What to do about G4S?

I couldn’t watch last night’s Panorama investigation of Medway Secure Training Centre (STC). I’m working abroad this week, ironically at a juvenile detention centre where G4S were relieved of their contract in 2010. But I have seen excerpts and read enough about the programme to recognise that if this is not quite youth justice’s Mid Staffs moment , it is at least its equivalent of Winterbourne View. This was the private hospital near Bristol where an undercover Panorama investigation in 2011 revealed criminal abuse by staff of patients with learning disabilities.

It will be interesting to see whether what  emerged following  that programme five years ago are mirrored at Medway; residents too far from home, high rates of physical interventions , particularly restraint; agencies failing to pick up on key warning signs; management failure and a closed and punitive culture. Winterbourne view was closed within a month and major changes resulted, both in the treatment of people with severe learning disabilities (for example reviewing the appropriateness of placements in hospital) and in the regulation of providers (with stronger accountability and corporate responsibility for owners and directors of private hospitals and care homes and tighter inspection). Could we see analogous change in youth justice?

I have a particular interest in STC’s because, as some people won’t let me forget, I had a hand in their invention.  Working on secondment in the Home Office in the early 1990’s, I found myself advising ministers about how to deal with what they saw as a  national crisis caused by  persistent young offenders, which was made much more acute by the horrific murder of James Bulger by two ten year old boys. Despite my and others advice, Kenneth Clarke was determined not only to create new closed institutions but to open up their running to the private sector. I well remember his junior minister Michael Jack, during visits we made to existing local authority secure units and Youth Treatment Centres (after the STC's had been announced) wishing that the decision to create something new had not been taken so precipitately. Jack seemed to echo then shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair’s view that if new secure places were indeed needed, it was insane not to expand existing provision.

I remember too attending a meeting at G4S’s then headquarters in Broadway where they explained their ideas for the new STC’s. They suggested that professionally trained and qualified staff were not necessary as it was simply a question of developing the correct procedures and getting staff to follow them. Staff thinking for themselves was seen as undesirable.  If this was the approach they in fact applied when they won the first contract, it was to be exposed as grossly naïve when Medway faced all sorts of management problems when it finally opened in 1998.

What does the current scandal expose?  For the second time in two years G4S has been shown unable to care for vulnerable and challenging young people in an acceptable way. There surely comes a point when they or the government must recognise that this is institutional failure. Unfortunately new contracts have recently been signed and the company will continue to run Medway and Oakhill STC’s while handing over Rainsbrook to new operators in May. Assuming the contracts are not going to be rescinded, how can the safety and wellbeing of children be guaranteed?

First, at the very least the government need to look at the way G4S recruit, train, supervise and support their staff and insist on change if it is found necessary.  If there is a cost to the company, they should see it as a form of payment by results. The result of their current approach has been abusive and they should pay to fix it. The macro corporate renewal that was required after the tagging overbilling scandal needs to be replicated in their STC operation.

Second while G4S were at best foolish in appearing to shift the blame on other agencies for failing to spot the abuse before Panorama, the system of monitoring inspection and advocacy has undoubtedly failed. If the YJB’s days are already numbered, this latest debacle will almost certainly usher their demise when Charlie Taylor reports this summer. Funds should be diverted to enhance the child protection and advocacy systems within the STC’s.

Third, a much more thoroughgoing and independent review of custodial care of juveniles should be ordered, ideally led by a judge or lawyer. Mr Taylor’s youth justice review absurdly excludes issues about the age of criminal responsibility and the powers of courts.   Sir Martin Narey’s review of residential care is unclear in its scope and anyway compromised by his relationship with G4S and attempt to undermine the independent findings of inspectorates at Rainsbrook last year. Michael Gove is right that the best way to prevent scandals like this is to prevent children ending up in custody. He needs to ask how that can be achieved.

Unduly Concerned

Just as 2015 started with an unnecessary and potentially counterproductive idea for criminal justice reform – Lord Leveson’s suggestion that courts ask for fewer probation reports before imposing sentence- so has 2016. This year it’s the Attorney General arguing that his power to find sentences unduly lenient should be extended to a wider range of offences, notwithstanding the fact that his office cannot cope with the workload generated by the existing scheme.  To help with this, a pilot programme has  been announced to allow a wider range of prosecutors to conduct appeals into unduly lenient sentences on behalf of the Government- details of the costs involved in this have not been given.

