Ex abundanti cautela

 

  

When I worked in the Home Office thirty years ago, my boss, a former barrister, was fond of bandying around Latin legal tags. His comments on my draft submissions to ministers often included the principle of being on the safe side.    

This certainly seems the approach the Sentencing Council has adopted in response to the new law on sentencing guidelines and pre-sentence reports (PSRs).  It has not only paused the new guideline that led to the rumpus – a revised version of the “Imposition of community and custodial sentences” will now come into effect on 1^st September.  The Council has also amended a number of existing guidelines with immediate effect. They say they’ve done so “to be confident that all sentencing guidelines comply with the new legislation”.

But have they gone further than they need to?

The revised version of the Imposition guideline has of course removed what were considered the offending paragraphs about the cohorts for whom a PSR would normally be considered necessary. While neither young adults nor women are mentioned specifically in the new law, courts will no longer be advised that when considering a custodial or community sentence for them they should normally ask the Probation Service for a pre-sentence report.

But the guideline does continue to say that “further information on age and/or lack of maturity can also be taken into account by courts when sentencing a young adult;” and that “it is important for the court to ensure that it has sufficient information about a female offender’s background”.

As for mothers with dependent children, pregnant and post-natal offenders, the court should obtain “detailed information” before sentencing them.

The Council has done as much as it could to keep the message that for these cohorts at least courts should generally be finding out as much as possible about their personal characteristics. In practical terms this, hopefully more often than not, will be by asking for a PSR.

The Council has also felt the need to amend the detailed explanations it includes in drop down form in its digital guidelines. Here I’d say they’ve gone too far. In the section on assessing the remorsefulness of an offender, they’ve removed the phrase “If a PSR has been prepared it may provide valuable assistance in this regard”. Also gone is the suggestion that a court will be assisted by a PSR in making an assessment of whether an offender has addressed an addiction or their offending behaviour.  Both of these statements are incontrovertibly true and it’s hard to see how they breach the new law.

Most worrying is the change the Council’s made to its guideline on sentencing children and young people. The original version stated that in making an assessment of whether a child under 18 is dangerous “it will be essential to obtain a pre-sentence report”. This has now been struck out. So, it seems, it is no longer essential.

The guideline continues to say that “the assessment of dangerousness should take into account all the available information relating to the circumstances of the offence and may also take into account any information regarding previous patterns of behaviour relating to this offence and any other relevant information relating to the child or young person”. So it might be argued – as with women and young adults- getting sufficient information to reach the best decision will in practice often mean obtaining a PSR. But to replace the word “essential” with – well nothing- is to my mind a mistake.

The Imposition guideline which set off this unseemly and unwelcome chain of events did not even deal with children. On this revision at least, the Council should think again.  

 

 

Unacceptable Violence

 

One of many troubling findings in the national annual report of Independent Monitoring Boards (IMB)out this week is “a level of acceptance among some staff and detained people, with poor conditions becoming normalised after years of inaction and minimal change; prisoners often feel there is no point in complaining and staff have become desensitised to seeing people in acute distress”.

I daresay losing the ability to be shocked can be a risk for local volunteers and professional inspectors too as it is for those of us who largely rely on their work to understand what’s happening in prisons.

Today I was shocked, reading the IMB report on HMP/YOI Hindley in Wigan. Not by the extended periods of lockdown due to staff absences in which prisoners are held in their cells 23 hours a day; nor that in one month last year more than three quarters of prisoners tested for drugs returned a positive result with occurrences of men found to be under the influence virtually daily. The scale of these problems may be high at Hindley but they’re sadly all too common across the estate.

What troubled me is a reference to the actions of trained and experienced officers from across the high security estate invited in to conduct comprehensive searches for illicit items.  Not surprisingly they found many phones, drugs and weapons. But the watchdog says that

“the level of violence used by a few external officers was unacceptable to the Board and Governors, who have pursued the matter through the official complaints process, with some matters referred to the police”.

I may be naïve but that does not seem normal to me. Not the violence necessarily, but certainly of a kind that results in a Governor referring prison service colleagues to the police. There are no further details about the incident but with recent calls for a substantial escalation in the force available for prison staff, it surely requires a fuller investigation.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.

 More trouble at the new Secure School. Ofsted visited in April after concerns were received about children’s safety and well-being. Inspectors found  a high number of internal doors need to be replaced. This is because they are not sufficiently robust and "do not prevent children from passing through them when they are locked, particularly when children are upset or frustrated and are demonstrating this through their behaviour".  Presumably they'd to all intents and purposes been kicked in. 

This would be extraordinary enough given that nearly £40 million was spent fitting the premises out before it opened last summer. 

But the inspectors go on to say that "several doors were badly damaged during a short period. This caused some anxiety for children and staff. There has been an increase in instances of children making weapons out of everyday items. Some children say that this is because they have not always felt safe recently." 

This sounds a euphemism for serious disorder to me. 

As a result the number of children living at the home run by Christian charity Oasis Restore has had to be reduced. There were just 9 when Ofsted inspected, when it should be taking 22 (and eventually 49). It looks like the Secure School currently has no Principal and no Registered Manager.

I have never visited the place but unlike some who work in the sector, I've always had worries about an organisation with no experience of secure care being able to cope let alone implement their lofty ambitions to revolutionize youth justice. In the same building 30 odd years ago, Medway Secure Training Centre (STC) suffered a serious disturbance not long after opening. Deja vu all over again?  

Four years ago I wrote that "Given the inappropriateness of Young Offender Institutions and STCs, there is part of me that wishes this initiative well. But it looks too much like a risky experiment.  Secure Childrens Homes already offer a proven model – it’s they which should be being scaled up. Instead the number of places has gone down. 235 last year compared to 250 in 2015 not long before the Secure School was dreamed up.