be similar in terms of the
people they are holding, the reasons why they are being held, the size, the scale, and there
are big differences in performance and outcomes for the people who are there.
The second thing that really surprised me is the whole question around rehabilitation. We
went to Bure Prison in Norfolk, a sex offenders’ prison, which is very well run. One of the
things the inspection team leader said to me, that made it well run, and that was
exceptional, was that it was the Governor’s vision that every member of staff who worked
there would see it as their job to make the prisoners less likely to offend when they were
released than when they came in. And I thought ‘hang on a minute, I thought that was what
most people thought their job was’. We felt the prison was pretty good because most staff
at Bure felt that, but that was exceptional. Now that strikes me as extraordinary, because
wherever you are on the crime and punishment spectrum, surely everybody wants prisons
to make people less likely to offend when they leave than when they go in. And I don’t think
that they do. For a lot of prisons, if you say the purpose is that people are there as a
punishment, and so that the public are kept safe, too often that’s where it stops. But you do
those things, and you do the work in prison, to make it less likely that they will offend when
they leave. My impression is that that is too often an afterthought.
We went to Peterborough the other day, where they are doing the payment by results thing.
They have got a new governor at Peterborough, doing a good job, and they have a lot of
resettlement resources there. But my impression was that the prison was hosting that. It
wasn’t that it was part of what the prison was dong. They were making space for these
activities to go on. One of the good things at Peterborough, almost uniquely in my
experience, is that they had a very good personal officer scheme – you don’t often see that
– and they had this fantastic array of resettlement services. But there was no sense that
these two things needed to be joined up. There was no sense that one of the things a
personal officer should be doing was encouraging and working with prisoners as they
engaged in the resettlement activities that were on offer. I slightly exaggerate, but not much.
That was how it felt. And it does seem to me that we have made some of this too
complicated. It must be the case that if somebody when they leave prison has a job to go
to, or the education to get a job, a roof over their head that is reasonably stable, if they’ve
got contact with a relatively supportive family, and if they are having something done about
their drug problem and they are maintaining that, then they are less likely to reoffend than
someone without them, and I don’t think we need a great research project to prove that.
There is a degree of common sense about it. Just putting those basics in place too often
doesn’t happen. The whole resettlement thing is the poor relation, and something that
needs to be addressed.
I’m encouraged by lots of what’s in the Green Paper, but I think that a culture shift is
required as well: There has been a culture shift within the Prison Service around the decency
agenda, and about safety. But I think there needs to be a culture shift around rehabilitation
and resettlement, so that everybody does see it as their job to make people less likely to
reoffend. One of the things that is missing in the Green Paper is something about family.
Families are seen too often either as a kind of problem, bringing trouble into the prison, or
as a ‘nice-to-have for prisoners that’s inconvenient to organise, but we ought to do it’. But
one of the important ways to think about prisoners’ families is as a resource. Who is it that
more often than not gets little Johnny a job? It’s his Uncle Joe down on his building firm.
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Who is it that fixes a roof over his head if his Mum won’t have him back? It’s his sister. Who
is it that gets on at him about going to his appointment at the drug rehab or whatever? It’s
his Grandma. So I think it’s important, in a sensitive way, and it doesn’t work in every case,
that we see families not merely as a luxury item for prisoners or a problem, but as a
resource that will share some of what prisoners should be doing, and will help with the
resettlement process.
I just want to make a couple of other points. One of the other things that has really surprised
me in this first year, that lots of people ask me about, and to which I don’t think there is a
clear answer, is the issue about drug supply in prison. How is it that in one prison we visited
recently more than one in ten prisoners said they developed a drug problem while they were
in prison? If you try to explain that to people outside prison they just don’t understand it.
There are these places with great high walls, barbed wire on the top, people are searched as
they come in – how can this be? You can take a view about drugs and society, or whatever,
and it’s a different debate. But the problem in that prison was that the whole conversation is
about drugs. Family visits were about drugs, searching policy was about drugs, bullying
policy was about drugs. Drugs dominated the agenda in prison. The idea that people are
turning their backs on it because it makes for a quiet life is quite wrong. It is an incredibly
disruptive thing for both the individuals and the prison as a whole. You ask people about
why this is happening and there is a kind of shrug: nothing can be done about it. And I don’t
think that’s right. That’s certainly an issue that we are going to look at.
The final thing I want to say is that I think that the other danger, and the danger for Ken
Clarke’s proposals, is that even if he is able to do everything that he sets out in the Green
Paper, the money is going to reduce at a much quicker rate than the numbers in prison. The
obvious but not correct way of dealing with that is that people are banged up for longer in
their cells. I had not understood until I started this how much of the day prisoners spend
locked up in a double cell that is effectively a large toilet. If you have a shared cell, a bit
wider than my arm span, maybe twice as long, with two people in there, having their meals
there, a table that one person can eat at, the other person is eating off their knee beside the
toilet. If they are unlocked for six hours a day then they are in there for eighteen hours a day.
Of course if that’s the case you can’t be doing anything else useful with them. What I
observe is that gradually the amount of time people are spending in their cells like that is
getting extended. Sometimes in big chunks but sometimes drip by drip. You speak to the
governor and they will give you a figure for the amount of time they spend outside their
cells. We go and calculate it, we go and look at it, and it’s almost always less than the
official figure. That means that the opportunities to do anything more purposeful and useful
with people are reduced. Prison capacity is not simply a question of the numbers of people
you can fit into the prison, and how many beds you have got available. It is also a question
about whether you can do anything useful with them while they are there. The extent to
which prisoner numbers are outstripping prison capacity, in this sense, is getting greater.
That’s the real threat to some of the things Ken Clarke wants to do. I think I will stop there.’
At this point Peers were once again called to vote, and many left the meeting.
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21 June 2011: Arts in prison
Speakers: Tim Robertson, Chair of the Arts Alliance and Chief Executive of the Koestler
Trust, and
Two former prisoners, Francesca and John, talking about how the arts have impacted
upon their lives.
This meeting was organised by the Arts Alliance, the national body for the promotion of arts
in the criminal justice sector. The Alliance is facilitated and supported by CLINKS.
Lord Ramsbotham welcomed everyone, in his capacity as Vice Chair of the Penal Affairs
Group, to a joint meeting with the Arts and Heritage Group, whose Chairman, Lord
Crathorne, was sitting next to him. There had been a suggestion that the issue of arts work
with offenders deserved an All Party Group of its own. However it seemed more sensible if
these two groups came together to share experiences. He hoped this was something that
could be repeated.
The Arts and Heritage Group would be invited to visit the annual Koestler Awards Exhibition
on the South Bank. The exhibition was traditionally curated by different groups, and this
year it was to be curated by the Magistrates’ Association in celebration of the 650th
anniversary year of the first Justices of the Peace. It would be interesting to see what art the
magistrates had chosen, to meet some of them, and some of the artists.
It was interesting that this meeting took place on the day of the publication of the Legal Aid,
Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, in the context of what Kenneth Clarke had
called the ‘rehabilitation revolution.’ The purpose of the evening’s meeting was to hear from
Tim Robertson, and his colleagues. Tim was Chief Executive of the Koestler Awards Trust,
and Chair of the Arts Alliance, a confederation of all the organisations bringing the arts to
offenders, to represent collectively to government what they did, and to act as a conduit to
take government policy back to the organisations The government had created the Arts
Forum, representatives of all the ministries involved with the arts, the Arts Council, and
funders, and the prison and probation services. There was a great deal of dialogue to ensure
that the issue was brought before government, and not just left to take its chance. He then
welcomed and introduced the first speaker.
Tim Robertson began: ‘Thank you very much. Lord Ramsbotham gave me my job at the
Trust and then promptly left and went to join the House of Lords. I hope that was because
he thought it was in good hands…. It is very good to be here. It is probably strange for some
of you who come from a prisons and penal affairs point of view to be looking at the world of
the arts, and for those of you who come from an arts and heritage point of view to be
looking at prisons. Those of us who inhabit those two worlds will have found that there is
great creativity in prisons and amongst offenders, and that strangely enough in the arts
there are also prisons everywhere: containments and structures of various kinds which both
enclose and often strangely stimulate the best in creativity, and perhaps the best in
humanity in all of us. All I am going to do today is to briefly set out a little bit of context.
Then I have sitting alongside me two ex-prisoners who have had involvement in the arts.
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The arts have played a big role in their resettlement. You will hear from them, and the bulk of
the time we will leave for your questions and discussion.
So just to set out the facts: where do offenders take part in the arts? All prisons have
education departments. Most of those have visual art classes, and usually creative writing
classes, sometime music workshops as well, working towards formal qualifications, funded
through education funding. Some prisons and other criminal justice settings will have art
therapies of various kinds, including NHS funded provision where the art is particularly
looking at the therapeutic and psychological benefits. Offenders will, like all of us, produce
art from their own initiative. In the Koestler Awards the biggest numbers of entries are in
paintings, and secondly in poems. Many of those are poems written by offenders in their
prison cells, with entry forms signed by a prison officer. And then there are traditional prison
craft forms, like soap carving or matchstick modelling.
Then there are many projects that are run in prisons and other criminal justice settings by
arts companies, both by national arts companies that go in and do this as part of their
outreach programmes, and also by many specialist organisations, specialising in art with
offenders. It is those organisations that make up the bulk of the membership of the Arts
Alliance. So for example in the field of theatre there is Clean Break women’s theatre
Company, one of whose users is here to speak with us tonight. There is Safe Ground,
theatre in prisons and probation, Geese Theatre Company, and many more. In creative
writing there is the Writers in Prison Network, which sends writers into prisons on three year
residencies. There is dance, of which the biggest provider is Dance United, which runs a
remarkable academy with young offenders which has had extraordinary results. In music
there is Good Vibrations, which runs Balinese gamelan projects in prisons, there is the Irene
Taylor Trust, and Changing Tunes, and many others. In the visual arts, both the National
Gallery and the British Museum, and many local museums and galleries have run projects in
criminal justice settings.
The Koestler Trust is a bit of an overview organisation. Our awards stimulate and motivate
offenders to take part in the arts. We get about 6,000 entries a year and we then try to get
that work out and seen by the public through our exhibitions, in London, and also in
Liverpool, where our last exhibition was opened by Lord Dear, and also in Edinburgh, where
our exhibition has twice been opened by Veronica Linklater – good to see them both here.
There are two main rationales for doing arts with offenders. One of those is a social benefit
model, about reducing reoffending, about the benefits of arts for offenders. The other is best
described as a human rights model. Just to come to the social benefits model first,
unquestionably participation in the arts has benefits for offenders in terms of raising their
self-awareness, their self-esteem, their knowledge and skills. In many ways, as many of you
who have tried to structure the rhyming pattern of a sonnet or to get your colours right for
water colour will know, the arts take hard work and discipline. They are often closer to old
fashioned punishment view of criminal justice than many people will think. They offer hope
and a positive future for offenders, and a role in reducing reoffending. The Arts Alliance has
done a collation of the research on this, which you are welcome to take away with you. For
example the reoffending rate for the young people who have taken part in Dance United
Academy is 33% below the national average, the year after they have left the academy. As
for Changing Tunes, which runs music projects in various prisons in the south-west of
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England particularly, the reconviction rate for those who have graduated from their projects is
74% below the national average.
The human rights model looks at the arts rather differently. It says ‘we don’t mind what the
benefits are. They may be difficult to prove anyway. It is a right for everyone to take part in
the arts and in creativity’. And in a way the rehabilitation of offenders depends not just on
them changing as individuals but also on us changing, on social and cultural attitudes to
offenders changing. They can reform themselves and have all the best skills and all the
correct attitudes that we might want them to have, but if society does not make its
educational, employment, community, family and other opportunities available to them,
because it caricatures them as monsters, as some sections of our media would do, then they
can’t rehabilitate. So there is an issue about how we change the view of who offenders are.
Many organisations like Clean Break and Pimlico Opera, who perform work with offenders,
help in that role. Southbank Centre over at the Royal Festival Hall, who are partners with us in
the Koestler Trust, gets the art of offenders seen every year in a national exhibition and
programme of events which is attracting 15,000 visitors a year. The visitors book has page
after page of people writing ‘I had no idea that prisoners had this level of skill, and I am
terribly moved by their stories’. The arts have a role in making human beings, rather than
caricatures, of offenders.
Just to whizz through a few issues. Sorry to be predictable, but funding is a big issue for all of
us in these difficult times. We are nearly all charities, and all depend on a whole range of
funding to do our work. We also depend on funding to the prisons. We have sometimes
ended up with extraordinary situations where Arts Alliance members have had a fully funded
project which they can’t take into a prison because the prison does not have the staff to get
the musical instruments in and out and do the security clearance and so on. The policy
changes which are at this moment being discussed in one of the Houses here I think, and all
the localism, and sentencing changes, will affect our work. We are only just beginning to work
out how those will affect us.
We live in a multi-cultural and complex society so diversity and inclusion, and how those are
reflected in our work, are challenges for all of us, as is the IT and digital revolution. Prisoners
are not allowed access to the internet, which is the driving force for much change in the arts
field. There’s an issue there about how we keep them up with that. The research evidence
remains a challenge, as I discussed. PR and media perceptions of the work that we do often
caricature us as arty types who are a bit naïve about working with prisons. And both within
the arts and within criminal justice there is a need for us not to be seen as peripheral but to
establish ourselves as central. The arts that are produced by prisoners, and by many other
groups on the edge of society are often the some of the most radical, interesting, amazing,
imaginative and inspiring things that are happening today. They should not be seen just as
little outreach projects, but really should be in the main gallery space and celebrated as a
central part of an artistic programme. And vice versa, the arts are often seen as an add-on in
prisons and in criminal justice settings, whereas I think we can be one of the central driving
forces for change, both in offenders’ lives, and of course so that there are fewer victims, and
society becomes safer for all of us.
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On my left I have Francesca, a user of Clean Break women’s theatre and education company
and next to her is Rebecca Manley, one of the Theatre Education Managers at Clean Break.
Then meet John who is a former Koestler award winner and currently on the Koestler mentoring
programme, and next to him is his Koestler mentor, Joanna Trench.
Frankie, could you say how you came to Clean Break?
Francesca: I came to Clean Break after a long journey. I was sentenced to prison ten years
ago, and came across the organisation after I was sentenced. I really liked the idea of an
environment where women could get involved with the theatrical arts and at the same time
share common ground. However after hearing about Clean Break my life took a turn for the
worse, due to drug addiction. It has taken me a further nine years to arrive. But I never lost
sight of that goal. I left the rehabilitation centre in 2009, moved to London with my daughter to
start a new life, and I finally had my assessment at Clean Break. It has been a slow and difficult
process to conquer my fears. I knew I wanted a new life and to change. I just needed to feel
listened to, and at Clean Break I have been.
Tim Robertson: Can you say what you got out of Clean Break?
Francesca: From Clean Break I have got a life I never knew existed. I’ve been valued and
treated with respect, and ultimately not judged. I started with zero confidence, but I knew I was
in the right place. Arts and theatre were really important to me. I could express myself in a safe
place, and gained skills that will carry me through to change my life. I have completed
Performance Level 2, Writing for Theatre, Backstage Theatre, Costume, Dance and Self
Development. I am currently on a full time work placement with the National Youth Theatre as
Deputy Stage Manager. The production I am working on is specifically for young adults who
were out of education, training and employment. This has now become my chosen career path,
to work with vulnerable adults in community based theatre projects, and I hope to go on to
study Applied Theatre at university. My experience has enabled me to develop a deeper level of
empathy and understanding towards others involved in destructive life styles. I want to assist
young adults to make positive changes in their lives. Clean Break has allowed me to find my
voice. I have spoken to groups of police officers about my story, and now I’m here today. So
thank you for this.
Tim Robertson: John, would you say what your involvement on the criminal justice system has
been?
John: in 2007 I was sentenced to five years in prison for a series of robberies. I spent two and a
half years in prison, but I was lucky enough to make my way to an open prison.
Tim: what was the prison you were in?
John: I started off in Feltham, where I spent nearly 18 months. The Kings Fund, which is a
charity as I’m sure you know, wanted to refurbish the healthcare wing, which was a really dire
place, full of violence. They came to me and asked me to paint six paintings for them. As a
result they down-graded me to a Category D prisoner, which meant I could then go on to an
open prison, which gave me the freedom to work in the community and to study.
Tim: Just explain about these paintings, which went into the new space. What were the
paintings of?
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John: Four of them were graffiti-style paintings, and two of them were sort of abstract
expressionism.
Tim: So you moved from Feltham to a Category D open prison: where was that?
John: That was Hollesley Bay in Suffolk. They asked me to do a further six paintings for the
visitors’ room, and then I managed to find my way to Latchmere House in Richmond. Along
the way I had been in contact with the London art schools. Once I was at Latchmere House
I started a Higher National Certificate in Fine Art at Kensington and Chelsea College which I
passed with distinction. I was voted the student of the year for the whole of the borough.
And then I got into Central St Martin’s School of Art and Design to pursue a BA with
honours in Fine Art, which is what I’m doing now.
Tim: John, if you hadn’t had art, what’s your guess about where you might be now?
John: Well, that time back in Feltham, when I was asked to do these paintings for the
healthcare wing, when I saw that art could be a viable option for me as a career path, as an
education and to study, that gave me belief, because without that I would have come home
to nothing. It worked out really nicely for me because when I did finally get released I still
had a couple of months left of my course, which gave me focus, so I went straight into
doing art, and from that I went on to doing a degree.
Tim: And were you part of art classes as well while you were in Feltham?
John: I did some art therapy in Feltham, and when I was in Hollesley Bay I was doing
community work with Downs Syndrome and autistic adults, and I ran art classes with them.
Tim: And did you enter the Koestler Awards?
John: I did and also I did a lot of poetry and some of that was published. I now write quite a
lot of poetry and we have our own event in Bethnal Green, so we’ve been very busy.
Tim: The Koestler mentoring? How was that and how did that come about?
John: That’s really helped. Joanna here knows vast amounts about art. We go to galleries
together, and not only does she support me emotionally but she helps me understand
certain things that some tutors might not. She’s been a huge help to me.
Tim: And how’s it been at St Martin’s?
John: St Martin’s is a different level of education from the last college I was at. It’s been
really good. I’m looking forward to starting next year in the new building, to carrying on, and
hopefully doing well and getting a good grade.
Tim: Can I ask both Frankie and John if there is anything you would want to say to
Parliament. The whole of Parliament is sitting here before you. They are terribly powerful
people. Do you have a short message to them?
John: I’d say, there’s a huge amount of talent in prisons. There are a lot of really talented
people that I’ve met, and it’s been a pleasure to meet some of them. I won’t forget them.
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Frankie: I would like to say how beneficial Clean Break has been. It’s enabled me to turn my
life around, to get my drive and determination back, and to want to change. So many creative
people get overlooked when they are stuck in the system.
Tim: I just want to correct one possible misconception here. It’s not the aim of either the
Koestler Trust or Clean Break to make all ex-offenders into professional artists or theatre
practitioners. Many of our Koestler mentors are doing perfectly ordinary non-arts jobs, but as
for most of us they are doing their painting or their poetry as part of what makes them human,
what keeps them growing, what keeps them alive. We happen to have two exceptional
examples here’.
Lord Ramsbotham asked Tim Robertson to explain where mentors fitted in to the awards
scheme.
Tim Robertson began by noting that this year saw a record 6,000+ entries to the Koestler
Awards, from prisoners, offenders on probation, and secure psychiatric patients across the
UK. These were judged by panels of artists: for example Grayson Perry, the Turner Prize
winner, had been judging at their building at Wormwood Scrubs that day. Winners were
invited to express an interest in the mentoring scheme. They would then be matched them
with one of the volunteer mentors, who were experienced artists, musicians, or writers. The
mentors were vetted, trained and supported to work with the award winners for up to a year
after release, so that they were standing on their own two feet in the arts. The Paul Hamlyn
Foundation had sponsored the pilot of the mentoring programme, and Queen Mary College,
London University, was doing a big evaluation of it, with a control group of people being
released from prison without mentoring. Results were due in about a year’s time, but the
interim report was looking good.
Lord Ramsbotham noted that the Arts Alliance aimed both to get the arts embedded in the
syllabus of every prison and every probation area, with the aim of enhancing offenders’ self–
esteem, and also to lobby for some stability in contracting arrangements for organisations
providing arts activity in these settings, to allow them to invest rather than being at annual risk.
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28 June 2011: The Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP, QC, Lord
Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
Geoff Dobson, Clerk to the Group, opened the meeting and welcomed everybody. He said
there had been just one nomination to the chairmanship for the coming year, Lord Corbett of
Castle Vale, and that he had therefore much pleasure in handing over to Lord Corbett.
Lord Corbett thanked the meeting, and then proposed that the meeting consider the
election of Vice Chairs. Claire Perry MP and Lord Ramsbotham had both indicated their
willingness to continue. Baroness Stern, who had undertaken the role for many years with
great commitment, had indicated that she wished to stand down. Lord Corbett extended
the grateful thanks of the meeting to her for all she had done. Paul Goggins MP had
indicated his willingness to be nominated as Vice Chair for the coming year, at which the
meeting expressed its satisfaction. The Group’s Secretary, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
had indicated his willingness to stand again. The meeting was content, and all were duly
elected.