Under the existing scheme, the number of sentences considered by the Attorney General’s Office has increased by 97% since 2010, up from 342 sentences to 674 in 2014. During the same period, referrals of cases found unduly lenient to the Court of Appeal rose 35%, from 90 to 122.  It’s not surprising that the success rate of complaints has fallen. Anyone at all can ask for a sentence to be reviewed - they don’t have to be involved in the case and only one person needs to ask. A quick email from any member of the public can trigger a review provided it’s sent within 28 days.

It’s true that the Conservative manifesto contained a proposal to enable a wider range of sentences to be challenged “to tackle those cases where judges get it wrong”. But with the resource pressures faced by the courts and prisons is this really a priority for the justice system?

Back in 2014, then Attorney-General Dominic Grieve seemed to think not, reminding Parliament that “the principle enunciated originally was that only a small number of cases in specified and very serious offences would ever be referred”. Last year his successor seemed much more enthusiastic about tackling anomalies in the kinds of offences which can be reviewed in order to boost public confidence. Today he declared that “It’s vital that the public are able to legally challenge custodial sentences and to make sure offences are being properly punished”.

If anything, there is a case that the Government should be looking to limit the way the scheme operates. Perhaps where the victim of the crime or someone else with a locus in the case has well founded concerns there is a case for review. But the problem with sentencing as a whole is less that it is too lenient and more that it’s too harsh.

 The Sentencing Council’s Crown Court Survey- now disbanded- found that in 2014 in assault and burglary cases, more sentences were above the recommended range than below it. Courts are under a legislative duty to impose a sentence within the offence range specified by sentencing guidelines, unless it is in the interests of justice to depart from this.  The vast majority of cases fall within the range but with burglary 3% of cases were above the range with less than 0.5% below it.

Of course a sentenced offender can appeal and a prosecution right to appeal could be seen to even up the scales.  But as Grieve said “there needs to be finality in sentencing and, of course, if many more cases are referred, that will place burdens both on the Court of Appeal in considering them and on my office in making the assessment”. It’s a burden the system could do without.

Five Criminal Justice Innovations from my Year

Make justice accessible: Mobile courts in Abu Dhabi














Develop useful alternatives to prison that build skills and serve the public :
Community service offenders work on a fishpond  in Kenya

Put human rights at the heart of prisons: Mission of Uganda Prison service on wall at Mbale  













Turn outdated prisons into museums to educate: Crumlin Road Gaol Belfast


















Or in the case of juvenile centres knock them down and use the bricks for art: 

Polk Correctional Facility  North Carolina 

2015 End of Term Criminal Justice Report: Some Signs of Promise but Must do Better

What should we make of 2015 as far as penal policy is concerned?  The new government has promised radical reforms at the heart of their agenda, but eye catching announcements like the closure of Holloway notwithstanding, we’ve yet to see much in the way of new policy or practice. As is always the case, there has been as much continuity as there has been change.

The controversial Transforming Rehabilitation reforms that placed 70% of probation work into the private sector got underway in earnest in February since when almost all prison sentences, however short, have been followed by a mandatory period of supervision after release. Inspection reports in May and November found the new arrangements presented a mixed picture noting continuing mistakes in allocating cases between the Probation Service and Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs), and variation in the quality of offender assessments. December’s revelation of serious failures by South Yorkshire CRC run by Sodexo confirms the impossible position faced by Paul McDowell who quit as Chief Inspector in February after it  had become known that he is married to the head of the company’s criminal justice operation.

Paul’s permanent replacement Glenys Stacey is due to start in the New Year and may wish to revisit the Inspectorate’s plan to discontinue monitoring the implementation of TR after March 2016- particularly if Sodexo fail to take remedial action and lose their contract in South Yorkshire. The National Audit Office plan to publish a report on value for money in the spring of 2016 but this looks too soon to be informative.  Proper scrutiny will be  essential   for a programme which NOMS former Director of Competition has recently described as untried, over complex and highly risky: “It is like watching people doing their best to organise the perfect train crash” he wrote in his book "Competition for Prisons Public or private?".

