Can we really get better prisons at reduced costs?

Consider a prison where only 10 per cent of prisoners spend ten or more hours out of their cell on a weekday: where a third say they have felt unsafe, and fewer than a third say a member of staff has checked on them personally in the last week to see how they are getting on; where less than a quarter think it easy to see the doctor and a fifth report that they have been prevented from making a complaint.  This is not a poorly performing jail but one that has been rated as exceptional in the latest Prison Service assessment.

Like all prisons this one is being required to cut its costs. But will running it more cheaply – which inevitably means reducing staff numbers - do anything to address what seem to be pretty serious shortfalls? Are fewer resources likely to increase the number of prisoners – 11% at the moment -who feel that a member of staff has helped them prepare for release? Or raise from 23% the number of prisoners who say their cell call bell is normally answered within five minutes.

The government will no doubt use the mantra that what matters is not the quantum of resource available but how it is deployed and managed. They might point to modern new prisons where according to their business plan, lower costs can produce improved facilities for the management of prisoners. One such is Oakwood, the UK’s biggest and cheapest prison where a specification  as high as those in other prisons is allegedly  being provided at less than half the cost per prisoner place.

Unfortunately the Prison ratings place both Oakwood -and Thameside, the other private prison which opened last year-, as being of serious concern. Inspectors went to Oakwood last month and there will be little surprise if they report some of the same problems they found at Thameside. There “as an operational response to rising levels of violence the prison had taken the unusual step of effectively locking down the prison, severely curtailing the regime and in particular prisoner access to time unlocked. The prison had done little to evaluate the success of this quite extreme strategy and at the time of our visit there seemed only vague plans to restore the prison to normality”.

Some of the difficulties of course can be put down to the teething problems that accompany the opening of any new prison.  Others may result from the simple but highly irresponsible policy of trying to run a prison with too few staff.

The serious problems in the best rated prisons let alone the worst suggest a looming institutional crisis. The Prison system and those who inspect it show too great a degree of tolerance of poor standards and of risk. Such a tolerance was one of the reasons identified by Robert Francis as to why numerous warning signs did not  alert the system to the developing disaster in Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust . They must not be unheeded in our prisons.

Young Adults in Custody: Time for Change?

The Prison Inspectorate’s scathing report on Feltham once again focuses attention on how best to accommodate young people in custody. For juveniles under 18 the time has come to remove them from the Prison system altogether. The Government is proposing  a creative and radical package of reforms for the juvenile secure estate;  a network of Secure Colleges outside prison  is surely the way forward for the small number of under 18s who cannot be dealt with in the community.

But what about young adults?  “Transforming Youth Custody” says nothing about the 18-20 year olds whose experiences of violence at Feltham B   prompted the Chief Inspector to question the viability of it being set aside for just young adult prisoners.

About 12,000 18-20 year olds received prison sentences last year with approximately 7,000 in custody at any one time. Most are held in dedicated Young Offender Institutions (YOI’s) but increasingly these establishments are being combined or even integrated into adult prisons. About a third of young men and all of the young women in the age group are now held in these dual establishments.

 The jury is out about whether integrated prisons for those aged 18 plus can provide a sufficient focus on the distinctive needs of young adults. The law does not permit under 21’s to share cells with older prisoners, but mixing wings in some establishments has led to reductions in assaults and other disruptive behaviour- a serious problem with this age group. But can they offer the constructive and purposeful regimes, therapeutic help and personal inspiration needed to enable young adults to put crime behind them? 

In Germany , in each of the lander , separate youth prisons accommodate all of those from 14-21 sentenced by the courts. Under 18’s and young women live in separate house blocks but take full part in the active daily programme of education , training and employment. Unlike many British prisons, almost no young people are found on the wings during the day with evenings and weekends filled with a wide range of recreation activities. The campus at Neustrelitz north of Berlin feels more like a further education college than a prison. Staff eat their lunch in a canteen alongside the trainees. In the UK meals are almost always taken in cells , with disruptive prisoners subject to the  what is sometimes disturbingly called “controlled feeding”.