The accounts were audited as part of the Prison Reform Trust’s accounts, and it was agreed
they could be taken as satisfactory. A report on the work of the group, entitled ‘Too Many
Prisoners’, was sent out in 2010 to MPs and Peers who had asked to be on the extensive
mailing list, and a letter was sent out in April giving details of meetings in the past year. Lord
Corbett thanked officers and members of the group for their support, and also he
particularly wished to thank the Barrow Cadbury Trust for funding the secretariat. Anna
Southall and Sara Llewellin, from the Trust, were welcomed to the meeting, and asked to
take back the meeting’s grateful thanks for their support.
The Prison Reform Trust provided the secretariat, and Lord Corbett recorded the meeting’s
thanks particularly to Geoff Dobson for his diligent work, to the chair Lord Woolf and to the
Director Juliet Lyon, who was present. Thanks were also recorded to Julia Braggins for
preparing the notes from meetings. The Group had a mailing list of about 200, 100 from
each House, and he knew that the notes were extensively read and drawn upon.
There being no other business, Lord Corbett declared the AGM over. He had great pleasure
in introducing the Secretary of State for Justice, and the group appreciated his making time
to be there. Group members very much liked the ambitions of his policies, the emphasis on
preventing reoffending, and the changes that involved, in both the sentencing system, and
in what went on in prison. He knew that in this room, and well beyond these walls – though
not yet in the offices of the Daily Mail or the Sun – people understood that an awful lot of
money went into a criminal justice system that did not get decent results. Research over the
last year or so had shown that we could do a lot better with less money, without threatening
the safety and security of the citizen.
Kenneth Clarke MP, Secretary of State began by thanking the chair for inviting him and
saying how glad he was to be there. He said he was not going to talk for long because he
preferred to answer questions. He continued. ‘We have produced this monster bill, a real
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leviathan of a bill. People with an interest in the subject will be reasonably familiar with it. We
spent a long process going through consultation on the Green Paper. We responded to that
last week and I made a parliamentary statement on it then. We’ve had parliamentary
questions again today, and we’ve got a second reading of the bill tomorrow – and there’s an
awful lot of it. So what I will do is just briefly touch on where I think we are, and then answer
questions, and try to explain why we’ve reached the decisions that we have.
The criminal justice sentencing part of the bill I believe to be a very balanced package of
radical reform, and I believe it is quite essential to introduce something of this kind, in order
to get the system functioning properly again in the public interest. I wish I had been able to
pass a bill of this kind twenty years ago when I was at the Home Office. At times I’ve
disapproved very strongly of what happened in the intervening period. But I think we are
now driven to doing something very radical about what we have. It coincides with my own
particular views. I’ve always been liberal on economics and liberal on social policy. Free
market economics combined with enlightened social reform, that’s always been my credo,
and we are driven to both on this occasion.
One of the drivers is that we are in the worst financial crisis that anyone alive can now
remember, and the whole prison management and prison system has exploded beyond any
ability of the economy to afford a continued surge in it. Meanwhile this rapidly expanding
prison population is not serving some of the key social purposes it should have. Plainly
prison exists primarily as a form of punishment for serious criminal behaviour, retribution on
behalf of the public and so on, but it is supposed to combine that with some reformative
quality as well, and the central feature of what I have set out to do is to tackle what I think is
the worst failing of the present system, both the prisons and the youth services actually,
which is the scandal about reoffending rates. You won’t reduce crime if you don’t reduce the
number of people coming out as slightly toughened up criminals who are about to commit
some more crime when they finish their sentence. The figures are truly disgraceful, with the
proportion of people sentenced who are actually serious recidivists steadily rising all the
time. We know that half the people in prison at the moment will reoffend, be caught and
convicted within twelve months of release, and three quarters of them will go on to commit
more crime.
All this we have tried to tackle in the criminal justice part of this monster bill. The legal aid bit
is quite formidable as well and I will answer questions on that if people want to ask me. I
hope you are familiar with most of the things we’ve put forward. The thing I would expect to
get most support for from the Prison Reform Trust is the moves we are taking on
indeterminate public protection sentences. Many of you here who are, will be familiar with
David Thomas’s book on sentencing, the bible on sentencing for practitioners. He described
the IPP sentences, which were brought into effect in 2005, as ‘an unmitigated disaster’.
They have never worked as parliament intended, creating a flawed system, not well
understood by the public and vulnerable to legal challenge. We will replace them with a
tougher determinate sentencing framework.
Other obvious problems we are tackling: we have far too many people on remand awaiting
their trial in circumstances where they are not actually going to be sent to prison when they
are sentenced. In principle we are changing the situation so that it’s not possible to remand
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in custody someone who is plainly unlikely to get any kind of custodial sentence when he
comes before the court, and either pleads or gets convicted of a criminal offence. However
we will make an exception for domestic violence cases.
I said I wouldn’t talk for long. The balance of the changes is genuinely reformative, getting
rid of some of the worst features of the present system. There is a whole lot of other stuff
which reverses a lot of the other bad effects of 21 criminal justice bills in 13 years, by
simplifying the system, restoring some discretion to the judges where it was quite
ludicrously taken away and also we have plans for community sentences and those who
administer them. I don’t think we can get rid of all short term sentences. I think that
sometimes there is no alternative. Community sentences don’t carry adequate public
confidence, and I have to admit that I share some of those doubts about them in some
cases, so we are going to try to make them more effective. Unpaid Work is one of the best
things, in the right case, because you combine a punitive element – doing work which you
are not paid for – with some restorative effects as well, getting people into the habit of
working, discipline and doing something that makes them realise that they can do some
good for the community in which they live. It is not properly organised at the moment.
People can spend years putting in the necessary hours. It isn’t supervised as strongly as it
should be in some places – people come when they feel like it – so we are trying to tighten
that up. We’re making more use of technology, tagging, curfews and all that kind of thing.
Otherwise we’re trying to make community sentences less prescriptive. Parliament has
taken a constant joy in passing criminal laws every year, making it ever more clear what
people are meant to do, so all professional judgement has been subordinated, in the
probation service and elsewhere, to a rather ludicrously mechanical exercise. The same is
true for how you recall people from licence and how you manage licence. We have got to
have a service which is allowed to get on with its job. And we will also have some reforms
sooner or later which will improve the quality of the support we give to community
sentences and elsewhere.
Then there is the question of what happens in prison itself. There is a lot of very good work
done already. It’s not an easy job. But there is a limit to what they can do. Prisons are
grotesquely overcrowded, which cuts down one’s ability to do what otherwise one would
like to do. Although there are some very good exceptions, the regime is one of bored
idleness for a very large amount of the time, which doesn’t do anybody any good at all. We
therefore have a programme of trying to get organised work and training into prisons. There
are fewer of the old prison workshops than there were twenty years ago when I used to lead
on prisons. Accommodation needs have closed quite a lot of them down. Although we
have some good companies going in to run training, and some very good examples, they
are very rare. By and large, we want to develop prison industry, to develop arrangements
with outside private employers so that you have a sensibly structured ability to provide
worthwhile employment experience for people in prison; to pay them, whilst making sure
you don’t put competitive firms outside out of business. Again, we want this organised
properly, so we have a means of getting people into some disciplined work, and some
training. And we are about to activate a Conservative Act, which has never been activated,
to pay prisoners, then make deductions from their pay, to the costs of victim support of one
kind or another. We’re very keen on that.
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I don’t underestimate the difficulties of all this. In public speeches I try to avoid overselling
this, because it’s hard work. I’ve tried it before, and getting it properly organised will take
some time to spread through the system. But we are going to put a real effort into it. I
visualise that one day we will have a wide range of availability of places and a serious
working environment inside for all those prisoners who want to do so. The experience from
abroad is that prisoners actually have to go on a waiting list to get in, because for the
sensible ones it is so much the sensible thing to do with your time, rather than hanging
about on the wings.
The other thing we are going to tackle is to try to stop the ready availability of drugs in the
prison system. I try to avoid overusing the word ‘scandal’, but it’s one of the most
extraordinary features of our system. We are trying drug free wings, and we are also trying a
much bigger drive on rehabilitation in prison, working with our colleagues in the health
department as well, with the aim of doing something about the drug situation.
That’s part of the other major feature of our reforms. We’re concentrating on reoffending,
concentrating on the rehabilitation of offenders, trying to do something to cut back on these
appalling rates of further criminal behaviour. The main innovation is the contracts, on a
payment by results basis, with public sector prisons, private sector prisons, community
sentence providers, acting - as they’ll have to, to deliver - in consortia, in collaboration with
voluntary bodies, community bodies and so on, entering into contracts whereby the reward,
the payment, will vary. There will be a return on the ethical investment for those who can
demonstrate results, by way of reducing reoffending, and as they share the risk, a loss for
some of these investors if it turns out that they make no material difference to the group of
people they take on. It’s pretty straight forward, crude really, but a big improvement on
trying one thing after another, and also the only way of proceeding at a time when finances
are rather tight. Indeed I want to reduce the pressures on the system. There’s this idea that I
am aiming at reducing the prison population. Much though I might quite like to see it, I have
no means of controlling the population. It is the judges who will determine what the
population is. But I would like to stop the remorseless growth, and ease the pressure,
because it leaves you more room to do things like rehabilitation and payment by results.
You’ve got to have some cash up front, some cash savings, to be able to pay for results.
Finally, we’ve got to keep the costs of the prisons down. Like every other public service
we’ve got to save on costs. I’m afraid I am one of those who believe in competition. Not in
aid of choice by our residents but choice where the government’s concerned. We have a
tendering process, whereby we test the costs and the quality of the regime. We want to pay
for a combination of quality and cost, not necessarily for the cheapest bidder. We have a
programme of steadily going out to tender to groups of prisons, and awarding the contract
to the person who produces the best overall value for money for the public. The last
government was going through the motions, but we are doing it seriously. The other thing I
like about contracts is that you can stipulate the quality of the regime, and impose penalties
if people do not deliver what they are supposed to be delivering. I’m also looking for
innovation, so it’s likely to be an advantage to a bidder if they can demonstrate the
likelihood of introducing this working environment, or the likelihood of an element of at risk
reward for reoffending rates into the contract and so on.
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So, I’ve been as short as I can. I’ve left vast swathes of the Bill out, and of course the Bill is
parked alongside some of the management changes we are making to alter the whole
approach to crime and punishment, particularly so far as prisons are concerned. The aim
remains to protect the public, and also to satisfy the quite legitimate public expectation that
we are going to punish serious offenders. But there are more intelligent ways of doing it than
the way in which we have been doing it in the recent past, in my opinion, and we hope to be
able to make considerable advances over the next few years as we roll this programme out.
What we are actually doing is making a serious and determined effort to introduce some
positive policies on criminal justice that will deliver a better criminal justice system. I’ve left
out the courts, legal aid, and all the other things. But we have taken on a most enormous
agenda, and it’s quite important to push it on.’
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18 October 2011: Community justice
Speakers: Lord Dholakia, Enquiry Panel Chairman
John Thornhill, Magistrates’ Association Chairman and Enquiry Panel Member
Lord Ramsbotham said that there were two speakers for this evening’s meeting, neither of
whom needed much introduction. He invited Lord Dholakia to speak first, as the leader of
the Enquiry.
Lord Dholakia began by explaining the background: ‘The Magistrates’ Association
approached me about six months ago. They felt that after 650 years of the magistracy in
this country, during which it had evolved in its role and functions, it was necessary to look
again at the issue of summary justice. I felt this was the right thing to do, for a number of
reasons.
First of all, I have always believed that the role of the magistrate is very much
underestimated in public discussions. The way that criminal justice impacts on the
magistracy and on magistrates is very important, because that determines what they do,
and what they don’t do. Secondly, the discretion they often use in reaching their verdict is
an important factor. Third, how does the community convey its confidence, or lack of
confidence, in the magistracy? And therefore we embarked on what we called a public
engagement programme. All of us could sit down and write our own views and say what we
think about the magistracy. But I think it was necessary to approach people in various parts
of the country to seek their views.
So the first thing we wanted to do was to gather an understanding about the future of
summary justice, and the second thing about the role of the magistrates in the changing
situation. Nowhere was this more important than in the recent riots in this country. Suddenly
you saw the role of magistrates highlighted. Are they sentencing too harshly? I understand
why, when I was driving in my car, I heard the Chairman of the Magistrates’ Association on
the radio putting his own point of view. But unless something like this happens you very
seldom hear about the magistracy.
So we hope that at the end of the consultation period we will be able to produce a report
which will form the basis of discussion with various criminal justice agencies, and with the
government. I hope there will be some debates – looking at people like Paul Goggins and
others in the Commons, and some of us in the Lords – to be able to raise awareness of this
particular report.
What are the questions we will be putting to those we are consulting? The questions are
straightforward. Does the public still support the concept of ordinary – not legally qualified –
citizens being involved as members of the judiciary in the delivery of justice? Does the
public have confidence in magistrates? Do magistrates provide a good quality of service?
What do we mean by ‘local justice’? Is this still a meaningful concept? Restorative Justice:
what is the role of the magistrates? Should magistrates be involved in pre-court, or noncourt decisions? Should magistrates be involved more fully in the administration of
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sentences - for example to play a part in helping achieve the aim of the sentence? Should
magistrates be more involved in the rehabilitation of offenders, something about which I
always keep harping. Is the makeup of the magistracy properly reflective of the society in
which we live? And should the magistrates’ court be more open?
So, you may say, how did we go about it? So far we have visited Swansea, Oxfordshire,
Trafford, Barnsley, and London. This weekend it’s Shropshire, followed by a visit to Leeds.
Each of the consultations has been attended by anything from 25 to about 1800 people.
Who are the participants? First of all we invite all the criminal justice agencies, and others
active in the local area, to come along. We also bring in the general public, people who are
interested. For example this weekend one of the initiatives being taken is to involve local
television, to project what we are trying to do. What have they so far found? Obviously we
haven’t started writing the main report, but just to give you some idea of what is coming
through: we are talking basically of 30,000 volunteers in this country involved in this
process. What do the public think about it?
One of the major things that came out was this. I had expected magistrates to get a lot of
flak, ‘they don’t represent public opinion, they don’t represent us’, but no. Offenders,
victims, the general public came along, looking at the role of magistrates, looking at their
effectiveness, and nowhere did we find any complaints that magistrates were not
performing their task adequately or that we should get rid of them. Secondly, as to powers:
have they got enough powers when it comes to sentencing? Should their powers be
restricted to what they have now, or should it be extended? As to the latter, this wasn’t
about being more punitive, but many felt that the period in prison was so short that they
hardly received any probation or other support. So would it help them to have a longer
period in custody?
The third thing was the need to get involved in some of the pre-court situations. Should
magistrates be involved in visiting local groups, in providing what are commonly called
outreach programmes, explaining their roles in the community? What about their post-court
responsibility? Should they take part in restorative justice? Should they take any role later
on, to see how rehabilitation works in relation to individuals? Those were the areas that
came through in discussions with local communities.
They were very keen on ensuring the representative nature of the magistracy. Quite often
people talked about the importance of having a magistracy that was diverse, yet the
impression being given repeatedly was that we do not necessarily represent everyone in
local areas. There were a number of reasons: unemployment, people not being able to get
time off work, and so forth. And then looking at the role of our magistracy liaising with other
agencies: at one time magistrates were very keen on their liaison and information service.
Now that work has very much come to an end, but how much is to be gained by working
with the probation service in relation to the sentence that is being passed.
So these are some of the issues that have come out. We hope to complete this work and I
hope the report will be ready by about April next year. These were just my observations from
the meetings. Some of my colleagues here have been involved in these discussions too, and
I am very grateful to them. Can I now ask John what his observations were?
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John Thornhill began by thanking Lord Dholakia and saying that there was a fair measure
of agreement between them on progress and objectives. He continued: ‘You will know that
we are celebrating the 650th anniversary of the 1361 Act, where our Plantagenet forefathers
believed that there ought to be ‘those worthy who could keep the Sovereign’s peace’
following the period of the Black Death and the upheaval in the country, and to ‘keep that
peace in the communities of the land’. The two inherent principles of the 1361 Act are still
there today: that is, keeping the peace, and keeping the peace in local communities.
Of course one of the problems is: how do we define a local community now? That’s an issue
we have to tackle, and that was part of a debate we had last Friday: is ‘local’ what we used
to think it was? Or is that something broader now? Does local mean ‘the whole of a county’
or just a small urban area? Those are issues that we have got to tackle. But if we work to the
two abiding principles of the 1361 Act, then we are asking the questions: how can we still
achieve those in a modern society – and one that has modern technology? Do we really
need to bring the offender a long distance to a court room to dispense justice, or can we
use the modern technology to dispense justice equally effectively? There may, of course, be
occasions when that is necessary.
The real issue is: do we still need magistrates? For someone like the Chairman of the
Magistrates’ Association to ask that is in a sense dangerous. But I do think this is a question
we ought to be asking, and to be asking openly and generally. I have to say that, from what
I’ve heard at the public forums we’ve attended, I’ve been very heartened by the measured
response. It was interesting to note in one event that both a defence solicitor and an exoffender said that in their time in their different criminal careers, they had seen a significant
development in the way magistrates’ courts, and magistrates themselves operated, to
become, as both put it, more professional. What we don’t want is to lose that very important
element, which is that magistrates come from the local community, are members of those
communities, and are not professional judges. But I do believe that the offenders have a
right to expect us to behave in a professional manner, and that is very different.
Magistrates come from a wide range of backgrounds. On my bench we had a river pilot at
one time. Recently I was stuck coming back from an event in Cardiff, the train was
cancelled at 10.30 at night and I was coming back to London. We got as far as Bristol
Parkway and there was a high speed train sitting at the platform. A couple of my fellow
passengers were a little bit disgruntled at this point, and said ‘Why don’t we hi-jack it?’ The
thought of a member of the magistracy hi-jacking a train… But I said ‘I know a man I could
ring. A fellow magistrate is a driver of one of those trains, and he could tell us how to drive
the train back.’ So the broad spectrum that magistrates’ experiences bring to the
magistracy is valuable. Whenever I am sitting in court, I never ask my fellow magistrates
what their background or job is because I don’t think that’s relevant. Their experience will
bring to that court a very important factor, as well as the local issues. We believe that as
members of the judiciary we still have a role to be part of local communities, to understand
what’s happening in those communities, to appreciate why offences are being committed in
those communities, and to maintain those very important links. We do that, we hope,
through our work with probation, and the police, and other agencies in the criminal justice
system, always of course maintaining our judicial independence, because that’s vital. I think
that’s what the public expect. I think in many ways that’s also what has come through in the
public forums that we have had: that there is an authority figure, independent of all the
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others, to balance all sides of the story, and make that decision for the benefit not only of the
offender and victim but also for the local community. That’s why we have asked the question:
should that local justice still pertain today?
We have links with probation, and we would like to see those links strengthened. We used to
have links through what were called probation liaison committees on each bench. We would
like to see a statutory requirement for that, and some of your colleagues are kindly working
with us to put a proposal as an amendment into the Bill. We believe it is right. Probation staff
work in communities and if they can work with us, we can understand more about the
community and therefore the role and place of that offender in that community and why they
have committed those offences. I was talking to Lord Bradley earlier. Recently I had a
statement in a report that said that the offender had a mental health problem. I know that is
an issue dear to Lord Bradley’s heart. What we want to see is, if we have that closer
relationship while still maintaining that dividing line, we won’t just receive it as a mental health
problem, we will receive more information about why the offender has that mental health
problem, so then we can craft a sentence that meets the needs of the community, that
recognises the offence committed in that community, and that also meets the needs of the
offender.
We often talk about consistency in sentencing. In one sense I don’t have too much of a
problem if there is a measure of inconsistency, because what that shows is that we are
responding to the local community. I remember many years ago in Liverpool we were having
some problems on the terraces at local football matches. I won’t tell you which team it was
because you will then know which team I support, but it was the other team – that’s all I will
say to you. It was right to say then ‘Let’s use the sentencing guidelines that we have, but
appreciate that in these circumstances it might be appropriate to respond to the needs of the
local community and go to the upper end of the sentencing guidelines’. We were interested
to hear many of the people who have spoken to us about the magistrates’ role at the lower
end, too. At the moment there is a concern about out of court disposals. There is rightfully a
place for out of court disposals, but are they sometimes being used inappropriately, for
offences that should have come to court? Is there a role that the magistrates can play, either
in gate-keeping, or by being responsive to the needs of the local community?
You will have heard of the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre. It’s just up the road
from my court house in Liverpool. I think it’s outstanding, but it’s something that we all know,
in this room, we cannot repeat. The cost is just so prohibitive. But what we need to do is say:
that is what community justice is about. So how can we achieve some of the important
underlying concepts of the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre? Out of that, the
problem-solving courts have arisen. In the problem-solving court, the offender comes back
every five or six week to meet with the bench of magistrates who imposed the sentence, and
a great discussion goes on. When the offender says, for example, ‘I’ve reduced my cider
drinking from three bottles to two bottles a week’, for that individual, that is a success. And if
the magistrates who imposed that sentence can be seen to recognise that success, then we
are building those relationships which we think are vital. That is why we have gone out to ask:
do you think those are the sorts of activities which should continue, and if so, is the
magistracy the vehicle to continue them?
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I can remember going to Leeds when we were looking at the Drugs Courts pilots. There,
offenders were coming back to talk to the magistrates and it was quite fascinating to see
the openness of the debates. One who was coming back quite a lot was bringing
photographs of the grandchildren. But it was done in such a way that it was obvious that the
offender understood that it was members of the judiciary they were talking to. There were
two offenders there: one had a problem with benefits and the other had a problem with
housing. We all know that that is often part of the underlying reasons for their behaviour.