April saw reports that Sodexo were planning to replace CRC staff with automated kiosks and December saw Working Links reported to be planning large scale job cuts in their CRC's  in Wales and the West country, in part because numbers of cases are lower than forecast. In the context of these commercial woes it seems particularly unwise for the Magistrates Association to be relying on Working Links to help fill a hole in their budget- a conflict of interest that first came to light in May.

On prisons, new Justice Secretary Michael Gove surprised many with an impressive series of speeches promising progressive reforms, with backing from the very top of the Government. So far outline plans have emerged to replace old prisons with new and give Governors more freedoms but much of the detail must wait until next year. Gove won plaudits from reformers for reversing a series of his predecessor’s policies including the ban on books for prisoners, the secure college for young offenders and the criminal courts charge as well as a proposed prison training project in Saudi Arabia.

But at year end, there are signs the honeymoon may be over. Gove rejected almost a third of the recommendations made in Lord Harris’s review of self-inflicted deaths of young adults and has established a series of further reviews – on education and youth justice- which may not report until the summer of 2016. Nor will the new for old prisons plan deliver speedy change. Speeches aside, the new MoJ has not exactly hit the ground running.

The need for urgent action was made clear when outgoing prison Inspector Nick Hardwick reported on the worst outcomes for 10 years and more recent data suggest prisons are continuing to struggle with safety, violence and drugs - most recently it has emerged that the deployment of the National Tactical Response Group (NTRG) to deal with disturbances, has risen by more than 50 per cent in a year.  The prison population is projected to rise slightly less sharply over the next five years than was estimated last year, and Gove appears to have ruled out further reductions in staff numbers. But genuinely increasing education and rehabilitation opportunities will surely require a fall in prisoner numbers. While increased use of electronic tagging, greater opportunities for earned release and more aggressive repatriation of foreign nationals have been floated as options an overall strategy – such as justice reinvestment- is still lacking.

On the personnel front, Gove has brought ex NOMS supremo Sir Martin Narey onto the MoJ board to advise on prisons along with Sir Michael Barber who ran Tony Blair’s delivery unit. Narey’s intervention following the damning  independent inspection report on Rainsbrook STC can best be described as unwise while Barber found the space in his memoirs a few years back  to decry as absurd magistrates who avoided making custodial sentences because of their concern about the size of the prison population. Former counter terrorism police chief Peter Clarke will fill Nick Hardwick’s shoes inspecting prisons.

Elsewhere the House of Commons Justice Committee chaired by Bob Neill has started an interesting portfolio of work on young adults, the courts and restorative justice. The Committee is showing a promising critical spirit, censuring Gove for tapping up the successful candidates for the independent prison and probation inspection posts and calling for the criminal courts charge to be scrapped; ironically Neill was part of the standing committee  which voted down Labour amendments on the charge in the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill in the last parliament.

 Relatively little has been heard on criminal justice from Labour since the election but that is likely to change once Gove shows more of his hand. Whether they support constructive reforms or seek, as they did with Kenneth Clarke, to portray him as soft on crime will be one of the interesting political dimensions next year.

Why We Need a Rehabilitation Devolution

Among the wealth of information provided by the latest edition of the Prison Reform Trust’s excellent Bromley briefing, two findings stand out. First is the catalogue of troubles experienced by adults in prison compared with the general population. Prisoners are 12 times more likely to have been taken into care and regularly played truant as a child; almost two thirds have used Class A drugs compared to 13% of the general population while prisoners are over three times more likely to have no qualifications, never to have worked, or be homeless prior to imprisonment.16% show symptoms of psychosis compared to just 4% of adults outside.

A second notable fact is that the reduction in the use of custody for juveniles over the last five years has saved the Youth Justice Board more than £300 million. Taken together, these findings suggest a strong case for developing a strategy to shift resources away from imprisonment towards the kind of community based measures which can prevent people becoming involved in crime and meet their many health and social care needs if they do so.

Addressing many of those problems-mental health, education, addiction, and homelessness- are almost always matters for local agencies and organisations whether in the public, voluntary or private sector.  In a report out today published by Transform Justice, I show how giving local authorities and communities greater financial and organisational responsibility for preventing and treating crime in their area could both help to reduce it and to minimise the use of expensive and often ineffective national resources such as courts and prisons.