The Prison Service in England and Wales acknowledges that even in a dedicated YOI, life for a young offender is not that different to prison life for adult prisoners. Staff in a YOI they admit “will not be able to give you much individual support, as there will generally be one member of staff for every ten young people.” Former Chief Inspector of Prisons Dame Anne Owers described young adults as a neglected and under -resourced age group, and whatever the shape of the establishments that hold them, the time is surely right for a renewed focus on identifying and meeting their needs in prison.

Who shot JR? Whatever happened to Justice Reinvestment?

Justice Reinvestment (JR) is an approach to penal policy which contains several important components of a better criminal justice system. At its core is the idea that much of the money spent on justice is used ineffectively and produces a poor return.  People in prison are largely drawn from neighbourhoods characterised by poverty, deprivation and social problems. If some criminal justice funding were spent not on processing individuals in these areas by “cops , courts and corrections” but instead on providing better services and facilities, better outcomes would result for the individuals and the communities where they live.

In January 2010, the Parliamentary Justice Select Committee produced the report ‚Cutting Crime: Making the Case for Justice Reinvestment which called for a radical rethink of the way criminal justice money is spent. It recommended reducing prison numbers by a third and the movement of resources towards spending on prevention in targeted communities. The report encouraged local agencies to play a much more active part in preventing and responding to crime.

The Coalition government took up the slogan at least, describing their rehabilitation revolution as making “the concept of justice reinvestment real by allowing providers to invest money in the activity that will prevent offending rather than spending money on dealing with the consequences.”

But JR is much more than a financing mechanism. It is about reducing the use of imprisonment and encouraging local responsibility for organising and resourcing the alternatives, as well as a focus on effective use of resources. Reductions in prison numbers and a localist approach (to probation at any rate) appear to have disappeared from the government’s agenda.

To be fair, pilot schemes to incentivise local statutory partners to reduce demand for adult  prison places and to provide councils with cash to divert under 18’s from custody are producing some technical lessons about what needs to be done. But with disinvestment the overall order of the day, stakeholders in the adult pilots complain of insufficient incentives   to make substantial changes to practice that were not already in train; on the juvenile side two of the four schemes have withdrawn from the pilot.

What’s needed alongside emerging technical models is a renewed political level commitment to JR. It's unlikely to come from a Government which wants to make the system not smaller but simply cheaper - but who nevertheless found £250 million to fund a Titan prison in North Wales as part of investing in Britain’s future.  

But if the Labour party needs a big but affordable idea for criminal justice, JR may be it.  

The Rehabilitation Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Today the House of Lords starts its detailed scrutiny of the Offender Rehabilitation Bill. Lord Ramsbotham wants to delay the process until the Government produce some proper information about the costs and likely impact of its proposals to introduce compulsory supervision for short term prisoners. Labour wants parliament to authorise the far reaching plans to dismantle the probation service- savings from which are to be used to pay for the supervision of the additional 50,000 prisoners.   It is unlikely that these laudable efforts to get the government to “show their workings” will get very far. A much more robust process of examining the case for change, and the plans for implementing it is surely needed. I have previously argued for a Probation Futures Task force to be set up along the lines of the body which looked at the NHS reforms in 2011.  .

At last night’s Annual General Meeting of the Parliamentary All Party Penal affairs Group,  Justice minister  Jeremy Wright  used his smooth lawyerly   tones to try to justify the case for the rehabilitation revolution . But while he accepted there are many design challenges, we were left to trust in  his confidence   that these would be overcome. We will not have people doing probation  work who are not properly qualified , he promised, but then went on to say that they would not need a probation qualification. He told us that plans for prisoners to spend their last couple of months  in a local resettlement prison had been  warmly welcomed by NOMS who in any event would have introduced them without ministerial instruction. He said he was very confident that  outsourcing probation would produce savings to fund the new supervision, on the basis of the experience of contracting out  Community Payback in London.  He will safeguard the interests of small voluntary organisations through “speed dating” events where they can meet other  organisations with whom to bid for contracts .  Much will be done to encourage charities and probation mutuals to engage with the market place.   He was not pressed about what happens to the losers.