Now nobody seemed to be able to tackle that. But in the North Liverpool Community
Justice Centre Keith Fletcher would have said ‘Go down and speak to….’ We need to take
that from the North Liverpool Justice Community Centre, because they believe that justice is
part of their community and is delivered by the people who know and understand the
community.
So that’s what some of us believe quite strongly, and that’s why we went out to the public to
see what they felt. I have to say, and I think Lord Dholakia would agree with me, that we
have been heartened by the responses we have got. So we hope to build a future for
community summary justice based on some of those principles that we know a large
majority of professionals in the justice system, and a large majority of members of the
community, and ex-offenders, believe are valuable, not only to them but also to society. I’ll
stop at that and answer any questions I can.’
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22 November 2011: The Sentencing Council - 18 months on
Speaker: The Right Honourable Lord Justice Leveson, Chairman of the Sentencing Council
Lord Ramsbotham opened the meeting on behalf of Lord Corbett, who was unwell and had
sent his apologies. He was sure the meeting would send Lord Corbett its very best wishes for a
speedy return to good health. He noted that there were three further meetings planned, all to
be held in that room: on 24 January 2012 there would be a presentation on the multi-faith
prison chaplaincy and the community chaplaincy; and on 6 March 2012 Professor Alison
Liebling would be coming to talk about public and private sector prisons. He drew members’
attention to Professor Liebling’s recent report on prisoner-staff relations, a follow-up to her
previous work in Whitemoor in 1998. Then on 24 April there would be a meeting entitled
‘Working in Prison’, with Eoin McLennan-Murray of the Prison Governors Association and PJ
McParlin, National Chairman of the POA. Alun Michael MP requested that they also be invited
to give their views on the report of the Justice Committee on the role of the prison officer.
Lord Ramsbotham then introduced Lord Justice Leveson, who would be speaking in his role
as Chairman of the Sentencing Council. He noted the appreciation of the meeting, since Lord
Leveson had cancelled many other speaking engagements in the light of his current
involvement with the inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the press. He further noted
that it would be inappropriate to ask any questions about that inquiry at this meeting.
Lord Justice Leveson began: ‘Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you today.
Although I withdrew from almost all speaking commitments as a result of the new responsibilities
that I have been given, the importance of this group and the concerns that I have in relation to
criminal justice in general and sentencing in particular caused me to decide that I would stay with
this one: I hope that you feel that the result is worth it.
When the Lord Chief Justice asked if I would accept appointment as the Chairman of the
Sentencing Council, I said that I would do so enthusiastically. I expressed myself in that way
because I believed that the Sentencing Council, which has a wider remit than the structures that
came before it, had a significant opportunity to contribute both to the law and practice of
sentencing and also to the wider public understanding of issues of sentencing.
Eighteen months on from the creation of the Council, notwithstanding my other duties, I remain
just as enthusiastic about the Council’s contribution to the criminal justice system. What grounds
do I have for such enthusiasm?
I would suggest that you need look no further than the Council’s first annual report for 2010/11
which we published last month. The Council had an extremely busy and productive first 18
months and shows no sign of slowing down. From draft guidelines and consultation exercises,
to issuing definitive guidelines for use by the courts; from launching the Crown Court Sentencing
Survey, to running a sentencing competition for students; the Council has achieved many
milestones across the wide remit of its work. And it is this very breadth of the Council’s work
which so encourages me and maintains my enthusiasm about the Council’s future.
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Let me begin by clarifying the Council’s remit and its role within the criminal justice system for
those of you who do not know. The Council has three principal aims which are: firstly, to
promote a clear, fair and consistent approach to sentencing by developing new sentencing
guidelines; secondly, to produce analysis and research on sentencing including assessing the
impact of guidelines on sentencing practice; and, thirdly, to work to improve public confidence
in sentencing by promoting awareness and understanding of sentencing and considering the
impact of sentencing decisions on victims.
I want to take you through the Council’s achievements across all three of those aims but in
particular I want to focus today on the last of them – improving public confidence in sentencing.
This is perhaps the Council’s biggest challenge as it is often a matter of changing often firmly
held views about the way in which criminal justice operates. It is one thing to draft and publish
a piece of work, confident in the belief that the courts will duly accept and implement it,
following, as they must, the law. It is quite another to alter the understanding and the mindset of the general public through the same piece of work. However, I am determined to make
a difference and the whole Council shares this ambition.
First, let me just set out how the Council has gone about promoting a clear, fair and consistent
approach to sentencing. The Council has already developed and promulgated two sets of
definitive guidelines: for assault, and for burglary. The assault guideline, which was the first
to be developed by the Council, came into use on 13 June and has been well received by
sentencers. The definitive burglary guideline will be in use with effect from 16 January next
year.
These guidelines have adopted a new step-by-step approach which the Council believes is
easier for judges and magistrates to apply, and easier for the public, including victims and
witnesses, to follow. Each guideline includes individually tailored processes for each different
type of offence meaning that they are all self-contained and comprehensive – no need to refer
back and forth to other parts of the guideline or indeed other documents altogether. This
sounds sensible but is in fact quite a departure from the existing Crown Court sentencing
guidelines. Those guidelines generally consisted of a substantial text and then a series of
boxes, and the problem we found in court was very frequently that counsel would refer to the
boxes without necessarily going back to the underlying text.
In both of these guidelines that we have now issued, the Council has returned to first principles
of sentencing and opted to focus attention on the two key determinants of seriousness as
defined in statute1 by the Criminal Justice Act 2003, namely harm and culpability. Weighting
these two determinants equally in order to reach a specific category of offence within the
guidelines represents a different approach from previous guidelines which focussed more on
scenarios which judges found restrictive and resulted in offences being effectively shoe-horned
into the scenario most closely resembling the case in hand. The Council’s approach allows
for a clear structure which can be broadly replicated for all offences. Of course, we aren’t
wedded to an exact and limiting structure – some guidelines will require slightly different
structures, but the principles will remain the same which is important in encouraging a
consistent approach by sentencers, and to promote better understanding by anyone who
wants to look at the sentencing guidelines.
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The Council has also consulted on a further two draft guidelines. In March of this year, we
launched a consultation on a draft guideline for drug offences. Unlike assault and burglary
which replace previous guidelines issued by the Sentencing Guidelines Council, there is no
current guideline for courts to use when sentencing drug offences. That may be because some
very distinguished judges, as long ago as the early 1970s and beyond, fashioned guidelines
and some authorities for the most serious types of offences. A large number of responses to
the consultation, together with substantial research conducted with judges across the country,
on the likely effects of the guideline, have given us a great deal to consider in the preparation
of the definitive guideline and we are soon to complete our work in this area. It has been an
iterative process. We consulted extremely widely, as I shall explain, but also have conducted
other events to test out potential solutions with groups of judges against common sentencing
exercises.
The most recent consultation exercise which we have launched is for a set of overarching
guidelines rather than offence-specific guidelines. The package containing guidelines for
allocation of cases between the Magistrates Court and the Crown Court – critically important:
when should the magistrates decide that a case is too serious for them to try but should be
sent to the Crown Court?; the practice of taking offences into consideration, where an offender
is prosecuted for one burglary, but then is prepared to admit having committed some others;
and finally the approach to totality for multiple offences – in other words what should be the
total sentence even if individual sentences taken together and added up would produce far
too high an overall sentence. This was launched in September and, in light of the subject
matter, the consultation process on this occasion is aimed more at legal professionals than
the general public. (I ought just to explain that when we consulted on the other guidelines,
which I will come on to, it was a much wider consultation exercise among the public as well.)
When the consultation period comes to an end next month (8 December) we will review all of
the feedback and respond early next year.
The second of the Council’s aims which I want to touch upon is the production of analysis
and research on sentencing issues. The Council has a duty to assess the impact of guidelines
on sentencing practice and one of the Council’s achievements of which I am most proud is
the Crown Court Sentencing Survey which has been designed to allow us to fulfil that duty. In
October 2010, we launched the survey nationwide in order to collect information about the
way judges are sentencing, and what factors are influencing their sentencing decisions.
When we published our annual report last month, we also published a bulletin of the results
from the first six months of the survey on our website, which you are very welcome to look at.
The bulletin sets out a number of results which one would expect such as a clear correlation
between sentence length and the severity of the crime. The results confirm that the majority
of sentencers are sentencing within the guideline range. We will be doing further work on the
interaction between all of the factors collected on the survey forms in order to make further
sense of the survey’s findings. Also, the bulletin was written in a style aimed at helping to give
the public a greater understanding of why offenders committing seemingly similar offences
can get different sentence outcomes.
One thing which the bulletin only hints at is how the Council will use the information to fulfil
our statutory obligation to monitor the frequency and extent to which courts depart from
guidelines. There is limited information in this bulletin because I took the decision that at least
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a year’s worth of data was required before we would have sufficiently robust information to
present in relation to all offences. However, you will see that the example which we give in
the bulletin notes that, for the offence of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, 2.5% of
sentences in the period 1 October 2010 to 31 March 2011 fell outside the guideline and this
is about the level that I would expect. If you imagine sentences as falling within a bell curve,
the guideline intends to capture the centre ground; the interests of justice will always throw
up a very few cases that fall at the extremes – either they are unusually serious, or there are
unusual mitigating features which certainly should permit a court to sentence outside the
Council’s guidelines, in the interests of justice. On the other hand, a significantly higher level
of departure would suggest that there was a problem with the guideline which would need to
be reviewed. I’m not making the assumption that I’m right. I want to find out where the
evidence leads us.
Apart from the Crown Court Sentencing Survey, the Council has also undertaken a number of
social research projects in the past 18 months which have served to inform the development
of each of the guidelines to date. Various methodologies have been used: surveys, focus
groups, one-to-one interviews. Some of the work has been conducted by the Council’s own
staff, for example the interviewing of drugs mules, which had been the subject of discussion
in our drugs consultation paper. Other pieces of research have been undertaken by
organisations such as Ipsos MORI, YouGov and the Institute for Criminal Policy Research.
These pieces of research have provided an evidence-based rationale for guideline
development and the Council publishes research bulletins to accompany its draft guidelines,
ensuring that everyone can benefit from the findings of the research conducted. Whatever we
do, in this regard, we will make public.
Returning to the issue of improving public confidence: it is vital that the public understand
what judges do in their name and why. When I gave an interview to Radio 5 Live earlier this
year, clips from “You Be the Judge” were used in the programme to provide examples of
sentencing decisions. They were well received by those who later responded to the
programme. For those of you who have not heard me extolling the virtues of “You Be the
Judge” before, it is an online resource which enables people to hear the facts of a case from
both prosecution and defence, and reach their own sentence before the approach of a
sentencing judge is then revealed and explained. It is an excellent tool for giving members of
the public a real insight into the three dimensional nature of sentencing rather than the often
very one dimensional nature made out in the media reporting of crime.
The feedback from that interview I gave was very positive and the number of visitors to the
“You Be the Judge” website increased as a result. I would urge anyone dealing with members
of the public who have concerns about current sentencing levels to encourage them to go
online and use the examples on the website. More often than not, those people who believe
sentencing to be too lenient find themselves under-sentencing the judge in some of the cases
provided.
And we have been doing our own work to engage the public – in July we invited members of
the public to an event in Liverpool to meet members of the Council to discuss sentencing
issues generally, and specifically the on-going consultation on burglary. Around 200 people
attended this event. But we were able to reach even more people than this by linking the
event to coverage in the Liverpool Echo which has a readership of over 85,000. A number of
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hypothetical burglary sentencing scenarios were presented, with attendees asked to choose
which sentence from four options they would give the burglar in each case. The aim, similarly
to “You Be the Judge”, was to see how their sentences compared with those which would
actually be passed. The results showed that the majority of sentences passed by those
attending were either the same as or more lenient than the sentences judges would have
passed. I believe that events like this are really helping us to promote public understanding
of sentencing. If the public understand what we are doing, they will have greater confidence
in what we are doing, and if they have greater confidence, the clamour might be reduced.
We have also taken a very pro-active approach to communications more broadly and I believe
that it is also yielding results. Our consultations have reached much larger audiences than
those of our predecessor bodies, resulting in significantly higher response rates. I’m not, I say
immediately in the presence of the former chair of the Sentencing Guidelines Council,
criticising what they did by way of consultation, but let me explain how we have done it. For
our main guidelines – that’s assault, burglary, drugs – we’ve issued a professional consultation
paper, aimed at lawyers, judges, academics, and Parliament, with a series of questions raised
and problems posed. We’ve also issued a public consultation document, directed at those
who do not have a particular knowledge or understanding of the criminal justice system. And
finally we have issued an online consultation for those who don’t want to see it on paper–
there is a section of our website that encourages members of the public to provide us with
their views. After I discussed this on radio there was, perhaps unsurprisingly, an enormous
spike of interest, and responses received. Making it easier for members of the public to
respond to the consultations has meant that more than 500 people have accessed the online
questionnaire for each of our offence-specific consultations to date. Council members have
given interviews to a broad range of media channels encouraging people to look at our website
and complete the online questionnaires and I strongly believe that giving people a voice in
these issues will give them more confidence in the end result which reflects their views. One
of the things that has been commented upon frequently is that when the definitive guideline
is published it is by no means the same as the one that we consulted on. So when we have
demonstrated that we have indeed taken account of the issues that have been raised, we have
received very positive comment upon it.
The surveys undertaken as part of our research work, which I have touched upon already, are
another way in which we are reaching out to a public audience and involving them in our work.
Feedback from those who have taken part in surveys or focus groups has also been very
positive on the whole and the opportunity to discuss and contribute to sentencing policy for
certain types of offences is welcomed by most participants. It is very important that we
continue to engage as wide an audience as possible through the development of our guidelines
at each stage of their development.
Another area which I would like to take this opportunity to highlight to you is the Council’s
relationship with Parliament. The Council has a statutory requirement to consult with
Parliament and I have given evidence to the Justice Select Committee as part of the
Parliamentary scrutiny process on the assault, drugs and burglary guidelines. I am due to give
evidence to the Committee again on 13 December. I regard the Committee’s scrutiny of our
work, through the evidence sessions they hold and the reports which they produce, as a vital
component of the work that we do. While Parliament sets the sentencing framework including
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statutory maximum penalties, the Council then has the task of filling in the gaps. Guidelines
exist to provide structure to the penalties allowed by Parliament, not to undermine them.
Therefore, it is important that Parliament understands sentencing guidelines and we are always
happy to consider new ways of interacting with Parliament as part of our work.
Earlier on, I asked what grounds I had for remaining enthusiastic about the Council’s
contribution to the criminal justice system. I believe that I’ve given you plenty of reasons but,
of course, listing the Council’s achievements in its first 18 months is only one part of it. Looking
forward, the Council has a great deal of work yet to do. There are a number of guidelines
currently in development on which we look forward to consulting the public. These include
new guidelines across the range including sexual offences, environmental crime and
dangerous dog offences which you may be surprised to hear was subject to a well-argued
number of requests for guidance from magistrates and the police. And throughout its work,
the Council needs to continue its efforts to improve public confidence in sentencing and will
do so with the support of other key players, including many of you, who work tirelessly to
promote confidence in the system.
I hope that I have been able to give you some idea of the Council’s aims, achievements and
goals in the time I have had. I would like to thank you for your attention and of course I am
very happy to answer any questions which you may have.’
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2012
24 January 2012: Multi-faith prison chaplaincy and
community chaplaincy
Speakers from Chaplaincy HQ, National Offender Management Service
The Revd Canon Michael Kavanagh, Anglican Advisor
Mr Ahtsham Ali, Muslim Advisor
Paul Goggins MP said that the idea for this session had come about when the Archbishop
of Canterbury had addressed the group a year ago. He was pleased to introduce the two
speakers, Ahtsham Ali, and Michael Kavanagh, taking the place of William Noblett, the
Chaplain General, who had recently retired. They were both extremely welcome.
Michael Kavanagh began: ‘I am going to kick off by giving those of you who do not know
much about prison chaplaincy a bit of a feel of what an average day for a prison chaplain
involves, talk a little bit about community chaplaincy, and then Ahtsham is going to give you
a bit of background about the development of multi faith chaplaincy. Hopefully we won’t
take too long and that will give us an opportunity for discussion.
Each prison chaplaincy team will be made up of a mix of employed and sessional chaplains
reflecting the faith/denominational make up of the prison. Each day one of the number will
be assigned as duty chaplain. They are responsible for carrying out some of the key duties
within the prison each day. I am a great fan of ‘A Life in the Day of…’ on the back of the
Sunday Times. So you’ve got this afternoon a Life in the Day of a Duty Chaplain, who could
be of any faith.
Each day the duty chaplain would normally come on with the early shift, with the rest of the
staff. It starts very similarly to the way those of you who are guests came into the Houses of
Parliament today. You have go through the search tank. You certainly can’t bring any
mobiles into prison – that would be a complete no-no. So it starts with all that, and a lot of
banter with staff. Sometimes you can be asked to stand for the drugs dog to go past, to
make sure you are not trafficking anything to the prison.
One of the most difficult but important pieces of work is that when you arrive you may be
notified that a prisoner’s relative has died during the night. It is your job as duty chaplain to
go and visit the prisoner and break the bad news. For example one person I was thinking
about today was a very senior gang leader in a northern town whose Mum had died. It’s
quite a daunting task. You don’t necessarily know the person, and you come with all sorts of
preconceptions. You go onto the wing, and visit the wing office, and chat about what you
are going to do, and what support the person might need. Then you go into the pad and
talk to him, and what you find is a human encounter, where someone is trying to cope with,
and deal with, a loss on the inside, when all the family is on the outside. You would often
arrange a phone call, and then, if the person is happy as this person was, pray with them
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and also arrange for their own faith chaplain to visit later in the day. They can provide ongoing support and help. Something that we often do is to arrange a time when they could
go to chapel and light a candle and pray for the person who has died.
Then you would be back into chaplaincy. The orderlies by that time would be unlocked and
coming down, and you would meet with the chaplains who are coming on duty that day. At
nine o clock normally there is a meeting with the Governor, and you meet with the other
members of staff to talk about any operational issues that have cropped up overnight.
That’s often followed by a meeting with the heads of the various wings, where you pool
information so that any pastoral concerns are flagged up, and you or one of the other
chaplains can be involved in supporting anyone who’s having a difficult time.
Then you are involved in what are called the ‘statutory duties’. I don’t know whether you
know that the 1952 Prison Act spelled out very clearly the sort of things a chaplain has to do
on a daily basis. Those have been incorporated into the Prison Rules and in the most recent
piece of work which provides a framework for chaplaincy, which is the Faith and Pastoral
Care Specification. As duty Chaplain you ensure that any relevant issues are notified to the
chaplain of the prisoner's particular faith/denomination so that these may be followed up.
The first one is a reception visit, where you will visit each new prisoner into the
establishment within 24 hours. They can vary hugely. Sadly some faces are all too familiar,
and will come back and back, so it’s just a matter of updating them and giving them a
chaplaincy leaflet and that’s it. But for some people that reception visit is hugely important.
If someone is coming into a dispersal prison having just received a very long sentence, they
will be reeling from the impact of having to serve maybe 20 or 25 years before they can be
considered for parole. You can begin to help them to make sense of that. In a local prison
you can have people coming in, maybe straight from court, having been told the day before
they are going to be a dad and now facing a sentence. There may be huge regret, selfrecrimination, and anger. So those reception visits are sometimes very short, or sometimes
the beginnings of a long pastoral involvement with that person as they come to terms with
what the sentence will bring for them.
Another statutory duty is to visit the healthcare unit. And again for some it’s quite a quick
thing – popping in to see someone who is only down there because they are having dental
treatment and have to be kept in. But some of the visits are much longer. Two that stand
out: an orderly in the healthcare unit who was being diagnosed with manic depression or bipolar disorder and was coming to terms with that and realising that much of his offending
and drug use had been bound up with trying to self-medicate for an illness that was of
psychological or psychiatric origin. The anger that he felt was that he had never had any
help to try to make sense of that. Another prisoner newly diagnosed with a degenerative
condition felt that it was a punishment from God for all the things that he had done. So the
healthcare visit is crucial in terms of pastoral support in helping people face really
challenging issues in their life.
The Care and Separation Unit – the segregation unit – again involves meeting all the
prisoners, but very often it is actually also about supporting the staff in what is a very tense
and at times a very difficult environment. I remember one summer visiting the unit when a
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prisoner was having a dirty protest. This was very difficult for staff - dealing with the
difficulties caused by the protest but also recognising the difficulties being faced by the
prisoner leading them to undertake such an extreme form of behaviour.
Then there is the discharge visit. Every prisoner before release has the opportunity of seeing
a chaplain and that’s one of the ways in which the community chaplaincy is particularly
helpful. If there is a Community Chaplaincy scheme in place a prisoner may work with a
mentor who will visit and with whom they will develop a mentoring relationship before they
are released. Those 24 hours after someone is released are often crucial as to whether a
prisoner y will come back in or whether they will make a go of a new way of life.
That will be pretty much the morning taken up for a duty chaplain, just doing those statutory
visits. In the afternoon the chaplaincy can be pretty manic and exciting. You might have in
one room a restorative justice meeting going on, perhaps where a group of men are looking
at the impact of their offending on victims. You might have a victim of crime coming in, not
for a one to one meeting, but to talk to the group about the impact of offending on them,
and for the men to understand a bit more closely what impact their behaviour has had.
Alongside that there will probably be faith meetings going on from a variety of traditions, and
Ahtsham will talk that through. One of the key things is the opportunity to get to know
chaplains from across the denominations and faiths, and building a really cohesive team
working towards a common goal.