Drawing both on lessons from the USA and domestic pilot projects, Rehabilitation Devolution argues that if local agencies are made responsible for paying the costs of incarceration, they are more likely to take steps to reduce its use. Local authorities have shown they can use funds to lower the use of custody and making them pay for the costs of juveniles held on remand has contributed to a fall in numbers.  American states like Pennsylvania have established a formula that requires a percentage of cost savings achieved through reductions in prison numbers to be reinvested in public safety improvements while in North Carolina so called Justice Reinvestment initiatives have helped reduce prison numbers by 8%.

  

What does this suggest for England and Wales? The report proposes transferring responsibility for meeting the entire costs of custody for under 18's to local authorities and Police and Crime Commissioners (PCC’s), work to identify the best ways of transferring that responsibility to a more local level for young adult and women offenders, and inviting PCC's to chair new Justice and Safety Partnerships( JSP).  Involving judges, probation, prison, local government and health, the JSP’s would introduce greater regional voice in the system and provide a body to which criminal justice budgets might be devolved over time. The report also argues that as a localisation agenda moves forward local commissioners would not simply buy what is currently provided but develop the kind of  responses better able to serve their community’s needs. So rather than paying for  Feltham YOI, local authorities might be able to commission a less damaging environment for their troublesome teenage boys .

While this may look like bureaucratic and possibly unwelcome organisational reform, its purpose is to incentivise the bodies best able to deal with crime and offending to do so creatively and cost effectively. George Osborne’s spending review may have included an eye catching plan to close Holloway but modernising the prison estate apart, the Spending Review looks much like business as usual. New for old prisons may well be necessary but it is not sufficient to address our problems of penal excess.

Reducing sentence lengths is the most direct but politically riskiest strategy for reducing prison numbers - although the risks might be mitigated by intensifying regimes so a prison sentence of a certain length in the future counts for more than it does now.

 Alongside this, aligning the systems for sanctioning offenders with the measures which can prevent crime and reduce offending could help bring down the numbers in court and custody.  By doing so we can end up not with a near 90,000 prison population forecast last week but something approaching the norm for Western Europe which might see it closer to 50,000.                 

Gove Calls for the Police

To many people’s surprise, expectations of prison reform over the next five years are currently sky high. It’s not just Justice Secretary Michael Gove who has promised fundamental change.  The Prime Minister told the Tory conference that “when prisoners are in jail, we have their full attention for months at a time – so let’s treat their problems, educate them, put them to work”. How will we know whether these noble aspirations are translated into reality for the 85,000 prisoners locked up across the country?

We will know next week whether the Justice ministry has secured sufficient funds from the Treasury to make Gove’s promises look plausible but will probably have to wait a few more weeks for the comprehensive prison reform plan that officials are putting together. In the longer term we will need to rely on the reports of the independent Chief Inspector of Prisons to know whether conditions of detention improve and opportunities for rehabilitation increase in the way the government hope.

Today we learned who is likely to be making those judgements - former Met Police Counter Terrorism Commander Peter Clarke. Clarke has been nominated as a preferred candidate as Chief Inspector by Gove and although he will appear for a scrutiny hearing before the Justice Select committee – as will Glenys Stacey who has been put forward as Chief Inspector of Probation- chances are that the former Scotland Yard boss will be appointed in due course to replace Nick Hardwick.  Last year Gove appointed Clarke to lead an investigation of Islamist infiltration of the governance of schools in Birmingham. Although the report arguably helped end Gove’s term at education, he and Clarke seem to share views about the widespread nature of extremism in Muslim communities.

Whatever one thinks of Clarke, it is disappointing that the opportunity has not been taken to make the post of Chief Inspector of Prisons more independent of government. Last year Hardwick told the House of Commons Public Administration Committee that being appointed by and reporting to the Ministry of Justice is “by its nature incompatible with full independence” and proposed direct accountability to Parliament. The Committee recommended as much in their report but just before the election, change was rejected, with the MoJ arguing that allowing the inspectorate separate offices and a website plus more freedom to recruit its staff were sufficient to “reflect the unique watchdog status of HMI Prisons”.

At the same time, as if to amplify  concerns about independence, the Justice Committee were involved in a spat with Chris Grayling over the selection of Hardwick’s successor. The fact that the two "independent" members of the selection panel were revealed to be tory activists, led the Commissioner of Public Appointments to promise to amend the rules about panel membership. In the event no appointment was made but now that it has been, the Justice Committee will no doubt want to know who made it.