Wright was asked if there was any international experience to draw on . “ I don’t think there’s anywhere in the world that’s doing it like this”, he replied . He’s certainly correct about that.  

Twenty Year Stretch: Michael Howard and the Legacy of Punishment

Twenty years ago this month, Michael Howard became Home Secretary , bringing a sea change to penal policy in England and Wales with which we have been living ever since.   Overturning a consensus that Home Office policies could do little to reduce crime, he embarked on an ambitious programme designed to increase arrests, prosecutions, and convictions but it is his view that “prison works” and the impact of his policies on the numbers behind bars for which he will be most remembered.

 Howard latched on to two influential conclusions from an academic review prepared for the US Congress about what works in crime prevention. The first was that incapacitation policies prevent crime because people in prison simply do not have the opportunity to commit offences and second that there are a small number of offenders who commit a large number of crimes. “If they could be incapacitated “, the review said “a large number of crimes would be prevented.” Despite caveats in the report, falls in the crime rate in the US   together with political saleability made the policy irresistible to Howard, who was by instinct sympathetic to victims and hostile to offenders.

Howard’s 27 point law and order package  delivered to the Conservative Party Conference in October 1993 included new Secure Training Centres for children as young as 12 and  mandatory minimum sentences for repeat  burglars and drug dealers to be served in decent but austere prisons.  Later policies to abolish parole and severely limit early release were never implemented but during his four year tenure prison numbers rose from 44,500 to 61,000.

Howard’s legacy was longer lasting however. By provoking political adversaries to oppose his reforms, he pushed his shadow Tony Blair and New Labour as a whole into a repressive approach to penal policy.  Prison numbers have continued to rise ever since 1993.

More disturbing perhaps was Howard’s  shamelessly  populist approach to law and order- most notoriously in his attempts to increase the tariff for the juvenile  killers of James Bulger, later  described by  a senior judge  as “ institutionalised vengeance ... [by] a politician playing to the gallery”.  In respect of his sentencing policy the Lord Chief Justice told the House of Lords that “Never in the history of our criminal law have such far reaching proposals been put forward on the strength of such flimsy and dubious evidence.” Indeed the most recent review of evidence by the Ministry of Justice has found that  “to date there has been no clear consensus from criminologists and commentators about whether there is an incapacitation effect at all, and if so, its scale.”

Howard’s treatment of the probation service was equally cavalier, removing the requirement for university based social work training and threatening the very existence of the service.  When he left office recruitment had almost dried up and it was left to Jack Straw to introduce a new scheme of professional training as an urgent priority.

Twenty years on , the liberal Ken Clarke has again been succeeded by a hardliner promising spartan abut humane prisons and threatening the probation service. Rehabilitation now plays a more significant role among policy objectives but Howard’s approach can be seen among a new generation of Tory politicians who want “ to reverse the tide of soft justice”. A group of them have written  “After the Coalition - A Conservative Agenda for Britain” in which they call for persistent offenders to be sentenced for prolonged periods in  tough unpleasant and uncomfortable prisons all to be run by the private sector.   With problems on Europe and the economy to contend with , such a back to basics approach may prove attractive  to the Tory Party at least in the run up to the next election. 

Cheating the System and Breaking the Law

Twenty years ago I was involved in  a series of international sentencing seminars. Judges from across Europe would present real life but anonymised cases from their jurisdictions which would then be analysed and discussed to establish what penalty would be likely in other countries. The method was intended to get away from a dry analysis of penal codes and case law to understand what really happens in courts’ practice. The aim was to try to expose what we thought were the harsh practices of the British judiciary compared to their European counterparts. For the most part our judges were indeed more ready to send ordinary criminals to prison and for longer periods. I remember one highly enlightened and philosophical German judge, Hartmut Horstkotte , who was reluctant to send almost any case to jail, constantly probing the purpose of imprisonment. When prison was unavoidable he always argued for the shortest possible term, ideally suspended.