After the men go back to the wing at the end of the afternoon session there is a bit of time
to write reports. Chaplains will also contribute to sentence planning reports, to parole
reports, and a variety of reports on prisoners some of whom as chaplain you get to know
very well, both from general things and also from coming to services. In the evening session
you often have volunteers coming in to support the work. Overall we think there are about
7,000 volunteers who come into prisons through the chaplaincy, providing everything from
helping to run a hand-bell group through to faith specific meetings, through to more cultural
events. That’s a real opportunity to form links with the local community.
The day as a duty chaplain would end with filling in the chaplain’s log, which is a legal
document, which has to take account of all the people who’ve been seen and ensuring that
the statutory duties have been complete. Then you have to make sure that nothing’s been
taken away from chaplaincy. You have to do a ‘tool check’ at the very end. Then you go out.
Going out is a little bit easier that going in, unless you get what’s called a blue tally, which
means that you’ve got to have an exit search to make sure you are not trafficking anything
out. And mostly when you’ve been duty chaplain, and you’ve been in for twelve hours, the
last thing you want is a blue tally, because the ‘Life in the Day ..’ needs to end by you going
home to have a cup of tea and a good sit down!’
Paul Goggins MP thanked Michael Kavanagh very much indeed and introduced the next
speaker.
Ahtsham Ali began: ‘Just to give you a broad picture, we have 144 prisons in England and
Wales and every prison has within it a chaplaincy team. The team will have a Coordinating
Chaplain, who manages it. The size of the prison will determine the size of the chaplaincy
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team, and also the religious make-up of the prisoner population will determine the number
of chaplains from each faith. I will read from the Prison Service Instruction. The first item
says that ‘chaplaincy provision must reflect the faith denomination requirements of the
prison’. That’s quite a major shift. If you go back just over a decade, all the employed
chaplains within the Prison Service were Christian, mainly Anglican and some Roman
Catholic. All that changed about a decade ago. Prior to that you would have had sessional
chaplains, who were called visiting ministers, who would come in for a few hours and would
be paid piece rates. But from about a decade ago the Prison Service started employing
chaplains from other faiths.
The ones this affected most were Muslim chaplains, because unfortunately we have quite a
few Muslim prisoners. At the moment the prison population is about 86,000, and we have
about 10,600 Muslim prisoners, which is about 12.8% of the population. There are many
factors behind that. One is the number of prisoners who convert inside, another is the
number of foreign nationals we have, and the last is the fact that the majority of prisoners
are young combined with the fact that 50% of the UK Muslim community is below 25 years
of age, but also I think another factor is the ease of drug use and abuse among certain
communities. I used to be a youth worker in the north of England prior to this job, so I saw
from first-hand the effects of that.
So we have a team which is diverse: you have Muslim chaplains, Christian chaplainsincluding Free Church, Roman Catholic, Anglican - you have Jewish chaplains, Pagan
chaplains, Rastafarian chaplains: you name it, we’ve got it. It’s determined by need so the
numbers will dictate. But the provision and the right is there for any prisoner of whatever
faith, to have access to the facilities and resources to allow them to practice their faith. We
have recently had a few conferences where we have looked at how other countries manage
their extremist prisoners, and we’ve had people from Jordan, Lebanon, Singapore,
Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi, and Pxakistan, and when we compare our facilities and our
resources, and the basic principles we adhere to in this country, it’s remarkable. Nobody
else has it. The fact that it is a basic right, if you go to prison, that part of the makeup of the
way you are looked after will be your religious rights, your right to practice your faith, a
recognition that faith plays an important part in someone’s life and can be used, God willing,
in a good way.
I’ve been to France, Spain and Denmark, and you see quite strong differences. When you
go to prison in France it’s illegal to ask somebody what religion they are. I met my
counterpart in one of the French jails and I asked him how many Muslim prisoners there
were in his prison and he said he had no idea. ‘There’s no way of checking, but I think it’s
about 1,800’. That’s a huge number for one prison. So I asked how he got to that number
and he said he added all the Alis, Husseins, and so on by surname, and that’s how he
determined it!
I was part of a visit to a Madrid prison, where they had the Madrid bombers, and when the
prison governor, not realising I was part of the Prison Service delegation and I was involved
in chaplaincy, was asked by one of our security governors ‘Do you not have Imams coming
in to look after the religious rights of the Muslim prisoners?’ he answered, ‘No, no we do not
trust Imams in this country.’ I think it’s different here because for 50 or 60 years we have had
a significant Muslim presence in this country.
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So the team make-up is very good, there is brilliant camaraderie and they support each
other in the statutory duties. Things have changed. When I came into post, I looked at the
minutes of the previous four or five years to get an assessment of how things were, and
you’d get prisons asking ‘The Eid festival for this month, how do we facilitate that?’ And the
answer was ‘there is no Eid for this month.’ ‘Don’t you have twelve Eids in the year?’ ‘No we
don’t.’ ‘Oh my goodness what have we been celebrating?’ The prisoners had been telling
the governor that there was one every month. Those days have passed, but I did read in one
of the minutes a governor asking the Muslim Advisor before me: ‘We’ve managed to source
halal chicken but how do we get halal pork?’
I had worked as a youth worker, and I’d worked with ex-offenders, trying to resettle them in
their communities. But when I started, I had a totally naïve view of prisons. I remember my
first week in Armley, when I was on induction with the Muslim chaplain, I saw a young man,
about 20 years old, who came after Friday prayers and said he wanted to speak to the
Imam. He broke down in tears, and said he just couldn’t cope. ‘Could you please have a
word with my cell mate?’ They share two to a cell and there is no privacy. ‘Every time I go to
the toilet he switches off the TV and leans over and I have to put a newspaper around me.’
Such basic things that you don’t think of: lack of privacy and lack of personal space. Things
that we take for granted are not there. This dispelled from my mind the picture we get in the
media that it’s ‘a cushy number’. It’s quite a harrowing experience, and more harrowing
depending on which prison you go to.
The first issue I had to deal with, in my naivety, was when Phil Wheatley, the Director
General at the time, sent me down to Channings Wood. They had had a sit down protest
after Friday prayers and the men refused to move, because the coffee whitener contained
an ingredient, an E number, which could have been derived from non-halal beef or whatever.
So I sat down, and they gave me some paperwork, and I went in and there were these 25
men sitting there refusing to get up. I just laid into them, which was not the appropriate thing
to do maybe, because I couldn’t grasp it. Hang on, you’re in for murder, you’re in for rape,
you’re in for burglary and you’re worried about whether an E number in a coffee whitener is
compatible with Islam? Come on, get real! But that just shows you how nuanced things can
become in a closed environment. Little things can become a big thing.
We have a council called the Chaplaincy Council made up of all the different Faith Advisers
in the Prison Service and we meet every two months, and one of the primary roles is to
endorse a chaplain going in to prison. If a Buddhist chaplain is being appointed a prison
can’t say: ‘We’ll have Fred: he’s a brilliant Buddhist. I know him.’ He has to go through the
Buddhist Adviser who checks his credentials and makes sure he’s good. This is quite
important from an Islamic view because we don’t have a hierarchy, a sense of ordination.
There’s no structure in that sense. We have to make sure that all the different routes to
becoming an Imam are cross checked, that it’s not just somebody off the street. That’s part
of our function.
I’ve been in post for about seven and a half, eight years. About five years ago the issue of
extremism became a bigger part of my workload, as we have had more terrorist offence
related prisoners in, and also as we have got a greater sense of prisoners going towards
extremist ideas. We now have 209 Muslim chaplains, of whom about 108, roughly, are
employed. When I started it was about 16. So that means that nearly every prison has
facilities and resources available to counter whatever needs to be countered’.
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Paul Goggins MP then asked Michael Kavanagh if he would like to say something about
community chaplaincy.
Michael Kavanagh began: ‘There are a number of community chaplaincy projects across
the country. In 2010 they numbered 18. The shape of them varies quite a lot because they
tend to be funded by various forms of local trust. So the Swansea Community Chaplaincy
may look a bit different from the one associated with Low Newton for example. Their main
work ends to be ‘through the gate’ in terms of providing mentoring and support in a variety
of ways to people as they are making the journey out.
There is an umbrella body called the Community Chaplaincy Association, which provides
some common trained support, and now recording facilities, so that community
chaplaincies can record the sort of contacts that they had. During 2010 1,354 ex-prisoners
were supported through community chaplaincy teams, which had 50 paid staff and about
500 volunteers. So it’s a really significant resource in various parts of the country and the
Community Chaplaincy Association is trying to develop and encourage that in a variety of
ways. Some community chaplaincies can be particularly faith based, some are more open
to people from a variety of faith backgrounds. Some mentors will recruit from one particular
faith community and some from a variety of faith communities. So the texture varies
according to context. But the key thing is this idea of support through the gate.
Certainly when I was chaplain for Full Sutton, before I went out to talk to groups like the
Mothers Union to recruit them to be prison visitors I used to say to my congregation ‘What
do you want me to say? What is the key message you want to get out there?’ And they said
again and again ‘We need help being resettled’. That transition from prison is difficult,
whether you’ve been in and out and in and out, and have never really built a settled life, or
you’ve been in for many years so you are basically institutionalised, the idea of going out
into this world that’s changed so much is completely scary. It was that help and support that
they said again and again is crucial. One of the options in the new specification for faith and
pastoral care is the post of resettlement chaplain. Some prisons want to develop that as an
employed post, as a complement for a good community chaplaincy.’
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6 March 2012: Public or private sector prisons?
Speakers – from the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge
Professor Alison Liebling, Director of the Prison Research Centre
Dr Ben Crewe, Penology Director and Deputy Director, Prison Research Centre.
Lord Ramsbotham opened the meeting by recording the group’s deep sadness at the
sudden death of its chairman, Lord Corbett, whose moving funeral had been held the
previous Friday. There would be a memorial service for him in due course. Robin Corbett
had been an inspiring and enthusiastic chairman and Lord Ramsbotham suggested that
members of the meeting should stand for a moment’s silence to remember him.
Lord Ramsbotham then outlined proposals for interim arrangements until the group’s AGM
in July. The meeting was content that two Vice Chairs, himself and Paul Goggins MP, should
share the chairing role until then.
Lord Ramsbotham introduced the speakers for the evening. Professor Alison Liebling was
one of the first people he had met when he became Chief Inspector of Prisons. She was
then doing some remarkable work studying the relations between staff and prisoners in
Whitemoor, and had continued working on these and similar themes at Cambridge ever
since. There could be no-one better suited to guide members through the difficult subject of
private and public sector prisons. He had remembered entertaining doubts about the
private prison sector when he took up his post. However he had been pleasantly surprised
by his first inspection of Doncaster, where he found both conditions, and staff treatment of
prisoners, exceeded his expectations. The prison’s director had told him that, as an exgovernor in a public sector prison, he was now free to do all those things his previous post
had rendered impossible.
So we would hear first from Alison Liebling and then from her colleague, Ben Crewe.
Alison Liebling began by thanking the meeting for its kind invitation to talk about this
complex topic. She said she would make a 25 minute introduction, inviting Ben to chip in as
he wished, as they were still working together on the material. She continued: ‘We change
our minds sometimes about the stance we want to take but we think the findings are very
clear. We are going to talk about the specific study which we finished last year. We have
encountered private sector prisons in lots of our research topics, and we couldn’t help
noticing that there were some significant differences. There hadn’t been, until that point,
any systematic or independently funded evaluation or comparison of public and private
sector prisons (with the exception of a study she had been involved in at Wolds, with
colleagues from Hull), despite the fact that it said in the legislation that private sector
prisons were being introduced as an experiment. We had to apply to the ESRC for funding
and tried to do the research in as systematic a way as possible, using carefully developed
methods that would ensure there was some kind of objectivity. We tried to stand outside the
various ideological debates about public versus private prisons, and apply our interest
about what goes on in prison to these institutions. There’s a hand-out and I’m going to talk
my way as briefly as possible through it. We are very happy to make the handout available
to anyone who wishes to see it.
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I’ll just say a brief word about what we did. It was an independently funded 30 month study.
We knew this was a sensitive topic, both politically and operationally, so we decided to try
to veer towards the high performance end in both sectors. We wanted to try to choose
establishments that we could match. We stuck to the adult male establishments because it
was too complicated to do anything else, and we decided to pick a local and a training
prison in each sector. So what you see on the first slide is the four original establishments in
the study: Forest Bank, which we matched with Bullingdon, both local prisons, one private
and one public, and Dovegate and Garth, both Category B training prisons, one private and
one public. We took a lot of advice on which establishments to choose, how comparable
they were, etcetera. They were all reasonably modern buildings, because we thought that if
we were going to compare the quality of public and private sector delivery, there was no
point in comparing say Wandsworth or Wormwood Scrubs with a new building.
As soon as we got into the field we found out that our two private prisons were not as good
as we were expecting, or had been informed. So although we had ruled out Altcourse
because it was famously the most expensive contract – we didn’t think it would be
representative of the private sector – the prisoners talked about Altcourse and Lowdham
Grange so positively that we couldn’t resist adding them in to our study. Prisoners kept
saying ‘They are really good. You should go and have a look at what’s going on there.’ So
we did.
Rye Hill was added in because it was going through a rectification process. It was officially
‘in trouble’, so we were requested by the OCP to include Rye Hill in the study to evaluate its
quality as it came towards the end of that process. So in the end we have a slightly
unbalanced study with two public sector prisons, two matched private sector prisons, and
then three additional private sector prisons. We did what we normally do in prisons. We
have spent our professional lives trying to learn how to measure the quality of prison life.
This has been a very developmental project, very much with the help of staff and prisoners,
and using a method that is a slightly unusual appreciative method, to try and identify the
sorts of things that should be measured.
On the next slide you have our revised latest fairly comprehensive set of dimensions. We are
quite confident that they capture most of the really important things about measuring the
quality of prison life as experienced by prisoners – that they represent something of an
approximate test of the quality and legitimacy of the inner life of a prison. We have clustered
the categories. We have got what we call ‘harmony’ dimensions which are the mainly
relational dimensions of prison life; then ‘security’ dimensions; and a set we call
‘professionalism’ which are very important – they sort of bind the relational and security
dimensions together; ‘conditions and family contact’; and then ‘wellbeing and
development’. We know all of these things matter quite a lot. We’re just showing the gist of
it – the headlines - here.
On the next slide we show the dimensions which have the most significant variation
between prisons. We are trying not to throw too many numbers at you but if you just look at
the list - ‘staff professionalism’; ‘organisation and consistency’; ‘staff-prisoner relationships’;
‘fairness’ and so on - what the numbers tell us is that these things differ very significantly
between prisons. There’s a five point scale. Anything above three is a positive evaluation by
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the prisoners, but the higher above three the better. Anything below three is negative. What
you’ll see is that there are very significant variations between prisons. You’ll also see that
some of the scores are very low, so these are the things that prisons don’t find it easy to
deliver. I’m telling you all that to help you to interpret the overall results.
The first headline is that the differences within the private sector are so great that we almost
abandoned our attempt to compare public with private. What we have done instead is
divide the prisons into four quality quadrants, from poor to very good. What you’ll notice is
that the private prisons are both at the bottom and at the top end of that quality spectrum.
This has been found before, it’s what the National Audit Office found when they did their
review of performance, that when private sector prisons are good, they are very good, and
when they are bad they are very poor. So Dovegate and Rye Hill are the ‘poor’ private sector
prisons. The next quadrant is ‘average’. We called Forest Bank average because, at the time
we measured it, it looked like most prisons look, on our view – a typical prison. Bullingdon
and Garth we’ve categorised as ‘good’: they were good public sector prisons. Lowdham
Grange and Altcourse, two of the new private sector prisons we added in, were in the top
quadrant: ‘very good’. Prisoners were right: they were outstanding in all sorts of ways.
All you have to note, really, is the shape of this figure. What it tells you is that very few of the
dimensions that matter make it over the threshold. Only the dimensions as evaluated by our
randomly selected prisoners that make it over that ‘3’ threshold appear in the figure. So we
have only included things that are positively scored. If we move from ‘poor’ to ‘very good’,
what you’ll see in the two poor private sector prisons is that very little is there. That means
that these prisons were not delivering the things that really matter, when we are talking
about prison quality. So ‘respect/courtesy’ is there but at a very low level. 3.01 is really a
neutral score, not a positive score, and prisoners were really talking about staff being polite.
So in these slightly chaotic, inexperienced private prisons, staff were quite nice, quite
benign, but they weren’t delivering much else. There’s a low score for ‘prisoner safety’. In
Rye Hill you’ll see ‘care for the vulnerable’, which is about looking after prisoners at risk of
bullying or suicide, but again at 3.01. So it barely deserves to be in our figure. Everything is
scored positively, so where we have put ‘drugs and exploitation’ that doesn’t mean there are
lots of drugs and exploitation – it means the opposite. Prisoners are saying ‘Staff are in
control here. They are doing everything they can to stop drugs coming in. Prisoners are
prevented from exploiting each other.’ But basically that’s all there is of all of our 21 or so
dimensions that matter.
When we move into the next quadrant, Forest Bank, ‘staff prisoner relationships’ appears,
and ‘staff professionalism’ for the first time. This is about staff confidence and competence
in the use of authority. This includes items like: ‘staff in this prison have enough experience
and expertise to do things that I need them to do.’ So it’s about staff being competent and
engaging with prisoners in a way that exerts a certain amount of authority in the prison. And
you’ll see that the score on ‘prisoner safety’ is higher at Forest Bank. What you’ll notice is
that there is a cumulative effect here. Once a prison has accomplished ‘respect’ and
‘prisoner safety’ and ‘care for the vulnerable’, they appear in the next quality column, usually
at a higher level, and other things build on those basic foundations.
Where this all becomes really interesting is that if we go to Bullingdon and Garth, the two
good public sector prisons, here we are getting slightly higher scores on ‘staff
professionalism’ and we are getting a dimension called ‘policing and security’. What this
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means is that prisoners are saying ‘staff are policing the wings. This is a reasonably secure
prison. Authority is flowing from the right place.’ And for the first time in Garth we see
‘personal development’ which is a really important dimension.
It’s not until we get to the two outstanding and unusual private sector prisons where we get,
not everything, but a lot more. ‘Staff professionalism’ – the scores are going up – ‘prisoner
safety’, ‘policing and security’, ‘personal development’ and for the first time ‘wellbeing’.
Wellbeing is significant because it is the opposite of distress. We have shown in previous
research using these measures that the higher the levels of distress among prisoners, the
more likely those prisons are to have suicides. Prisons with lower levels of distress, or
higher levels of wellbeing, tend to be prisons where prisoners are engaged in offending
behaviour programmes, personal development projects and so on. So our interpretation of
this figure, apart from noticing that the private sector is very varied – at their best they are
able to deliver something that seems hard to deliver in the public sector – is that it raises
questions about the ’rehabilitation revolution’, if it is only in three out of seven prisons that
prisoners are describing the experience of imprisonment as an experience that involves
them being able to plan for their future, think about their personal development, engage in
offending behaviour courses and so on. So this is quite important. That’s headline one.
Moving on to the next slide, the dimension of personal development has become of real
interest to us in this study. We describe ‘personal development’, based on what the
prisoners have said, as ‘an environment that helps prisoners with offending behaviour,
preparation for release, and the development of their potential’. And where the prison is
scoring reasonably high on personal development, it means the prisoners are agreeing, or
strongly agreeing, with these sorts of items: ‘My needs are being addressed in this prison’; ‘I
am encouraged to work towards goals and targets’; ‘I am being helped to lead a lawabiding life on release’; ‘every effort is being made by this prison to stop offenders
committing offences on release’. Our hypothesis, and we have got good evidence to
support this, is that this dimension works in the same way as the distress dimension did in
the suicide prevention study, that if prisoners are saying yes to all of these items they really
do stand more chance of doing better when they are released. We are getting increasingly
interested in the concept of personal development as described by the prisoners. And one
of the things they are saying is that in chaotic prisons, like Rye Hill and Dovegate, they are in
survival mode, and so preoccupied with getting through the day, staying safe, and
manoeuvring their way to getting their basic entitlements, that they are not thinking about
their futures. They are just getting through the day.
So if we go back to the figure, it is quite important to understand why personal development
is the last thing to emerge. Basically a prison has to be respectful, safe, and caring for the
vulnerable. Staff have to be professional, delivering help and assistance to vulnerable
individuals, doing policing and security well, and there has to be organisation and
consistency (some people call these the hygiene dimensions). These are the things that only
appear in the very best prisons. It’s only in those circumstances that prisoners are
experiencing personal development. That’s headline two.
What we have done with this data, because it’s all standardised, we’ve put personal
development into a regression analysis, and then looked at which of the dimensions in our
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overall study are explaining its emergence. Basically this is saying: what are the most
important dimensions of prison life if you are interested in maximising personal
development? And what we found is that five key dimensions explain most of the variation
in levels of personal development. These are: Humanity, that means an environment
characterised by kind regard and concern for the person; Staff Professionalism, staff
confidence and competence in the use of authority; Help and Assistance, which is support
and encouragement with problems, including drugs, healthcare and progression;
Organisation and Consistency, which is the clarity, predictability and reliability of the prison;
and finally a dimension we have called Bureaucratic Legitimacy, which is the transparency
and responsivity of the prison system. What this means is that prisoners understand their
sentence and they know how to work their way through it; they understand the decision
making, how to get on the right courses, and staff are able to translate some of that into
meaningful conversation.