What else might they ask when Clarke comes before them for a pre appointment hearing? Most of their questions will no doubt focus on the skills, experience and values he will bring to a post which many consider as one of the foremost human rights monitors in the country. But there are three specific matters they would do well to raise.

First they will need to establish whether Mr Clarke has any family relationships that might cause a conflict of interest, such as that which ended Paul McDowell’s time as Probation inspector (and about which the Committee regrettably failed to inquire at the material time).

Second they might want to ask how being an ex-police officer could affect his judgement. After all inspection of police custody suites is an important role of the prison inspectorate these days. Former prison service staff are ineligible to be Chief Inspector of Prisons, but ex police officers seemingly not. His investigation skills will not be in question but will his impartiality?

Finally, they may want to ask a bit not only about how his experience in counter terrorism might affect his attitudes to the treatment of Muslim prisoners but about his other police roles too. For example he was deputy then acting head of personnel at the Met in the early 2000’s.  Today the Met admitted that that there had been no proper management of the deployments of undercover officers , even after the introduction of supposedly stringent legal controls. Was that debacle any part of Clarke’s responsibilities? Lets hope not otherwise he will be busy contributing to Lord Justice Pitchford's inquiry.

Dear George

Spending Review 2015 and Prisons

As you will know from the  Party Conference, David has made prison reform one of the key domestic priorities for our government. In my own speech in Manchester and several others (most recently last night at the Howard League) I have emphasised how rehabilitation is the most important aspect of imprisonment. Better education, together with improved mental health and substance misuse treatment in prison are essential to achieving our policy aim.

Unfortunately I have discovered that the prison system is in a parlous state, often struggling to provide safety and decency let alone equipping prisoners with the attitudes and skills they need to put offending behind them. In the circumstances there are simply no options for making further economies in the running costs of prisons. As I told the Howard League that journalists should have unfettered access to prisons, our scope for varnishing the ugly truth will be increasingly limited too.

As you know , I plan to replace some of our Victorian city centre prisons with larger, modern and more economic establishments  although your officials will no doubt tell you that that this has been proposed by pretty well all of my predecessors since the last century and will take a good deal of time and careful planning to achieve. I will also be making much better use of new technology although again you may feel that you have "heard all this before".

As you have been encouraging departments to consider radical structural reforms, I do however have two more proposals which will help us to reduce cost in the system while improving its quality.

The first is to look at transferring responsibility for elements of the criminal justice budget to a more local level with incentives for Police and Crime Commissioners and local government to do more. Boris has been doing some interesting crime prevention work in partnership with local authorities in London and I am sure you would see the sense of our new Metro Mayors playing a greater role. If they can reduce demand on the courts and on the prison and probation services, over time we can cut spend responsibly and sustainably- not by making the system “cheaper not smaller” as my immediate predecessor sought to do, but "smaller and better". There’s a rather good report by Transform Justice about so called Justice Reinvestment  here and I understand a follow up will be published shortly.

The second idea is to cut substantially the lengths of prison sentences served by all but the gravest offenders. We keep people in prison much longer than our European neighbours - as Herr Schauble might have told you- at significant financial, social and ethical cost.  

If we are to keep our supporters and the media on side, we will need some cover for this. What I am thinking of is making the serving of a sentence very much more demanding than it is currently so that offenders have to serve less of it.

I am not advocating the kind of short sharp shock military regimes that Willie Whitelaw and Michael Howard experimented with in the past. Rather it will be the education, employment and therapeutic interventions which will be intensive.  Expecting prisoners to work a full day and to participate in education and rehabilitation activities in the evenings and at weekends would make a prison sentence count for much more, not only for prisoners but in the eyes of courts and the public.  I will ask the Sentencing Council to recalibrate the going rate for all of the main of the offences in the light of the more exacting nature of the penalty of imprisonment.

As you will appreciate, establishing the necessary regimes will require a short term increase in funds so that adequate numbers of staff can be deployed. This will not be welcome news to you but the rise will be easily offset over time by not only averting the need for new prisons – the population is forecast to rise to 90,000 by the end of the parliament – but by actually reducing the number of prisoners.  50,000 is what the Justice Committee recommended a few years ago and that’s what I’d like to aim for.  By simultaneously cutting the length of stay but  enhancing the rehabilitative impact of that stay it should be possible. I believe its known as a double whammy.

Yours Ever,

Michael