The picture changed when our Dutch hosts presented the case of wholesale importation of cannabis to the Netherlands. A businessman had, over many years,  paid off police and customs officials to allow him to supply the “Coffee Shops” where retail sale for personal consumption was not prosecuted. From memory, the English judges proposed a sentence of 5 years or so and were, like me, astounded when the normally lenient Horstkotte announced his opinion that the right sentence in this case was 20 years. In his view, corrupting the system was a far more serious matter than an individual act of delinquency. He reasoned that acts which endanger the fair operation of the rule of law are both deserving of retributive and deterrent punishment.

I wonder what he would have made of the Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce  case?

I think he would have had sympathy with the judge’s view that the case goes to the heart of the criminal justice system whose operation somewhat paradoxically depends in part on those who have broken the law acting honestly. When people are found not to have done so, courts sentencing them have little room for manoeuvre.  

The seminars revealed that that the going rate for punishing offences varies widely across Europe. As one participant observed, in their discussions, judges were using different currencies.  In a report last year for  the Criminal Justice Alliance I found this is still the case. 

The real message of the case is the need for a downward revaluation of punishment levels across the board. If public services  are reducing spend by 20% over five years so too should our sentence lengths. Were this to happen , Huhne and Pryce might have satisfactorily been punished with a large fine, a period of house arrest monitored by a tag and some meaningful community payback.  I'd like to think that this is what Horstkotte would have imposed.     

20 years on from the Bulger Tragedy: The dangers of Precipitate Policy Making

Next week marks the 20^th anniversary of the murder of Liverpool toddler James Bulger by two ten year old schoolboys in Liverpool. Among its many consequences, what then shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair called “hammer blows struck against the sleeping conscience of the country “ are  widely agreed  to have ushered in a much harsher climate of public and political climate on crime in which we are still living. 

Whatever its wider impact , the tragedy provides important lessons about the dangers of precipitate  policy-making, not least perhaps for the present government’s plans to revolutionise the probation system. Three weeks after the murder, Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke announced to parliament that he would introduce a new custodial sentence, the Secure Training Order to deal with the ‘menace to the community’ created by 12-15 year old persistent juvenile offenders. The orders were to be served in new institutions to be provided through agreements with public, voluntary or private organisations that could demonstrate the ability to meet the required standards and   give value for money.  They would be different from anything that had ever been provided before.

Working on secondment in the Home Office at the time, I well remember a conversation with junior minister Michael Jack during one of a series of visits to existing secure accommodation, hastily arranged to inform the implementation of the new policy. ‘I wish’ he said – or words to this effect – ‘that we had seen all this before we had made the announcement’.  I can imagine Junior Minister Jeremy Wright saying much the same to his advisers as they troop around the Probation services his boss has pledged to dismantle.  As with STCs, the introduction of payment by results and privatisation is being introduced on the basis of almost no research and in the teeth of professional hostility.

What was the result of all this rushed policy-making back in 1993?  First while the policy was quick to announce, implementation was anything but and in a sense , short lived to boot. The first STC did not open until April 1998. Two years after that, Secure Training Orders were effectively scrapped, folded into a unified custodial sentence.  Second, despite this, decisions made in 1993 have served fundamentally to reshape the juvenile custodial sector.  Three further STCs were subsequently opened, despite much of the original justification for their creation being lost in the mists of time. As one consequence, the number of places in local authority Secure Children’s Homes has fallen by a third since 2000.  Unit costs   have proved somewhat cheaper than the Secure Children’s homes but the STCs' chequered history hardly justifies Clarke’s promise that they would be different from  what went before.  Third, despite the potential role for public, voluntary or private organisations in running the new system, it is the private sector that has run them all. 

Are there lessons here for the current probation plans? One may be that political opposition cannot be relied upon to last. In 1993, Blair  described it as  insane to set up STCs  at the same time as  local authorities were  having to close some of their facilities for disturbed young people. The insanity is in fact what happened under the government he came to lead. As a member of the Youth Justice Board from 1998 I have to accept my share of responsibility too.

Given the far reaching nature of the probation proposals, there is a strong case for some kind of pause that goes beyond the short consultation which ends this month. What about a Probation Futures panel that could look objectively at the very serious concerns that have been raised during the consultation?      Had such a body been able to give serious and impartial consideration to government plans in 1993, the history of custody for juveniles might have been very different.