So we think we know from this analysis what a reasonably good prison looks like, and when
we compare prisons we find that they are very varied in their performance and on a very
wide spectrum, with quite serious implications for outcomes for prisoners.
Headline two is that even in the very best private prisons we have seen a consistent area of
weakness, which is to do with the use of authority. So in Lowdham Grange and Altcourse,
the one area where these prisons did not outperform the good public sector prisons was in
policing and security, drugs and exploitation, and the use of authority. So what we are
seeing in the private sector – to talk in shorthand - is a slightly lax or permissive model of
order, a bit reminiscent of old style dispersal prisons. Some of you will know exactly what I
am saying. Power is not always in the right places. Because staff in private sector prisons
are inexperienced, few in number, and professionally not that powerful, they can
disproportionately tend to work to a slightly naïve and permissive model of order (this is not
unseen in some public sector prisons, but here we are talking from the findings of this study
in particular). There are a few quotes from prisoners here, illustrating that point. Prisoners
complain that staff don’t use their authority properly, they are a bit permissive, they don’t
know where the boundaries are, and so on. So one of our emerging conclusions is that there
is a hidden strength in the public sector which is not acknowledged in the debate about
public versus private sector prisons, and this is that when staff in the public sector get it
right, which they don’t always, they can use their authority in a very professional and
competent way, and prisoners appreciate that. It sometimes means prisoners have better
and more constructive experiences in traditional professional public sector prisons than they
do in slightly permissive private sector prisons.
I know I am talking about a lot of complex material in a very shorthand way, but that’s the
gist of it so far. Our next slide illustrates this: it’s all there in the figures. Altcourse was
significantly better than Lowdham Grange as a prison. It stands out a mile, and we think we
have learned a lot about why this is. We think it was about leadership and the way Altcourse
opened, not just about finances. But when we look at the policing and security dimensions,
and it matters as much to the prisoner to be in a prison that is secure and safe as it does to
be treated with respect, it’s the public sector prison, Bullingdon, that comes first, outperforming the private sector. So in the briefest way possible, what we are arguing is that
there are some simplistic arguments being heard in this debate, there is an assumption
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sometimes that private is better. We think prisons are more complicated than that, and it is
quite important not to overlook this professional authority work that traditional public sector
prison officers can do at their best. They often get it wrong too, and veer towards the heavy
and oppressive use of authority, but it is the case in almost all aspects of prison work that
the ‘right place to be’ is often quite close to the ‘wrong place’. We have spent the day in
Wormwood Scrubs and this has influenced our mood. We have come back feeling a bit
miserable because we have spent the day in focus groups with somewhat disaffected
prison officers and it was not the kind of conversation we wished it had been.
We have tried on our last slide to conceptualise all this. We said to ourselves, if we were
dropped into a private sector prison blindfold, and someone took the blindfold off, we’d
know we were in a private prison in a second, whether it was high or low performing,
because private sector prisons have a very distinctive lightness about them. When you go
into a public sector prison there’s a heaviness. We have tried to conceive this along an axis,
heavy to light. Then we have got ‘absent/present’, by which we mean whether or not staff
are engaging with prisoners. We have tried to put all the prisons we’ve been doing research
in recently in this model, to try and articulate some of the features of public versus private
prisons that we think we have found. What we think we are arguing is that private sector
prisons tend towards the naïve-permissive, light/absent, ie staff tend to stay a little bit back
from the prisoners, they slightly under-enforce the rules, they are more powerless in lots of
ways, so that there is a slightly naïve-permissive, or at best powerless-professional culture
or atmosphere in private sector prisons. The public sector prisons on the other hand tend
towards the heavy/oppressive end of a use of authority spectrum. The right place to be, the
ideal model, would be in the empty quadrant, what we are calling present-light, and we have
seen staff do this in some places at some times, where staff are just unobtrusively, but in a
very confident way, making sure that they are the ones in charge. They have relationships
with prisoners, but they are relationships with power flowing through them. We think that the
public sector can do that, and are more likely to do that, than some private sector
establishments. But that is not to say that you can’t hold Altcourse up and say that is
probably the closest we have seen in the private sector to that sort of traditionalprofessional model.’
Ben Crewe added: ‘One of the other things that we are saying is that there are some risks
in re-modelling the public sector prisons to look like private sector prisons, because what
might be lost are precisely those strengths that are fairly unrecognised at the moment:
things to do with having experienced staff who use their authority carefully, judiciously, and
wear it fairly lightly. That’s something that’s at risk of disappearing.’
Alison Liebling continued: ‘Having gone to Wormwood Scrubs today there is a frustration in
talking to prison officers who don’t work to the traditional professional model. The private
sector staff are inexperienced but they are also much more enthusiastic about notions of
rehabilitation. They believe in prisoner change, and they are not cynical. They are a breath of
fresh air at one level. But they are not so good at the professionalism/authority aspects of
their job.
What we have studied has been what we’ve called phase two privatisation, which has been
about new private prisons. We are now in phase three, which is existing public sector
prisons going over to the private sector. We are obviously watching this with real interest.
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Some of the staff at Birmingham, who have been present at presentations on this research,
have bought the argument that they could combine the strengths of the public and private
sectors. They have got the experience and they have now got a private sector company
managing them. It’s possible that they could try and bring off the strengths of both sectors.
But they could also combine the worst aspects of both sectors. So we are watching
developments with interest.’
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24 April 2012: Working in prison
Speakers: Eoin McLennan-Murray, President, Prison Governors Association
PJ McParlin, National Chairman, POA
Lord Bradley opened the meeting, explaining that he had been asked to chair the session
in the absence of the Co-Chairs. He was very pleased to welcome the speakers, Eoin
McLennan- Murray, and PJ (Peter) McParlin, and invited them to address the meeting.
PJ McParlin said that he would begin, but first he wanted to thank the meeting for inviting
them both to offer their insights on working in prison. He continued: ‘You see before you
an unusual sight – the POA national lead and the PGA lead on the same platform, singing
from the same hymn sheet, supporting the concept of working in prisons. That might come
as a surprise to you, and I’m sure it would to many of our members. So don’t tell them that
you have seen us. We had a rather tempestuous history in the past, before I was chairman
and before Eoin was president, and we have some history to get over. But we’re going to try
and get over that together. And if we disagree on some issues we hope we’re big enough
and ugly enough to say, well, we disagree, and move on. It’s a new working relationship,
and we are there together, partners in the criminal justice system. And I think that’s what’s
necessary.
When I’ve finished, Eoin will give you an overview of working prisoners from the perspective
of the person in charge. Because it will be prison governors who have to source contracts,
follow directives from the centre, overcome practical obstacles, and create the working
prison. It seems to us that prison governors, who are more used to having a degree in
criminology, will have to have an MBA in the future. How that marries together will be
interesting to say the least. Eoin will also discuss incentives for the workers – I am not
talking now about my members, but about the prisoners – and he will also touch upon
reparation for the victims. But I’ll just give you an overview, as an introduction.
I’m sure that everyone in this room will be aware that prisons have always been places of
work and endeavour, and prison rules require prisoners to engage in ‘useful work’ and on
occasion privileges can be used to encourage compliance in that useful work. No-one is
compelled as such to work, and many do not, because the opportunities for work simply
don’t exist. As we all know, although there is some very good work being done in prisons, in
most cases prisoners are released still unprepared for work in society. Sections of the
popular press, and indeed some commentators, seem to hanker for the days of work in
prison when it was treadmills, and breaking up boulders in Dartmoor-esque quarries,
overseen by brutal warders.
In reality, prisons have been known in the past for a variety of work. There have been
productive farms and gardens, although I am afraid those have been reduced in number
over recent years. There has been this need to make savings throughout the estate and
they have been sold off. There has also been a variety of what I would describe as mostly
low-grade, repetitive, menial work in workshops, such as brush shops making shaving
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brushes, or packaging a variety of goods. Alongside that there has been production for
prisons, such as furniture for cells, laundry services for prisoners’ clothes, and of course
essential jobs such as producing meals for 88,000 prisoners - that’s a bit of a daily miracle in
itself - and of course wing cleaning. It’s all done by prisoners. It’s not done by people brought
in to do it from the outside.
There have been examples in the past of attempts to put prisons on a commercial industrial
footing. Coldingley is an example, and I am sure Eoin will discuss the lessons from the
demise of that experiment. There seems to have been a mixed view on why that failed. Was it
because the Treasury became involved and wanted their ten penn’orth, or their twenty
penn’orth or their forty penn’orth? or was there an issue about human rights for prisoners,
who needed to have the rights that ordinary workers have?
In 2005, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee reported that there were 24,000
working places across the prison estate. But in that same report the Prison Service accepted
that prison industries had got rather left behind by all the developments in the system. It went
on to say that the provision of work was no longer a central part of that system. Education,
education, education, drug and alcohol abuse sessions, etcetera. I think that tide is starting to
change.
In March 2011, 10,000 prisoners were deployed in workshops and of that 10,000, 161 were
women, which seems a remarkably low figure. In addition to that number there were
approximately 500 on daily license from open prisons working in the community. I can recall
being in Latchmere House when it was open and being somewhat surprised to see a bus
driver having his hair cut. And I thought what’s this bus driver doing here? And then I realised
this was a prisoner about to go out of the gate and drive the number 39 bus. So that sort of
work does take place. Again in 2009-10, according to Hansard, the number of hours per
week that a prisoner was working was 11.8. That becomes important when we listen to what
Ken Clarke says, that he wants a working week for prisoners of 40 hours. There’s a bit of a
distance to travel there.
The case for change, to try this experiment, is easy to make. Obviously there is an annual
prison bill of some £3bn. On average it costs £40,000 a year to lock up a prisoner. Then
there’s the unacceptably high rate of reoffending. According to the Independent newspaper in
2011, 36% of released prisoners went straight into a job or a training scheme. Encouragingly,
of that 36%, only 22% went on to reoffend. They saw that as a success, and of course that
compares with the 70% rate of recidivism among those with no employment. To all that, we
need to add the intention of the government to save £2bn a year from the penal system by
2014-15.
So what do Ken Clarke and his ministers tell us that they want? They want a full 40 hour
working week, across the prison estate. They want it to be meaningful work, with the
discipline of regular working hours, and the development within that of new skills to prepare
for employment on release. They also want to see reparation to victims, not to individual
victims, but money to be put into a general pot, to be distributed as they see fit. They also
want prisoners to be able to build up savings for their release. A cynic would say that that
would enable them to avoid paying a discharge grant.
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Eoin and I were invited in a personal capacity to be members of the Working Prisons
Business Advisory Group. On that group are a number of commercial companies. For
example, the chief executives of Ford Motor Company, Virgin, Timpsons - many of us will
know of their work with prisons - and Amaryllis, a PFI firm. We’ve got to the stage now
where there is an official launch scheduled for May in Number 10 Downing Street. There is a
sales company called 131 Solutions. (Why? Because apparently there are 131 prisons.
That’s not correct – but that’s their working title). The subtitle is: Justice Working for You.
Of course the two big things that prisons can provide for prospective companies are space
and labour. There is lots of space in any number of our prisons. It might be restricted in
Pentonville, but Lindhome, for example, is absolutely huge. It’s the biggest site of any
prison in Western Europe. It’s an old airfield, and the hangars are still there. So space and
labour are there, and they are concentrating on those traditional industries, but wanting to
put them on a commercial footing: printing, engineering, woodwork, textiles and laundry, no
longer for the internal market of prisons but for outside. And we are assured by the captains
of industry – that’s how they describe themselves – that the quality is fine.
I started by saying that we are broadly supportive, and we are, but that doesn’t mean we
should ignore the problems. For example, a full working week is somewhat ambitious. I
wish that Ken Clarke had spoken to us before he went out with wanting a full working week.
11.8 hours per week is what it is at the moment. If they had said 20-25 hours, that would
have been a more realistic aim, at least initially. Then there are of course some prisoners
who will never be able to work, and not because of security risks. There is a lot of good
commercial work taking place at Frankland, a dispersal prison, for example. But of course
there are prisoners who have mental health issues, and issues of addiction. Then there are
the practicalities of prison life. The need for security, and the need to make sure that
prisoners can attend for court appearances, for medical, legal and social appointments, for
visits, and counselling and so on. As I have mentioned, this is a workforce with a number of
dependency issues.
Prisons are not currently structured for a nine to five working operation. Moving the gym,
medical facilities, and counselling appointments to the evening, the time when the staffing is
at its lowest, would mean the complete reversal of the structure of the current prison service
today. And of course within that we have been quite clear that they have to continue with
their education services, and their addiction therapy. If you can’t read the safety notice, you
are going to have a problem in the commercial factory setting. That’s something that people
sometimes don’t think about. If you listen to Dr Mary Harris of the National Grid, which has
employed a number of ex-prisoners very successfully, it is very simple. She says she wants
somebody who is now safe, and who is literate. That is something we should be able to
provide. There is no point in just throwing somebody into a workshop environment with
these issues. Work has got to run alongside the addiction therapy and the education
services.
And of course, the reason I’m on the advisory group, as a trade union leader, is so that I can
liaise with the TUC. It would be a dreadful own goal if the law abiding public outside were
going to lose jobs because of this initiative, especially in a recession. And of course that
brings in issues of pricing. The TUC are broadly supportive. The government are are now
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talking about being able to bring back into prisons work that has been outsourced, for
example from Czechoslovakia, because prisoners can do it more cheaply. Fine, however
when you look at the issues with regard to Remploy, for example, I am sure the TUC will cast
a weather eye on that, and they will be concerned about where we are going. They will want
to see a code of practice, and they will want to be able to see, as we do, that prisoners are
not exploited. They still have to abide by health and safety legislation, and there has to be a
legal framework, and we have to know how prisoners will address their concerns, and be
treated with respect, in a commercial working environment. We must be quite clear that this
experiment has to be a commercial success. Yes there are social benefits for prisoners and
for society, but are they equal to the economic benefits? Britain, the Prime Minister tells us,
is open for business. We will all have a view about that. But I will tell you that it would appear
that prisons are now open for business. That’s more than enough from me. I will now hand
over to Eoin’.
Eoin McLennan Murray began: ‘Before I talk about working in prisons with prisoners, just a
bit more about the staff. PJ spoke of how we are working together, and discussing common
issues about which both our associations are concerned. The context within which this sits,
at the moment, is that the Prison Service itself is restructuring. So working in prisons, for
staff, is going to change dramatically. That’s being driven by competition. Prisons are being
privatised, and we have to compete with the private sector. As a result of that, new working
practices and management structures are coming in. New wage structures are coming in.
The biggest change is that the starting salary for new entrant prison officers, since 1st April
2011, has dropped by about £5,000 and is more comparable to what the private sector pays
their prison custody officers. Of course, over a fifteen year contract, if you factor in that lower
wage bill it makes any public sector bid far more competitive. Managerially, the Prison
Service is restructuring all management across the service, and it is slimming down, to mirror,
again, what you see in the private sector.
This will be a new area for us. It’s bedding in at the moment. We are just going through the
transformation stage as I speak. But that level of change sets up enormous uncertainty
among staff. Those prisons that are being competed will often have a surplus of grades. They
will have the old management structure. Yet when they go into the competition, they will have
to adopt a new structure, either one run by the Prison Service or by the successful winning
contractor, and we will have surplus staff. If we retain the prison, the surplus staff will be
protected in employment. If we lose the prison the surplus staff will face redundancy. So
that’s the uncertainty many of our colleagues are facing. And it isn’t an even uncertainty
across the country. In certain parts of the country it’s exacerbated; in the North East of
England for instance it’s really dire. In the South East, and in London, it’s not a problem. But
that is the backdrop to the emotional state of prisons at the moment, with all these changes
going on.
Looking at work in prisons as far as prisoners are concerned, as PJ has very eloquently said,
that stems from the green paper, Breaking the Cycle. Prisons are going to be places of hard
work and discipline. We don’t actually disagree with that. There should be good constructive
work in prisons. We know that if prisoners have employment skills and can get employment
on release it reduces the likelihood of them reoffending. That has to be a worthwhile
objective, and it is one which the government recognises. So in order to get more prisoners
into a position where they could gain work, we have to change our whole culture in prisons.
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We have in the past seen work as an activity, something to occupy prisoners during the day,
because idle hands, as they say, make work for the devil. We have to change from seeing
work as an occupation to seeing it as a commercially viable activity which would generate
an income. The whole prison regime will have to change to accommodate that.
So where are we now? The figures I have are slightly different from PJ’s. We’ve got 400
workshops at the moment, which employ 9,000 prisoners. Within those workshops the
average hours are around 22 per week. I think the 11.8 hours that PJ mentioned is if you
looked across the whole estate and averaged out what prisoners were doing, in terms of
time out of cell. At best, some of our workshops are doing 33-35 hours per week. They
tend to be in the less secure prisons where there is greater flexibility, and the governors
have more scope to run a fuller regime. Our local prisons have the poorest figures. They are
lucky to reach mid-teens in terms of activity hours and workshops in the week. So it’s a real
stretch to go from 14 or 15 hours in a prison like Wandsworth up to 40 hours a week. In fact
it’s impossible in Brixton, which doesn’t have any workshops at all. The service is so
disparate that it seems madness to us to have a one-size-fits-all policy. It’s just not going to
happen.
Really the only way this proposal can be successful is if it’s done in certain parts, and to a
certain degree. There are some prisons which can accommodate longer working hours,
have the space and have the capacity to meet the needs of industry. But some of our inner
city locals are so packed, so old, and have such poor infrastructure that you are just not
going to be able to develop to a state where you can run any financially viable enterprise.
And those are the prisons that hold the section of the population, the short termers, who
create the most offending, and are responsible for the highest re-conviction rates. Ironically,
they are the people we should be targeting to try and inculcate work skills, to reduce their
levels of reoffending. But these proposals will probably not be able to achieve that at all. I
suspect we will be concentrating on those prisoners who serve longer sentences, and who
tend not to reoffend so much. They are the population who I suspect will benefit from this
working in prison scheme, while the people who really need it most of all are going to be left
behind.
The big prison industries that we have, as PJ said, are laundry, printing, furniture
engineering, and textiles. Just to give you some idea, the turnover is about £36m a year. The
plan is to increase that to something like £60m, and they want to do that within the next four
years. They plan to do that by extending the length of the working week. This is all being
done, not with more resources being given, but with resources being taken away: the £2bn
savings that PJ spoke about. So the money has to come from private enterprise. That’s the
only way that it can be funded. If you are going to extend the working week you are going to
need to employ more staff to supervise it. Or you are going to have to restructure your
regime, so that you close down some bits and allow other bits to expand. That would be
quite a managerial challenge, and the detail hasn’t yet been worked out.
If you just increase your staffing, and you can pass that cost on to someone who is investing
in your prison, that would be the best scenario. But if they want to make a profit, and you
are going to buy in extra staff and put in infrastructure, those are heavy overheads. So, for
the prisons where it will be viable, there will have to be an investment made by the company
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to ensure the numbers stack up. And if the numbers don’t stack up it isn’t going to happen,
because private business isn’t out to make a loss. They want to make money. They also
want to create new business opportunities. As PJ said, we’ve got space, and we’ve got
labour. So what they are hoping for is that a company will come and say ok we want to take
over that hangar at Lindholme, we want to invest in it and put in some capital equipment,
we want to employ a number of prisoners, we want to produce a product and we want to
sell it. And we will fund all of that. If that’s what they can do, that’s wonderful. Everyone wins
in that situation. However, as I said, not every prison could accommodate that kind of
approach.
There are other initiatives whereby we will just increase the contracts that we currently
service. Let’s take laundry as an example. We may be able to provide laundry services for
the NHS, or for hotel chains, and bring in those contracts commercially, because our
laundries probably don’t work very efficiently. As you can see if we are doing 22 or 25 hours
per week, a lot of money goes into laundry equipment. If you run it 24 hours a day you can
take in a lot more work. I am sure there is scope for private industries to get involved in
using our facilities in what would be down time for us. That might be a way to boost income
and also to increase the number of hours that people work.
PJ spoke about the business advisory group that we sit on, and these captains of industry,
who are obviously successful in their own fields, will be casting a very watchful eye on the
financial viability of some of the schemes that are being suggested. So what’s emerging at
the moment? There are certain givens, and the captains of industry have made this quite
clear. Industry will pay the market rate for labour. So if you are marketing high quality
furniture, and the commercial rate outside is that you pay £25 per hour, that’s what they will
pay for every prisoner that they employ. That’s not to say that the prisoner would get that
amount of money, because what is envisaged is that the prisoner would get an allowance.
That hasn’t been set yet, but it’s likely to be in the order of £20 to £25 per week. The
additional money that is being paid to the prison for the prison labour, and for renting the
facilities, would go to cover the additional costs of that undertaking, because it is
anticipated that the security and accessibility of the prison will add on-costs for any outside
contractor, and therefore they could be reflected as legitimate costs to come off the bottom
line. So the idea is that there should be sufficient income generated to pay the prisoners,
and to provide for a rehabilitation fund for the prisoner, for his eventual release, as well as a
fund for reparation to victims. That would go to a charity like Victim Support.
The Minister is clear that it has to ‘wash its own face’. There can’t be a cost. It has to at best
be cost-neutral, and that would include, of course, the contractor making some profit. There
are some issues that it throws up. The Treasury will take the view that, if you are earning an
income in a state-funded prison, then that money should come back to the tax-payer, or offset the cost of running that prison. So the MoJ will have to square with the Treasury some
flexibility about whether they can keep that money, because it should go back to the public
purse. That’s a battle that has yet to be fought.
