Taking Stock: More Local Control of Probation ?

Among its wonderful wealth of exhibits, Oxford’s Pitt-Rivers Museum includes a set of village stocks, originally placed on the footpath in College Lane Littlemore in March 1857. They were made especially for the punishment of a man sentenced by local magistrates to spend 6 hours in them.

The wooden stocks were built by one Richard Humphries, “Village Constable and Carpenter” and it was this that came to mind while reading Frances Crook’s powerful argument against Police and Crime Commissioners assuming responsibility for the probation service. Frances thinks it would be wrong “for an authority that is charged with overseeing policing with its investigative role also to oversee the infliction of a sentence. This creates an inherent conflict of interest, particularly if there is any element of private profit-making bodies involved.” Constable Humphries seems to prove the point.

Yet I can see greater merit than does Frances in more devolved organisational and financial arrangements for probation and indeed prisons. One of the key principles of a Justice Reinvestment approach is giving local people greater responsibility for preventing and dealing with crime. The hope is that if local agencies must meet the costs of locking up people in their area, they are more likely to take steps to do less of it.

The reconfiguration of probation provides an opportunity to incentivise this transfer of resources away from prison places and into community-based measures for rehabilitating offenders and preventing crime. At any one time, about 100 people in crisis ridden Birmingham jail are serving sentences of six months or less. Probation might work harder to develop credible and innovative alternatives for these petty offenders if they stood to access some of the savings that would result from lowering prison numbers. They might also provide interventions which would enable the police and prosecutors to keep more in the way of minor cases out of the courts altogether. 

Creating this dynamic would require a regional or local mechanism for allocating and shifting resources across the criminal justice piece. I’ve argued that this role could be played by PCCs working with local authorities in Justice and Safety Partnerships.  The Howard League’s 2009 Commission on English Prisons suggested that “with local authorities as lead partners,  .. local strategic partnerships should be formed that bring together representatives from the criminal justice, health and education sectors, with local prison and probation budgets fully devolved and made available for justice reinvestment initiatives.”

There are already tentative steps towards devolution in Greater Manchester and London where the PCC role is carried out by the mayor. But there is a case for going farther and faster. The Strengthening Probation consultation initiative , though purporting to want feedback on proposed changes to the structure and content of probation services is offering  roadside repairs on a vehicle that should be written off.  

In 2009, in arguing for directly elected sheriffs to run criminal justice, Douglas Carswell suggested that a putative Sheriff of Kent, “knowing that he was up for re-election, might rule, that instead of facing jail, shoplifters would be forced to stand outside Bluewater with placards around their necks reading ‘shoplifter’.”  While this is nonsense, there are risks in a localising punishment. But there are opportunities too.