From September last year, a new scheme was brought in for prisoners who are working
currently for real wages outside, on temporary release, whereby their earnings are not paid
to the prisoner any more, but are paid to NOMS, into a shared service centre. The prisoner
then pays national insurance and tax. His or her net income is then reduced by a further
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40% and that money goes to Victim Support. There is no rehabilitation fund for these
individuals. PJ spoke about incentives, and I can best illustrate this with a case example. If
you’ve got a man from a place like Blantyre House, working in London for a little above the
minimum wage, he has to fund his own transport into London. A season ticket from
Staplehurst to London is something like £4,500 a year. He pays tax and national insurance.
What he’s left with, if you reduce it by a further 40%, gives him a level of income which he
could almost earn if he stayed in a prison workshop. So there is a big question about
whether you can incentivise prisoners to work if they don’t see that there’s anything in it for
them. There is currently no rehabilitation fund for the prisoner, and what he is left with is not
sufficient to make provision for his future accommodation needs. So in some ways the
objective of helping prisoners resettle and steer away from crime is being undermined by
the very policies we are now following.
Another interesting issue which might arise is this: what is the position with industry in
privately managed prisons? Are they going to be subject to the same restrictions? Will the
Treasury have the same view about money that they make as profit? I don’t think that will be
the case. So I think there are a number of things that have yet to be thought through here,
and the government should think very carefully about making statements that are so
generalised about what they are going to do across the prison estate, because it’s not really
going to be achievable. As PJ said, in broad terms we very much support these proposals,
in terms of increasing work in prisons, and improving prisoners’ chances of successfully
resettling, but we have got to be realistic about it, and it has got to be done in a way that is
practical and will work. What concerns us is that the rhetoric will create an expectation that
the reality will not be able to deliver. We will caution them about that. I’m going to stop there
because there may be some questions about some of the detail’.
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15 May 2012: Youth Justice Board
Speaker : Frances Done CBE, Chair, Youth Justice Board for England and Wales
With John Anthony, Youth Justice Board
Paul Goggins MP opened the meeting, by saying what a pleasure it was to have Frances Done
with them. He said that at every meeting that week he had returned to a theme common to
those supporting the same football team. He thus introduced the speaker by saying that one of
her previous roles had been as chief executive of the organising committee for the seventeenth
Commonwealth Games, which had taken place in the magnificent surroundings of the
Manchester City stadium, now known as the Etihad Stadium, which had reached global
prominence earlier that week. Frances Done had gone on to make such a great contribution in
her work at the Youth Justice Board (YJB) and he knew that members of the meeting would be
very interested to hear what she had to say.
Frances Done began by agreeing that she had felt very proud watching the team as they had
arrived at Manchester Town Hall, although she herself supported Plymouth Argyle. It had been
wonderful to see the stadium, which she would go on calling the City of Manchester Stadium,
so vibrant. She continued:
‘I am really pleased to be here. What I thought I’d do is give a brief introduction under four
headings. Firstly: general progress and challenges. I’d like to talk briefly about the resettlement
work that the YJB is leading – though bear in mind that everything we do is done in partnership
with the whole of the youth justice system. I want to talk briefly about the youth justice custody
pathfinder schemes which are really exciting. They involve payment by results but are very
much in the grain of what we have been trying to do for some time. And then just a couple of
minutes about some schemes that are really quite important. It’s particularly interesting that
Lord Bradley is here because the youth justice liaison diversion scheme around mental health is
a really important scheme with vast potential for the future. Then finally just a few minutes
about post-18 work, and the things we are doing to look at the transition of young people out of
the youth justice system.
Just in terms of general progress: it’s always very difficult to say in youth justice that things are
going well, because obviously things happen every day that are not going well. Things happen
that are really damaging to victims and to young people. But generally speaking the progress is
being maintained, despite the real challenges about budgets and all the things that the Youth
Offending Teams (YOTs) are facing. I think that is because basically the system has matured,
and there is a very strong understanding of what we need to do to keep the progress going. So
the first time entrant figures are still coming down, and as for the reoffending rate, although the
headline rate has gone up, the real reoffending rate which is based on comparisons between
comparable young people and offences is still going down. The custody numbers are at their
lowest ever levels since accurate records were kept. We are now down to1804 young people in
custody, I think, in March. That’s really encouraging, because the whole aspiration we have, of
course, is to ensure that no young person goes into custody if it is possible and practical and
appropriate for a community sentence to be given by the court. So all those things are
encouraging but we all know that there are huge issues in our communities still and we need to
do a lot better.
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One of the things we have been concentrating on really hard in the last couple of years is
resettlement, with a view to reducing reoffending, and supporting young people at the time
when they probably need it most, when they come out of custody. And what that means,
obviously, is concentrating on helping young people get back to school, or training or a job,
helping make sure they have a good housing situation – they are not sofa surfing, or on the
streets even, as some children are when they leave custody – and making sure that they have
some personal support. Because although those other two factors are the key, if they don’t
have anyone to help them on a day to day basis, to support them, or be bothered about them,
or care about them, then they will revert back to the groups where they feel comfortable. And
usually that’s an offending group.
So we started in the North West and we invited chief executives from local authorities into a
young offender institution just to see whether it would make any difference. And it did. We
got nine out of ten chief executives from the Greater Manchester area, and nine out of ten
children’s services directors, all on the same day, into Hindley Young Offender Institution and
the impact was amazing. They hadn’t really understood before that there were 250 of their
young men in Hindley. From then on, the whole idea of resettlement took off. So now we have
a whole group of YOTs working together, working with the young people who have got
detention and training orders, as soon as they come in, on what their resettlement plans will
be. We are working with third sector organisations, Construction Youth Trust, Princes Trust,
Catch 22, any organisation locally that is prepared to be part of it. The third sector is dong a
fantastic job, because they can often provide services in a way that is much more flexible,
much more sensitive than the more formal local authority services.
We have now got that set up in seven different areas of the country, with different groups of
local authorities, all at different stages, and the results are really encouraging. I can’t give you
official results because we have to wait until we have the elapsed time reoffending rates
properly measured by the Ministry of Justice and I don’t want to pre-empt any of that because
it would be wrong to do so. But on the ground, you’ll find that the groups of local authorities
are really encouraged by the results into what impact this is having on whether children go
back into custody; whether they reoffend; and if they do, how often they reoffend. That is
really important because there is a victim for every crime, so if you reduce the number of
crimes you reduce the number of victims. There is also a scheme still going in Feltham, the
Heron Unit, which will finish in the autumn. It has offered very intensive support for young
people, and has gone very well too, although it was a much more expensive model.
I think the sign that this is going in the right direction is that when we have talked to the local
authority consortia about not being able to carry on supporting the project manager posts we
put in to start with, to help them get going, we have found that the groups of local authorities
have been prepared to cough up the money themselves. That’s what we want, not just so that
we can pull the money out, but because we want these things to sustain themselves, and to
be run locally, and that’s been very encouraging. It has also driven more cooperation between
local authorities and YOTs on other issues as well, so it’s drawn them together in other ways
and made it more likely that good results will be had.
Just to say about the youth justice custody pathfinders – a bit of a jargon title. What we have
been doing for the last four years is trying to talk to local authorities about the potential for
them to hold the custody budget. At the moment we hold it in the YJB. It comes from the
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Ministry of Justice. It’s a large budget; at the moment it’s running at about £230m a year, which
is a lot of money for a relatively small number of children. We have always believed that if that
money was held by local authorities, and they had to pay the bill, there would be a great
incentive for them to invest up front in young people, well before they become extremely
expensive, not just in money but in terms of the damage they do. Local authorities were not
very keen on that to start with, but over the years we have been talking it through, and getting
them much more involved obviously around resettlement, and bit by bit they have come round.
There are always arguments about how we’ll do it, and how much everyone is going to get, but
there’s a general understanding now that this is the right thing to do. As from next April,
following the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act, the cost of secure
remands will transfer to local authorities. That’s a relatively small sum of money, £25m a year,
but local authorities know that later on there will be devolution of the whole budget. The focus
that we’re getting from local authorities, with this coming up, is very significant and therefore
we are already getting better results, and more efforts to keep people out of secure remand,
and we expect that to continue. So that’s all going in the right direction.
On the pathfinders, when we asked for four areas to try out a deal whereby we would give
them money up front to invest in services, and they would commit to a reduction in custody
numbers, we got twelve groups of local authorities volunteering. I thought that was amazing. I
thought we might not get four, but we got twelve groups and we were able to choose four: four
boroughs in West London, seven boroughs in East London, Birmingham on its own because
it’s very big, and West Yorkshire, and they are all working hard on it. A slight fly in the ointment
was that they all signed up last April, and then the riots happened in August, which took
everyone by surprise. The London groups have been a bit shaken, and Birmingham to some
extent, but we have been working with them on that, and things have calmed down, they are
still sticking with the plan, and I am optimistic. They are all trying different things. Some of them
are investing in well-proven methods like multi-systemic therapy, which is a complicated way of
saying working very intensively with families and the young person, which has got a proven
effectiveness, in terms of scientific evidence. Some of them are concentrating on improving the
relationships with the Crown Court, where the serious offences are dealt with, some of them
are doing much more work on triage, stopping young people coming in earlier on, and making
sure they don’t end up in custody. Whatever they do, it’s all about focusing on the particular
young people they know are at risk, and that’s what we wanted. We don’t know the results of
that yet, but I would be very surprised if they didn’t turn out to be successful. But anyway, on
the way we are learning an awful lot about what is working in certain areas, and we bring these
four areas together every four or five months and they all share their experiences and then they
go away and think about whether they can try something that has been tried elsewhere.
I just wanted to say something about the new diversion schemes. Since the Bradley review, the
Department of Health have really invested heavily in the whole idea of trying to identify
vulnerable young people (and adults) at the point of arrest. To make sure that rather than just
going through into the system and getting charged, there is a real consideration of exactly what
is affecting this young person, and what mental health needs, what learning disability, or
speech language and communication needs they may have. The vast majority of young people
that we deal with at the more serious end have got these needs in various combinations, and
it’s about trying to work that out right at the beginning, using health professionals at the point
where they can talk with the police and the YOT about what the charge should be if there is
one, and if there isn’t a charge, then what other action should be taken. Again, this is looking
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really encouraging. Although it costs millions and millions of pounds, when you think what
happens if you don’t address issues at the right point, then it’s relatively small beer really.
There’s a commitment, subject to the evaluations, to roll this out across England and Wales, by
2014. Given the pressures there are on budgets, it’s really important that there is commitment
to do this really positive work.
Then the final thing, which is a bit close to my heart: I have felt ever since I came in 2008 that
there was a whole area of work that YJB was not addressing well enough, not because we
didn’t bother, but because there were so many other things to concentrate on. But I think the
maturity of the YJ system now has got to a point where we have to focus on what happens to
young people of 17 as they go into the adult system. The answer is that for many of them it is
like literally falling off a cliff. Because we hone down the way we deal with young people to the
extent that they get a great deal of support. The support the YOTs give is very directly related to
their need and the risks that they pose. But they can easily at 18 if they are in the community
transfer to probation, with probation having no obligation to do anything to support them at all.
That’s not probation’s fault. That’s just the set-up that probation has. Also in custody there are
real possibilities that young people, who we have invested heavily in, who are in specialised
units, with really good care and support, could be, and are, transferred to prisons where there is
no support at all. Obviously we do our best to make sure that doesn’t happen, but that does
happen and can happen. And apart from the risk to that young person, there’s the real
likelihood that the good work that has been done to date will not be continued, and is therefore
lost – or if not lost, then not built on. Probation are as keen as we are to work on this, and we
are working together with probation and NOMS and government departments. There is a big
programme of work around transferring information properly between YOTs and probation
services, by putting it up in a cloud, and then probation can pull it down, and the pilot schemes
in London were incredibly well received. When we were turning off the pilots in order to get the
MoJ to agree to a longer term scheme, the London YOTs and probation asked us to carry on
the scheme, because there is a big issue about transferring information accurately. If you don’t
know all that is known about a young person, how can you properly deal with them later on?
You can’t possibly. So we are really working hard on that.
We are also working with local probation and YOT groups to try and come up with
arrangements to decide which young people really need to carry on with the support they are
getting, and how we can do that. This links in with all the work that the Transition to Adulthood
Alliance (T2A) has been doing for a very long time. What we are trying to do is to bring some
reality on the ground to all the plans and ideas that those bodies have had. There’s nothing new
in all this: we are just trying to do something about it.
Finally we are working with NOMS on trying to get proper agreement as to what happens to
young people in custody, and how we make sure that they only ever go into a 18+ custodial
institution which can support them properly, and provide for their needs, and their further
training and their education. So there’s an awful lot going on. It’s early days on all this but it’s a
very important direction of travel, and we are very supportive of all the other agencies that are
working on it. I think I’ll leave it there.
I’d just like to introduce you to John Anthony – we’ve changed the name of his post with all the
restructuring that has been going on, but I think his title is Head of the London Local Business
Area for the YJB, and I know he’d be happy to answer any questions about London.’
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19 June 2012: The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman pursuing fairness and safety in custody in
challenging times
Speaker: Nigel Newcomen CBE, The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman for England
& Wales
Paul Goggins MP opened the meeting, by saying what a pleasure it was to welcome
the speaker, Nigel Newcomen, who had been in his post for six months. Prior to that, he
had been Deputy Chief Inspector of Prisons. The meeting looked forward very much to
hearing what he had to say.
Nigel Newcomen began by thanking the group for its kind invitation. He had been
proud to take up this new role last autumn, after nearly nine years as Deputy Chief
Inspector of Prisons, and he looked forward to sharing a few thoughts about how he
had set about the role, and some of the issues with which he had been grappling.
He continued: ‘What I thought I’d do is begin by outlining my vision for my new office in
these rather challenging times; touching on one of the big challenges at the moment
which is the tragic rise in deaths in prison custody, immigration detention and probation
approved premises. Then I’ll touch on the high volume of complaints from those in
custody and on probation; I’ll set out a few words on
how I hope my office will rise to these challenge; and finally I will say a few words about
the need to maintain and, preferably, reinforce the independence of my office.
So, what of my early ambitions for my tenure in these challenging times? To begin with, I
am pleased to have inherited a committed and value driven organisation. To reinforce
this, one of my first steps has been to ask my staff to revisit our statement of vision and
values. The new vision emphasises our independence and my desire to make a
significant contribution to safer, fairer custody and offender supervision. I intend the
values to drive my staff’s behaviours – which is why they now include an absolute
commitment to equality and diversity, both internally and in the agencies we investigate.
Another change of emphasis has been to place greater focus on identifying lessons
from investigations and improving dissemination of that learning, so that services are
encouraged to improve. This search for improvement is integral to the new vision:
investigation is what we do, but I want my office also to contribute to change. Put
simply, if I can help the agencies I investigate to learn the lessons of those
investigations, this should help avoid the next complaint by remedying the problem at
source and helping to prevent avoidable deaths by contributing to safer custody and
safer approved premises.
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More pragmatically, in these austere times, I have also had to focus on how to sustain
and protect the strengths of my office. Unfortunately, as with all public services,
considerable efficiencies are required of me (indeed, my budget will reduce by at least
21% by 2015 and I have already lost around 8% of my staff since 2010-11). Having to
seek such efficiencies is a familiar story in these challenging times, but my office’s work
is demand led and demand continues to grow. Thus in 2011-12 we saw a substantial
and tragic increase in the number of deaths that we were required to investigate - and
no let-up in the number of complaints we received.
Let me say a few words about deaths in custody. In 2011-12, my office started 229
investigations into deaths in prison custody, immigration detention and probation
service approved premises. This is the highest annual figure since the Prison and
Probation Ombudsman took on this mournful and onerous responsibility in 2004 - and a
15% rise on the previous year. Indeed, January 2012 saw the highest ever monthly total
of deaths in custody (34). Even amongst so many tragedies, one other statistic sticks
out: last year saw three apparently self-inflicted child deaths – the first such deaths for 5
years. These are deeply troubling figures.
The majority of deaths we investigated were from natural causes: 142 deaths - a rise of
20 on last year. This continues an upward trend over recent years, no doubt reflecting
the fact that more prisoners now serve longer sentences, more prisoners are sentenced
later in life and some prisoners display significant health deficits. This has led to an
aging and ailing prison population. In consequence, the past decade has seen deaths
from natural causes replace self-inflicted deaths as the principal cause of death in
prison custody.
Unfortunately, the number of apparently self-inflicted deaths also rose last year - to 71,
13 more than the year before and a sharp reversal of the downward trend seen in recent
years. The rise in apparently self-inflicted deaths is particularly depressing, reflecting as
it does the chronic despair of the individuals concerned, but it is also troubling that
prisons are now having to care for an increasing number of people who are growing old
and dying in their care.
Each death, of whatever cause, is a source of immense sadness to family and friends and a reason for reflection in our investigations about what more could have been done
to prevent an unnecessary death or to provide better care for the dying. Spotting
potential trends and seeking to learn lessons is therefore important. One example,
where we spotted an apparent recent trend, was the increased number of fatal incidents
in 2011-12 in which the deceased was undergoing methadone treatment in custody and
may also have been using a combination of drugs, whether licit or illicit.
I raised my concerns about these drug related deaths, which were shared by a number
of coroners, with the Chief Executive of the National Offender Management Service. I
am pleased he took the matter seriously and launched his own inquiry. I believe this
inquiry was published last week, with a range of actions to address the emerging
concerns about methadone related deaths. This is exactly the sort of learning of lessons
that I want to encourage and which, I believe, can increase safety in prison.
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Moving from deaths to complaints: there has also been no lessening of demand for the
other principal part of my remit: the independent investigation of complaints. This is no
doubt to be expected, as the number of prisoners continues to rise. Overall, the total
number of complaints this year, at around 5,300, was very similar to last year. However, we
started 5% more investigations than in the previous year, so there was a significant rise in
substantive casework.
Frustratingly for complainants, and wasteful of my office’s scarce resources, around half the
complaints received were ineligible under my terms of reference. This was mainly because
the internal complaint process of the services concerned had not been exhausted. This
suggests that, 20 years after my office was created, understanding of how and when to
access the Ombudsman is still sketchy amongst prisoners. This is something I am seeking
to address with a new communications strategy.
With the prison population at an all-time high, there is no reason to suppose that this
volume of complaints will do anything other than rise. It is also entirely feasible that, as
greater efficiencies are required of prisons and other parts of the system, so further
increases in demand will feed through to my office. At its simplest, if regimes and services
are trimmed, detainees and those on probation may simply have more to complain about.
So there are many challenges, but I am convinced that my staff will rise to them. And I am
committed to ensuring that the combination of decreasing resources and increasing
demand is not allowed to be an excuse for poor service to complainants and bereaved
families. My office must strive to improve the quality of its service wherever it can and with
whatever resources it has - and I recognise that there is some way to go to deliver the
quality of service to which I aspire. For example, timeliness of investigations, particularly
into fatal incidents, needs to improve.
In 2010-11, only 14% of draft reports into self-inflicted deaths and only 16% of those into
natural cause deaths were produced within our time targets. There was some improvement
in 2011-12, with 22% of drafts into self-inflicted deaths and 24% of drafts into natural
cause deaths within target - but there is still a long way to go. Unfortunately, much of this
delay is outside my control. In particular, I am obliged by my terms of reference always to
have a review by a clinician of the quality of healthcare provided to those who die in
custody. These reviews are generally commissioned by Primary Care Trusts but they were
late in 86% of cases in 2011-12, and this obviously had an impact on the timeliness of my
own reports.
A lot of effort has gone into trying to encourage better quality and timeliness of clinical
reviews. But, ultimately, this responsibility rests with the NHS and, inevitably given
everything else going on in the health service, the issue is a low priority. Although I am
hopeful that new national commissioning arrangements for offender health from April 2013
may offer an opportunity to address the matter. Meanwhile, I and my staff will redouble our
efforts to improve performance in fatal incident investigations, as delays hinder bereaved
families gaining a measure of closure from our investigations and add to the already
excessive delays in the inquest system.
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Looking inwards for a moment, you can see that the inevitable message to my staff is
that we have no choice but to deliver more for less and with fewer staff. Already I have
put in place a range of internal reforms, including work to create the type of organisation
I need, and can afford, work to re-engineer casework processes and efforts to introduce
greater proportionality into our investigations – although, as I will explain, this
proportionality must always be tempered by the need for justice and care for bereaved
families.
So what do I mean by proportionality? Well, with complaints it means targeting our
resources more effectively. I need to ensure we do a first class job in our most serious
cases - for example complaints about assaults by staff or about bullying or racism – in
other words, cases where there may be most to put right and potentially most to learn.
One size of investigation does not fit all. Some simple cases can be dealt with briskly
and some mediated between the complainant and the authority. But I will have to
decline to investigate complaints where no worthwhile outcome can be achieved or no
substantial issue is at stake. For example, we recently received a complaint from a
prisoner that his prison had temporarily run out of shower gel and he regarded the offer
of soap as an alternative as unsatisfactory. I declined to investigate the matter further.
We will also ensure that we respond proportionately to prolific complainants, so that
resources are spread as equitably as possible (in fact, I was surprised to learn that 37
complainants made 20% of all the complaints investigated last year). However, in
making any changes, fairness and protection of complainants will remain my
touchstone: prisoners have very little and small things can mean a lot. Indeed, as I
learned very clearly in the Inspectorate of Prisons, the adding together of small
indignities is a very real way in which degrading treatment can manifest itself.
I am also introducing greater proportionality into fatal incident investigations, at least in
cases where there are likely to be fewer lessons to be learned. This is clearly delicate,
but some deaths from natural causes are reasonably foreseeable and greater
standardisation, brevity and expedition may be appropriate. This focus on
proportionality will enable me to redirect resources to where our findings can have most
impact and offer most learning, for example to enable me - as I recently needed to do to allocate significant numbers of senior staff to investigate the appalling spate of
apparently self-inflicted deaths amongst children. But, again, any changes I make will
be sensitive to the needs of bereaved families whose interests must remain central to
my investigations.
I would add, that there has been a suggestion that, given scarce resources, I should
stop investigating deaths from natural causes altogether. I do not agree: firstly, because
Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights requires the independent
investigation of all deaths in state custody. And, secondly, because I believe there is a
lot to learn – and improve – about the care of the increasing numbers of prisoners who
die of natural causes in custody. My investigations have an important part to play in this.
114
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For example, I have been disappointed that, in a number of recent natural cause cases,
I have had to criticise the inappropriate use of restraints on some very elderly and infirm
prisoners attending hospital. Prisons are not always getting the balance right between
security and humanity in these cases and my investigations will continue to review
whether prisoners have been allowed to die with dignity.
Finally, on this whistle-stop tour of my early months in post, let me turn to the key issue
of independence. I hope that my lengthy time in the Inspectorate of Prisons has eased
my transition into the role of Prisons and Probation Ombudsman. There is much that is
similar between the two offices: both are robustly independent and, I believe, respected
bodies which report without fear or favour.
As a result, they are both able to carry out crucial work to support fairness and safety in
the criminal justice system, and offer a means to reassure the public about the
appropriateness of what happens in custody in their name.
However, there are differences, not least constitutional. Thus the Chief Inspector is a
Crown appointment and a creature of statute. My role is not on a statutory footing,
although I was recruited in line with the public appointment process, confirmed by the
Justice Select Committee and have written guarantees of operational independence. I
also do not have the legally enforceable powers of access or interview of some
equivalent bodies – although I must add that there has never yet been any obstruction
to my investigations, but there is no guarantee this will always remain the case. It has
been argued that this lack of a statutory basis weakens the visible independence of my
office and I agree. Indeed, the Justice Select Committee, when endorsing my
appointment, called on the government to “proceed to put the Ombudsman on a
statutory basis at an early opportunity”. I am pleased that the Secretary of State for
Justice has confirmed to me that the government remains sympathetic to finding a
legislative slot - although none has yet been found. Meanwhile, I will continue to ensure
that my office remains robustly independent of the services I investigate and the
departments responsible for them. Anything less would be to diminish the role.
In conclusion, can I say that I am grateful to have been given this opportunity to set out
my early ambitions and some of the challenges facing my office. I am convinced my
staff and I have an important role to play in pursuing fairness and safety in prison,
immigration detention and probation. And I hope there is no doubt about my
commitment to robustly and independently pursue this responsibility, even in this
particularly challenging time’.
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26 June 2012: Fair Access to Justice? Availability of
intermediaries for vulnerable defendants
Speakers:
Lord Bradley
Juliet Lyon, CBE, Prison Reform Trust
Jenny Talbot OBE, Prison Reform Trust
Ian Mearns MP opened the meeting by introducing Catherine Stone, Chief Executive of
Voice UK. He was glad to report that, although Voice UK had suffered funding cuts, it
would still be possible to continue with the APPG, the AGM of which had taken place
earlier in the day. He outlined his own long-term interest in this field, from his days in
local government in the North-East. He had learned something of the problems, and the
animosity, facing those with learning difficulties in gaining access to those public
facilities and services others take for granted. He was pleased to introduce the
speakers, Lord Keith Bradley and Jenny Talbot, as well as Juliet Lyon of the Prison
Reform Trust. He also sought the meeting’s understanding about the lack of MPs
present, given that afternoon’s business in the House. He also apologised that he had to
leave the meeting early to vote.
Lord Bradley began, after thanking the meeting for its invitation to speak at the joint
meeting: ‘This meeting has the pleasant duty of launching the PRT’s ‘Fair Access to
Justice?’ briefing paper, so brilliantly produced by Jenny Talbot. I am very pleased to be
here to give my support to the paper, and to say a few introductory words around its
context in relation to my own report on people with mental health and learning
disabilities in the criminal justice system.
Just to put the context therefore: as many of you will know I was commissioned to write
that report back at the end of 2007 and it was published in April 2009. When I was
asked to do that, it was to undertake a very simple and quick review of the liaison and
diversion schemes that were in place at that time – there were about 160 of them – and
to make comment about how they could effectively be organised, funded and sustained
within the criminal justice system. Having looked quickly at them I decided that it would
be a missed opportunity simply to review the existing schemes. So with the then
government’s agreement I took on a more wide-ranging review to look more broadly at
the criminal justice pathway, about where people come into contact with the criminal
justice system – that’s principally at the police station – and then what happened to
people with mental health and learning disabilities at the police station; if they then
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continued along the criminal justice pathway to court, what support and help and
information flowed from the police station to the court; then if they continued into secure
accommodation, again what support and help was given to this group of people in
prison or in secure health accommodation. Or if they were transferred either by
sentence or by connection with healthcare into the community, how they were tracked
into the community and again what support and help was given. Again, when they had
completed their time in secure accommodation, how they were then reintroduced back
into the community, and what help and support
117 was given to them, particularly in terms
of support against the threat of reoffending at that point.
Prisoner rehabilitation (deleted 506f07f9-3e3800-9b37eff7)_Prisoners Rehabilitation 10/10/2012 16:44 Page 118
into the community and again what support and help was given. Again, when they had
into
the community
again what
support and how
help they
was given.
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when theyback
had
completed
their timeand
in secure
accommodation,
were then
reintroduced
completed
their timeand
in secure
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thenparticularly
reintroduced
back
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and support was
to them,
in terms
into
the community,
and
whatofhelp
and support
was
given to them, particularly in terms
of support
against the
threat
reoffending
at that
point.
of support against the threat of reoffending at that point.
So fast forward to when that report was completed and published in 2009. The then
So
fast forward
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that
was completed
and for
published
The then
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Icustody
just want
to refer
to three
that diversion
I made. The
first was
thatservices
all police
suites
should
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access to liaison and
services.
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custody
suitesimproved
should have
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to liaison
and diversion
services.
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services
would
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mental
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and identification
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mental health
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information
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and diversion
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appropriate.
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liaison
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and advice services
to all
relevant
including
solicitors
and
appropriate
adults. So
and
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say that these
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and would
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then moved
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but
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and help.
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setting,
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of all,that
thatthere
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the judges
if that’s
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ensure,
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of all, that
the
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magistrates,
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if that’s
theindividual,
appropriate
had
information
about
the needs
of the
Prisoner rehabilitation (deleted 506f07f9-3e3800-9b37eff7)_Prisoners Rehabilitation 10/10/2012 16:44 Page 119
appropriate
setting,
had information
and adults
knowledge
about the needs
of had
the individual,
and secondly
that solicitors,
appropriate
and intermediaries
also
information,
and
secondly
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information,
at that
first court
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at
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putthat
in place.
put in place.
The third recommendation I made was that immediate consideration should be given to
extending
to vulnerable defendants
the that
provisions
currently
available should
to vulnerable
The
third recommendation
I made was
immediate
consideration
be given to
witnesses. Good work has been done over recent years to ensure that vulnerable
witnesses have the best opportunity to provide evidence in court. It seems to me, and
118
Jenny’s report reinforces this message, that defendants who have a range of complex
118
needs should have that same support, to enable them to provide the best evidence
possible in court, and that they are provided with appropriate assistance to ensure that
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extending to vulnerable defendants the provisions currently available to vulnerable
extending
vulnerable
defendants
theover
provisions
currently
available
vulnerable
witnesses.to
Good
work has
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recent years
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thattovulnerable
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years toinensure
vulnerable
witnesses have
best
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provide
evidence
court. Itthat
seems
to me, and
witnesses
havereinforces
the best opportunity
to provide
evidencewho
in court.
tocomplex
me, and
Jenny’s report
this message,
that defendants
have Ita seems
range of
Jenny’s
reporthave
reinforces
this message,
that
defendants
havethe
a range
of complex
needs should
that same
support, to
enable
them towho
provide
best evidence
needs
should
haveand
that
same
to enable
to provide
the besttoevidence
withthem
appropriate
assistance
ensure that
possible
in court,
that
theysupport,
are provided
possible
court, and that they are provided with appropriate assistance to ensure that
that
is theincase.
that is the case.
Can I also point out the fact that the handling and questioning of vulnerable defendants,
Can
also
pointwith
outlearning
the fact and
that communication
the handling and
questioning
vulnerable
defendants,
suchI as
those
disabilities,
is aofspecialist
skill?
It’s not
such
as those
learning
and communication
disabilities,
is a in
specialist
something
thatwith
everyone
is capable
of doing, to support
people
the rightskill?
way. It’s
Andnot
in
something
everyone
is capable
of doing,
support
peopleraised
in theconcerns
right way.on
And
in
fact the UKthat
Joint
Committee
on Human
Rightstohas
particularly
this
fact the
Jointthat
Committee
onaHuman
has
particularly
raised
concerns
on that
this
they have
fair trial.Rights
So our
concern
is simply
about
ensuring
issue,
toUK
ensure
that they
have ainfair
trial.have
So our
concern is simply
about
issue,
to ensure
all vulnerable
people
appearing
court
an entitlement
to receive
theensuring
support that
they
all
vulnerable
peopleeffectively
appearinginin
court
have an
support
they
need
to participate
the
process,
andentitlement
to be able to
to receive
give thethe
best
evidence
need
to participate
effectively
in the process,
and to
be able
to give the
best evidence
possible
to ensure the
right outcome
in the court.
That’s
the context
in which
I set my
possible
to ensure the
outcome
in the court.
That’s
context
in which
set my to
now reinforces
them,
and the
brings
forward
more Istrength
recommendations.
Thisright
report
nowvulnerable
reinforcesdefendants
them, and brings
forward
more
strength to
recommendations.
reportthat
the
argument aboutThis
ensuring
have the
relevant
support.
the argument about ensuring that vulnerable defendants have the relevant support.
Finally, one of the key ways in which I gathered evidence for my own report was to have
Finally,
the key
ways ingroup’
which –I gathered
evidence
for my
own report
wasbeen
to have
what is one
nowof
termed
a ‘users’
young people
and their
families
who had
what
is now
termed ajustice
‘users’
group’ who
– young
their
families
whocame
had been
through
the criminal
system,
had people
been toand
court,
and
who then
to talk
through
criminal
justice
system, who had been
court,
and
whoown
then
came to talk
to me at the
each
stage of
the evidence-gathering
that to
I did
about
their
experiences,
to
me
at each
of the
evidence-gathering
thatthose
I did about
their own
experiences,
and
also
to teststage
out my
recommendations
against
experiences.
Nothing
was more
and
also to me
testthan
out my
recommendations
against
those
experiences.
Nothing
was
valuable
hearing
the experiences
of those
individuals
who had
come
to more
court
valuable
mehadn’t
than hearing
of those
had and
come
to court
because to
they
receivedthe
theexperiences
relevant support
andindividuals
help they who
needed,
invariably
because
received
thethey
relevant
support
and help
needed,support
and invariably
ended upthey
backhadn’t
in court
at that
because
hadn’t
been given
the they
appropriate
ended
up back inincourt
support
at that
because
they
hadn’t
the appropriate
first appearance
the court
room.
Often
theybeen
weregiven
remanded
into custody
because
first
the court
room.
Oftenand
theyhelp,
werenor
remanded
custodybeen
because
they appearance
hadn’t beenin
given
the right
support
had the into
sentencers
given
they
hadn’t been
given
the rightabout
support
help,
the sentencers
been that
given
the knowledge
and
information
theand
needs
of nor
thathad
individual.
I was hoping
the
knowledge
and
information
about
the
needs of
I was
hoping
that
Anthony
Fletcher
was
going to be
here,
because
hethat
wasindividual.
one of those
people
who
gave
Anthony
Fletcher was
going to be
here, because
he was
ofI those
whoare
gave
me that invaluable
information.
Unfortunately
he can’t
beone
here.
think, people
Juliet, you
me that
think,
Juliet,
you are
Unfortunately
hecan
can’t
be here. I this
going
toinvaluable
say a few information.
words around
that area. But
I commend
report
and
going
to say a few
wordsits
around
that area. But can I commend this report and
wholeheartedly
endorse
recommendations.’
wholeheartedly endorse its recommendations.’
Ian Mearns MP thanked Lord Bradley and introduced Juliet Lyon.
Ian Mearns MP thanked Lord Bradley and introduced Juliet Lyon.
Juliet Lyon began by saying how sorry she was that she was not Anthony, as she had
Juliet
sayinghearing
how sorry
wasShe
thatcontinued:
she was not
Anthony,
as proud
she had
alwaysLyon
verybegan
much by
enjoyed
him she
speak.
‘We
were very
that
always
verywe
much
enjoyed
hearing
him speak.by
She
‘We were
very proud
doing at
PRT, supported
thecontinued:
Princess Diana
Memorial
Trust, that
we
in the work
were
Prisoner rehabilitation (deleted 506f07f9-3e3800-9b37eff7)_Prisoners Rehabilitation 10/10/2012 16:44 Page 120
at PRT, asupported
by the Princess
Diana of
Memorial
in theable
worktowe
were doing
were
partner
with Keyring,
small organisation
which many
you hereTrust,
will we
were
with Keyring,
small
of that
you here
will was
know.able
Andtoit partner
was through
Keyring, aand
theorganisation
Working for which
Justicemany
group,
Anthony
know.
it was through
and the Working
for Justice
Anthony
able toAnd
contribute
so well. Keyring,
I can remember
one occasion
when group,
he wasthat
speaking
in awas
able
to contribute
so well.
I can
remember
one of
occasion
when
he was
speaking
a
meeting
like this, and
he was
asked,
‘what sort
help would
have
made
it easierinfor
meeting
like this,
and hereplied,
was asked,
helpmore
would
have made
easier
for
‘If the‘what
judgesort
hadof
been
lenient’.
Thereitwas
a pause
you in court?’
Anthony
you
court?’ Anthony’s
Anthony replied,
‘Ifworker
the judge
hadhim
been
more
There
was
a pause
and in
laughter.
support
asked
what
helenient’.
meant by
‘more
lenient’
and
Anthony replied, ‘Well, if the judge had just explained things a bit better.’ And that was
just so indicative. He had used a great word,
119but it wasn’t the word he had actually
meant to use, and he hadn’t understood what
119 had happened.
In PRT we are very grateful to Jenny for the work she has done. The programme was
Prisoner rehabilitation (deleted 506f07f9-3e3800-9b37eff7)_Prisoners Rehabilitation 10/10/2012 16:44 Page 120
and laughter. Anthony’s support worker asked him what he meant by ‘more lenient’ and
and
laughter.
Anthony’s
asked
him what
he meant
by ‘more
and
Anthony
replied,
‘Well, if support
the judgeworker
had just
explained
things
a bit better.’
Andlenient’
that was
Anthony
replied, ‘Well,
if the
judge
had word,
just explained
things
bit better.’
And
that was
just so indicative.
He had
used
a great
but it wasn’t
thea word
he had
actually
just
so to
indicative.
used
a great word,
wasn’t the word he had actually
meant
use, andHe
he had
hadn’t
understood
whatbut
hadit happened.
meant to use, and he hadn’t understood what had happened.
In PRT we are very grateful to Jenny for the work she has done. The programme was
In
PRT‘No-one
we are very
grateful
to Jenny
for the
work
she has
done.
The
programme
wasdid
called
Knows’
but over
the years
she
worked
on it,
pretty
much
everybody
called
Knows’
butyet
over
the in
years
she
it, pretty
much everybody
did
know. I‘No-one
don’t think
we are
there
terms
of worked
securingonenough
support,
and this paper
know.
I don’t think
we But
are yet
there
in terms
securing
support,
and to
this
paper
is a testimony
to that.
what
we are
clear of
about
is thatenough
we have
been able
show
is
testimony to
But what
we are
about is thatdifficulties
we have been
show
thea prevalence
ofthat.
learning
disability
andclear
communication
insideable
the to
justice
the
prevalence
of learning disability
and communication
difficulties
insidedothe
justice
system,
and systematically
we are working
through making
sure people
know.
system,
systematically
arecharities
workingwe
through
making
sure people
do know.
in partnership
with we
other
will make
absolutely
sure that
this briefing
Working and
in partnership
charities
willamake
absolutely
that
this briefing
Working
goes
to the
people whowith
are other
in a position
towe
make
difference.
But sure
before
I finish,
I
goes
to to
thesay
people
who are in
a position
to make
difference.support
But before
I finish,
I
wanted
that knowing
when
a defendant
hasa particular
needs
is a crucial
wanted
to say that
knowing
when
defendant
particular
a crucial
step in providing
that
support.
Andawe
want to has
make
sure thatsupport
the veryneeds
goodiswork
that
step
in providing
thatvulnerable
support. And
we want
make surevictims
that theisvery
good work
has been
done with
witnesses
andtovulnerable
replicated
in that
has
been done
with
andtovulnerable
victims is replicated in
something
similar
forvulnerable
vulnerablewitnesses
defendants,
ensure parity.
something similar for vulnerable defendants, to ensure parity.
I can’t think of anything more nightmare-ish than going to court - which anyway feels a
Ibit
can’t
of anything
more nightmare-ish
to court - which
anyway
of athink
strange
and nightmare-ish
situation than
– andgoing
not understanding
what
was feels a
bit
of a strange
nightmare-ish
situation
– and
not
understanding
whatnot
was
happening,
not and
knowing
who people
were and
what
their
roles were, and
being able
happening,
what their
were,
not who
being
able
to speak upnot
for knowing
myself. Inwho
the people
course were
of theand
interviews,
weroles
found
that and
people
had
to
speakdisabilities,
up for myself.
In the course ofdifficulties,
the interviews,
we they
found
that
people
who
had
learning
or communication
all said
had
trouble
with
the
learning disabilities,
or communication
difficulties,
all said
they
had of
trouble
with the
language
in court. I want
to read you, from
the briefing,
one
or two
the things
they
language
court.don’t
I want
to read
you, from
onewords
or twoI’ve
of the
things
they
said: ‘Thein
judges
speak
English.
Theythe
saybriefing,
these long
never
heard
of in
said:
‘The
judges
don’tcame
speak
They
these
words
never
heard of
my life.’
‘The
solicitor
to English.
talk to me
andsay
used
big long
words
and I’ve
I found
it difficult
toin
my
life.’ ‘The solicitor
came
to talk toled
metoand
used big
and I found
difficult to
understand.’
problems
in words
understanding
anditfollowing
the
This in turn
frequently
understand.’
led toreally.
problems
in understanding
following
This in ‘Iturn
frequently
court
proceedings.
didn’t
understand
I pleaded
guilty straightand
away.
I didn’tthe
court
didn’theunderstand
really. I‘Ipleaded
away. I didn’t
know proceedings.
what he meant‘Iwhen
said ‘custodial’.
couldn’tguilty
reallystraight
hear. I couldn’t
know
what he
he said ‘custodial’.
‘I couldn’t
hear.
I couldn’t
understand
butmeant
I said when
‘yes, whatever’,
to anything,
becausereally
if I say
‘I don’t
know’ they
understand
but
I said
‘yes,Sometimes
whatever’,they
to anything,
because
I say
‘I don’t know’ they
look at me as
if I’m
thick.
tell you two
thingsif at
once.’
look at me as if I’m thick. Sometimes they tell you two things at once.’
And then some defendants talked specifically about the difficulties they experienced in
experienced
And
then some
defendants
talked
about the
responding
to questions.
‘I am
not specifically
good at speaking
anddifficulties
they don’tthey
listen.
I needed in
responding
questions.
‘I amOthers
not good
at speaking
and they
don’t
listen.
I needed
more time totoexplain
myself’.
spoke
more generally
about
not
knowing
what was
more
explain
myself’.
Othersask
spoke
more‘Igenerally
about
notwas
knowing
was
going time
on intocourt
or who
they might
for help.
didn’t know
what
goingwhat
on and
going
in court
who they
might
askThey
for help.
‘I didn’t
know
whatand
wasingoing
there’son
no-one
to or
explain
things
to you.
tell you
to read
things
court on
youand
there’sjust
no-one
to help.
explain
you. They
tell read
you to
read
things
in court
can’t
ask for
Thethings
judgetothinks
you can
and
write
just and
because
youyou
can
can’t just
ask forAnd
help.then
Thelastly:
judge‘Itthinks
you can
read and
writejust
justsee
because
youand
cantwo
speak
English.’
was scary
because
I could
this man
speak
thenbig
lastly:
‘It was
justthere
see this
and two
womenEnglish.’
sitting onAnd
a great
bench
andscary
I was because
in a glassI could
box and
wereman
all these
women
sitting on
a great
bigcame
bench
andand
I was
a glass
boxsolicitor
and there
all these
others looking.
A man
then
over
saidinhe
was my
butwere
he was
different
others
looking.
man then
came
over and
said he‘what
was my
solicitor
but he was different
from the
one theA night
before.
I thought
to myself
is going
on?’’
from the one the night before. I thought to myself ‘what is going on?’’
I think those are very explicit and clear and without that kind of guidance to us I don’t
Ithink
thinkwe’d
those
are
very explicit
and clear
and without that
kind of
to us
I don’t
get
anywhere.
So that’s
my contribution,
standing
in guidance
for Anthony,
and
believe
think
gethave
anywhere.
that’sBut
myI’ve
contribution,
standing in for Anthony, and believe
me hewe’d
would
done itSo
better.
done my best.’
me he would have done it better. But I’ve done my best.’
120
120
Prisoner rehabilitation (deleted 506f07f9-3e3800-9b37eff7)_Prisoners Rehabilitation 10/10/2012 16:44 Page 122
So, in terms of intermediaries within the context of special measures in particular, and to
help ensure fair access to justice, we are simply recommending one register of
appropriately trained and professionally accountable intermediaries, which can be
accessed to provide support according to personal need for vulnerable people in the
criminal court, regardless of their status as witness or defendant. The briefing paper
contains a number of recommendations - I’ve just talked about one particular example and we hope those recommendations will ensure fair access to justice for vulnerable
defendants. We are very keen to discuss further the contents of the paper and the
recommendations, and to progress them. I would just like to end by saying a big thank
you to all those people who helped me to put this paper together, some of whom are
here, and all of whom are acknowledged in the paper’.
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3 July 2012: The Future Place of Restorative Justice in the
Criminal Justice System
Speakers:
Lord McNally, Minister of State, Ministry of Justice
Lizzie Nelson, Director, Restorative Justice Council
Javed Khan, Chief Executive, Victim Support
Geoff Dobson, Clerk to the Group, opened the meeting and welcomed everybody. He said
there had been just two nominations for co-chairs of the group, Paul Goggins MP and Lord
Ramsbotham. He had therefore much pleasure in handing over to Lord Ramsbotham.
Lord Ramsbotham thanked the meeting, and began by paying tribute to Lord Corbett, the
former chairman of this group. He had attended a very moving occasion the previous week
in his memory. It took two people to replace Lord Corbett, and moreover the advantage of
co-chairmanship was that there would be a chair from each House. This was agreed, with
satisfaction. He then proposed that the meeting consider the election of the Vice Chair.
Claire Perry MP had indicated her willingness to continue in the role, and the meeting
indicated its agreement. The Group’s Secretary, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts had
indicated his willingness to stand again. There had been no further nominations. The
meeting was content, and all were duly elected.
The accounts were audited as part of the Prison Reform Trust’s accounts, and it was agreed
they could be taken as satisfactory. A report on the work of the group would be produced
over the summer and circulated when members returned in October. Lord Ramsbotham
thanked Geoff Dobson for all the hard work he had put in to organising such a full and
interesting programme for the year, and Julia Braggins for producing the minutes. He also
thanked the Chair and the Director of the Prison Reform Trust for making Geoff’s time
available, and for supporting the group. Finally, he particularly wished to thank the Barrow
Cadbury Trust for funding the secretariat. Max Rutherford from the Trust was present, and
was asked to pass the group’s formal thanks to the trustees for their support. This was a
group that was widely valued by members, and which had quite an influence in the House.
Finally Lord Ramsbotham gave notice of the next meeting, on Tuesday 23 October, with the
Criminal Cases Review Commission. He knew there would be a good deal of interest in this.
With that, Lord Ramsbotham closed the Annual General Meeting and introduced the
evening’s speakers. The meeting was fortunate in having Lord McNally, Minister of State in
the Ministry of Justice, with them. He knew Lord McNally had a strong interest in the
evening’s topic, restorative justice, and he was very pleased to invite him to open the
proceedings.
Lord McNally began by saying how glad he was to join members of this group. He too
referred to the moving event the previous week to celebrate the life of Lord Corbett. It had
been an eclectic gathering, with a strong penal affairs element to it. He had known Robin
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Corbett for forty years, and knew how committed he was to this cause. He also said he
regularly saw the notices for the Penal Affairs Group and shared members’ admiration for
the organisation behind it. He had enjoyed the AGM. There was nothing more complete in
the workings of democracy than the election of officers for all party groups.
He was delighted to be there, and to share the platform with Lizzie and Javed. He knew
Javed, but had heard Lizzie for the first time at a round table at the MoJ that morning. He
knew the meeting was in for a treat. He continued: ‘I plan to use this time to set out the
government’s approach to restorative justice in England and Wales. In addition, let me make
clear that I am an ardent supporter of the principles of restorative justice (RJ). I believe it
offers an opportunity not only to assist the rehabilitation of offenders but to give victims a
greater stake in the resolution of offences and in the criminal justice system as a whole.
Victim-led restorative justice can allow us to make inroads into the reoffending cycle, with
the triple benefit of victims avoiding the trauma of future crimes, the tax payer not having to
foot the bill for more crime, and a rehabilitated offender making a positive contribution to
society. As many of you know far better than me, the evidence for the effectiveness of
restorative justice is promising. Analysis conducted by the MoJ of a number of restorative
justice pilots showed that 85% of victims who participated were satisfied with the
experience and there was an estimated 14% reduction in reoffending. The government is
therefore committed to making use of restorative justice in more areas, and in more
circumstances, across the criminal justice system.
Crucially, the increased use of restorative justice needs to be rooted in local needs and
responsive to local crime and reoffending. It needs to be driven by how practitioners, victims
and communities want to respond to crime in their area. This is part of a move towards
localism where we accept that different areas will have different approaches. To ensure
restorative justice is delivered in the way most appropriate for each area, we are working
with partners like the Restorative Justice Council to provide local areas with the tools to
make greater use of restorative justice with confidence. Therefore as part of our response
to lower level crime, more than 18,000 police officers have been trained in restorative
practices. We are also working with 15 local areas to develop Neighbourhood Justice
Panels which will bring together the victim, the offender and community representatives to
respond to low-level crime by using restorative justice and other reparative processes.
Further up the system, over £1 million is being provided to train prison and probation staff
and volunteers and to develop guidance, and we are providing over £600,000 to Youth
Offending Teams to provide training to Youth Referral Panel members to deliver more
restorative and reparative panels. Provisions in the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of
Offenders Act which received Royal Assent on 1 May will also allow courts to make wider
use of Youth Referral Orders which are focused upon restorative and reparative outcomes.
All of this work is geared towards enabling local areas to build the capacity and capability to
develop and deliver RJ practices which are effective and victim focused.
We also believe there could be a place for restorative justice before the sentencing process
for offenders who admit guilt and are able and willing to participate alongside the victim.
Pre-sentence restorative justice would inform the court’s decision about what the right type
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of punishment should be. At this stage, we need to learn more about how this would
operate, and hope to work with one or more local areas to test pre-sentence restorative
justice out.
To ensure that restorative justice is delivered to a high standard, we funded the Restorative
Justice Council’s ‘Best Practice Guidance for Restorative Practice’, and last year the
Ministry of Justice and the Restorative Justice Council launched a National Register of
Restorative Justice Practitioners and professional qualifications accreditation. This allows
criminal justice staff and voluntary sector organisations supporting victims to recommend
properly trained individuals who can safely and effectively support victims to participate in
restorative justice. We cannot hope to achieve our aims without the crucial involvement of
victims. So I am particularly pleased about our continuing work with Victim Support. One of
the key purposes for expanding the use of restorative justice must be to give victims a
greater stake and voice in the resolution of offences and in the criminal justice system as a
whole.
The government published its response to the consultation, ‘Getting it Right for Victims and
Witnesses’ yesterday. There we recognised that, despite the improvements that have been
made over the last two decades, victims still too often feel they are an afterthought for the
criminal justice system. We are committed to ensuring that victims get the support they
need to deal with the immediate aftermath of a crime and, over time if need be, receive
further help, which may include compensation, to put their lives back on track.
To realise these ambitions the government has committed to reviewing and updating the
Victims’ Code and the use of the Victim Personal Statement as well as the process for
dealing with complaints when something has gone wrong. We will prioritise, as part of this
review, how the offer of a restorative approach can be incorporated in a revised Code and
whether the Victim Personal Statement could be used as a way of a victim signalling their
interest in restorative justice.
The government has also committed to make offenders pay reparation to victims for the
harm they have caused. This may be financial - through court ordered compensation paid
by the offender to the victim - or indirectly, through revenue raised from the Victim
Surcharge which is spent on support services. We are also providing Victim Support with
£38 million in funding per year until 2014 so it can invest in services that are victim
focussed; we have put rape support centres on a secure financial footing for the first time,
with 65 centres around the country receiving total grant funding of nearly £3 million a year
until 2014; and we have further guaranteed funding of £2 million a year for the next two
years to fund specialist support for adult victims of human trafficking.
The next significant step in this context has been the government’s consultation on
community sentences. I’m very pleased that this included a substantial section on
reparation, looking at how we can ensure that restorative justice is more regularly used in
the sentences of the court and what more we can do to strengthen the role of victims in it.
The consultation closed on 22 June, and we are still busy working through the responses.
However, it is clear from initial analysis that there is considerable practitioner enthusiasm for
greater use of restorative justice. And I hope to see some constructive proposals that build
on what we’ve achieved already.
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Our vision, therefore, is for a criminal justice system which understands and addresses the
issues involved for victims, offenders and wider communities, responds intelligently and is
more effective. We want a system that focuses relentlessly on tackling reoffending, helping
offenders lead law-abiding lives and supporting victims. This is why we will continue to work
with organisations across the sector to improve best practice, tackle capacity hurdles, extend
the use of restorative justice and firmly establish its place now and for the future in the
criminal justice system.’
Lord McNally concluded by saying that that was the end of his text. He told the meeting that
he hated reading speeches, and quoted one of his early mentors, Michael Foot, saying that
he had found this one of the worst things about being a minister ‘because I like being as
excited as everybody else about what’s coming next.’ He again mentioned the round table
meeting that lunchtime, which had left him with things to think about. Good intentions were
not enough. Things needed to be thought through, to ensure that delivery and expectations
were in kilter. Otherwise public confidence in the concept of RJ would be undermined.
However he was convinced that the government was on its way in this area, and completely
committed to taking it forward. He was looking forward to the support of all the organisations
and individuals in the room to making it a reality in the very near future.
Lord Ramsbotham thanked Lord McNally very much indeed for his presentation, and
reflected on how delighted Charles Pollard of Thames Valley Police, one of the original
proponents of RJ, would have been to hear it. He agreed that the key would be to ensure that
it was implemented in the best way. He then introduced the next speaker, Lizzie Nelson, and
noted how very much she had contributed to progress thus far.
Lizzie Nelson began by thanking the meeting for its invitation, and thanking Lord McNally for
his and the government’s support. This had been crucial in shifting the culture amongst the
criminal justice agencies towards taking RJ seriously. She continued: ‘The Restorative Justice
Council (RJC) is the national membership body for restorative practice. We have around 250
member organisations, which are the organisations delivering RJ at a local level around the
country. Since the launch of our practitioner register last year we now have 250 registered
individuals, who are also members of the RJC.
As we heard already from the Minister, RJ works. We don’t have to debate the evidence any
longer. There was a £7m 7-year study showing that it reduced reoffending, delivered very
strong victim satisfaction, and that 70% of victims who were offered the opportunity to meet
the offender face to face following a serious crime of burglary or robbery took up that offer. So
we know that it works. And we know it’s the right thing to do. Giving victims the opportunity to
confront the offender with the real impact of the offence and encouraging offenders to face up
to what they’ve done and to take responsibility for its impact on others is simply the right thing
to do. I think that’s why the Prison Reform Trust’s ICM poll last year showed that 88% of the
public support a victim’s right to confront the offender with the real impact of their crime. I
think that’s also why we have received such strong cross-party support. I want to take this
opportunity to thank all the peers who spoke in the recent debates on the LASPO Bill in favour
of legislation on RJ. It is really striking to see the wide range of support, from cross bench
peers and from all three main political parties.
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We believe that RJ should be available to any victim of crime, at any stage of the criminal
justice process. It shouldn’t be an intervention only offered for low level crimes, or only if
you get to court, or only post sentence. It should be available at every stage of the system.
Good progress is being made. The Minister has already spoken about some of it, through
developing the evidence base, and through the training that has been rolled out among
many police forces. The government has recently funded £1m of training in NOMS. So
there is a lot to be positive about in terms of increasing the capacity.
But two things are really needed if we are to move beyond a culture change of
encouragement to actually mainstreaming RJ and delivering that vision that the government
has set out so clearly. One is the need for evidence-based practice standards to be
maintained and adhered to. RJ only works when it is done well. If you don’t do the
preparation, generally speaking victims simply won’t come. That’s what we are seeing in a
lot of youth justice at the moment. Victims are sent a letter saying ‘we’ve already planned a
meeting for two o’ clock next Tuesday. You can come if you want’. It doesn’t tell them this
meeting is about them. It doesn’t prioritise whether or not this meeting is at a time that suits
them. It’s no wonder that people don’t come. At the moment there is an attendance rate of
just 13% amongst victims of crime, nationally.
Yet we know that RJ only delivers these reductions in reoffending and these victim benefits
if the victim and the offender actually get to meet and talk to each other. That’s what delivers
these very strong findings of the government’s research. The preparation is essential,
running the meeting well is essential, and the follow up is essential. All of that is the
restorative process and you can’t just assume that because you have sent someone an optin letter they are going to come. So adherence to the practice standards that are based on
the evidence the government has gathered is really essential as we roll RJ out more widely.
The second major gap is in relation to the legislation. At the moment the only provision in
legislation for victims of adult offenders is in the CJA 2003 where there is a very brief
mention of RJ as a possible activity requirement in a community sentence. Based on that
legislation, Thames Valley Probation Service has managed to keep going an RJ service
since the research trial closed in 2004. But they are the only area of the country that has
consistently been involved in RJ post-sentence in the adult criminal justice system. W
Yorkshire Probation has also recently introduced a service post-sentence based on this
piece of legislation, and London are just starting one. So across the country there are just
two areas that are offering RJ post-sentence for victims of adult offenders. And in relation to
pre-sentence RJ, which the government has made clear they want more of – half the cases
in the government’s seven year study were pre-sentence – since the trials closed in 2004,
there has not been a single incidence of pre-sentence RJ in this country.
If we want to see pre-sentence RJ develop, there are good grounds for doing so. Joanna
Shapland’s evaluation of that research showed that more offenders say yes to participation
pre-sentence, so more victims get access to RJ. Victim participation rates and victim
satisfaction were just the same pre and post sentence, and pre and post sentence victims
also said that RJ had been offered to them at about the right time. The judiciary bowed to
pre-sentence RJ, by which I mean that the offender has come to court, they have pleaded
guilty, you don’t sentence there and then. You just defer, as if it’s part of the pre-sentence
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report writing. The judges liked it because it gave them additional information on which to
base their sentence. So there is no reason not to introduce pre-sentence RJ as long as it is
always voluntary for the victim and the offender, and victims have a choice to say yes or no.
The evidence is very strong. I think Javed will say more about potential cost savings. But the
key point is that without stronger legislation we won’t see any increase in pre-sentence or
post sentence RJ. So we really need the kind of amendments that many of the peers
around this table supported and called for during the last debate.
That’s really all I wanted to say today. I don’t think we need any more evidence for either
pre-sentence or post-sentence RJ. The key thing now is to move to action. And on the
practice standards: we know what best practice is. We have got the evidence from
practitioners, from the government’s research, and from international precedent. All of that
has fed into RJC Best Practice Guidance and national occupational standards on restorative
practice. The key thing is to ensure that people actually work to those standards and don’t
cut corners. We can best ensure that through practitioner accreditation, where people
actually evidence those standards. The government has the power to ensure, through
commissioning and guidance to areas, that these are the standards that must be met,
wherever RJ is practised.’
Lord Ramsbotham thanked Lizzie Nelson very much for her presentation. He thought what
a good thing it was that the RJC existed to ‘kite-mark’ good practice. He was also not
surprised to hear that Thames Valley were still practising RJ, and spoke highly of the quality
of their work at the conferences he had attended. He was pleased to introduce Javed Khan,
Chief Executive of Victim Support. He expressed the hope that parliamentary time could be
found for a debate on the recently published consultation, on which he and Javed had
worked.
Javed Khan began: ‘I’m really pleased to have the opportunity to speak at this APPG and
to follow the noble Lord and the formidable Lizzie. The problem I have, though, is that I am
not sure what I can say that is going to be particularly different. So I shall try to be as
controversial as I can be, on behalf of victims. Because I don’t think everything is good.
There is a lot of good that is developing but I don’t think we are quite there on everything.
I would like to place on record Victim Support’s welcome for the government’s commitment
to RJ, which has been developing over the last year. We heard more about that yesterday. I
see it as an approach which can go some way to empower victims who so often feel
disempowered as a result of crime and, all too often, the result of the way they are treated
after crime. However, let me reinforce at the outset, as has been said: it is the needs of the
victim that must be at the centre of any effective approach. That’s the only way that what is
on offer is both truly “restorative” – giving back to victims some of what was taken away –
and “justice” – where victims can begin to see that offenders recognise the harm done and
are committed to facing up to their own responsibilities.
Effective restorative justice needs to have victims at its core but that does not mean it is at
the expense of offenders or their rights. There has often been some misconception, and this
becomes a victim versus offender debate. But this is not a binary debate: it’s not an eitheror. The rights and needs of victims and offenders are not mutually exclusive and we must
not fall into that trap. That’s demonstrated by Victim Support in the work we have been
doing with the Prison Reform Trust, the Restorative Justice Council and others, to challenge
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that outdated narrative. Doing that is not easy and means challenging long-held
preconceptions and assumptions – not least in the media. I hope today’s discussion will
help to move that along.
I said in my contribution to the annual Perrie lectures last month that there are three key
outcomes we most certainly all share:
• the full rehabilitation of offenders (and prisoners)
• an improved experience for victims of crime
• a community that is confident the justice system is doing its job.
I think those are universal demands that we all place on the criminal justice system. And in
this vein, I believe restorative justice, when done well and with the needs of victims at its
heart, is one of the most effective ways of helping offenders to face up to the impact of the
crimes they have committed. That is what so many victims tell our volunteers, that they
want to know that the ‘wrong done’ is recognised by the person who commits that ‘wrong’.
And that’s common sense: we all know that we can’t begin to put anything right in our own
lives unless and until we recognise what has gone wrong and why. To put it simply, it’s
called taking responsibility. Perhaps this is not universally fashionable but, I’d suggest, it’s
always necessary.
So, facing up to the crime, to the ‘wrong’ committed, is a good and necessary action. It
helps the offender and it certainly has real potential to help victims too.
I believe, RJ can offer victims a sense that they are making the journey to take back control
of their lives. It offers victims a real voice in the criminal justice system, something that is not
always evident. That voice is core to the delivery of justice and that’s one of the reasons
why Victim Support has been supporting RJ projects for many years; to strengthen the
voice of victims in the justice system. And we know that the voices of victims tell us that
satisfaction in that system is much stronger when RJ, giving victims a voice, has their needs
at its core. As mentioned earlier, we know that 85% of victims are satisfied with restorative
meetings and a not dissimilar number – 80% – of offenders feel the same. So, it works for
both victim and offender.
And also, when RJ works properly, it raises confidence levels in the justice system more
generally, and we know that that’s a major challenge for the government at the moment. It
can provide the community with greater feelings of security. I believe that confidence levels
will continue to grow as it becomes clear that RJ offers a real opportunity to reduce the level
of reoffending – which in turn saves money and benefits us all. Victim Support and the RJC
have estimated that if all victims of burglary, robbery and violence against the person were
offered RJ it could save as much as £185m over two years (by lowering reconviction rates).
I would argue that there is a very strong case for an ‘invest to save’ approach, even in these
fiscally constrained times.
So the case for victim led RJ is very strong. But let’s not get too excited just yet, as so far
we have only heard some fine words. We already know that there are some major risks to
effective RJ being rolled out, coming along very soon. The commissioning of victim services
being handed to Police and Crime Commissioners is possibly the greatest of these risks if
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not done well. We have made our position consistently clear on this and found wide spread
support from a range of organisations including the PRT. Let us be under no illusions that
without a national framework and obligations, local commissioning risks having a negative
impact on the wider spread of RJ.
We know that RJ has been shown to be very effective for victims as well as offenders. It is
also highly cost effective. However, it is still not widely understood and may, therefore, not
be prioritised by Police & Crime Commissioners if they are to be given that responsibility. If
this happens, local people will be deprived of the opportunity to benefit from RJ and the
lack of resources will choke off the hard-won progress we have made. Government has an
obligation to listen and to act, not just to speak soothing words. I would call on the Ministry
of Justice to reflect carefully on the fact that 70% of respondents to their consultation on
local commissioning have said “you’re making a mistake’. I would ask: why have you
chosen to ignore them? .
So, to end, we want to see RJ available to all victims who want it, at a time when they want
it. It can’t be seen as something to impose on victims. Rather, it needs to be a genuine offer
that clearly aims to meet the needs of the victim. This will take resources, it can’t be done
on the cheap, and at a time when the future funding of services to victims is, at best,
uncertain, we look to you, Minister, to help make real the aspirations and commitment we
know you share with us. If we achieve that I think we will build a justice system which we
can all be proud of and which meets the needs of offenders, victims and society’.
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The All-Party Parliamentary Penal Affairs Group aims to increase its members’
knowledge of penal affairs and to work through parliamentary channels for reform of
the penal system.
This report, Prisoner Rehabilitation, focuses on the dominant theme of many
meetings held in the past two years and on a particular interest of Lord Corbett of
Castle Vale, who chaired the group from 2002 – 2012.
Prison Reform Trust
15 Northburgh Street
London EC1V 0JR
020 7251 5070
www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk
[email protected]
2 071473 968010