Seven Days in Tamimi

While Tamimi may conjure up images of a pacific island paradise, the bleaker reality is one of two United Nations compounds in the heart of Baghdad’s Green or International Zone (IZ). It is home to more than a hundred staff from the UN mission in Iraq (UNAMI) plus burgeoning numbers from an alphabet soup of international agencies. Members of the multinational teams whether working to inoculate children against disease, to settle and feed people fleeing from Syria and Anbar province, or to strengthen Iraq’s fragile system of governance, stay in pre fab containers alongside the security staff who protect them and the contingent of Fijian soldiers who guard the compound. Some of the staff have been there years, (with monthly breaks), others like me come for a few days for specific assignments.

Within hours of arriving, not so distant booms were followed by a loudspeaker instruction to stay indoors until further notice. An email reported an ongoing wave of explosions in the Baghdad area, small arms fire and movement of security forces. It was left to CNN to break the news that one of the targets was a juvenile detention centre with two guards killed and more than twenty escapes.

The attack cast a shadow over our planned visit to Rusafa prison, intended to form part of a five day training workshop organised for the Iraqi Correctional Service . Prisons have been targeted by Al-Qaeda across the region since last summer. While the Rusafa prisons are in the highly fortified perimeter of the Ministry of Interior, crucially they are in the Red Zone- a short drive but a world away from the eerily empty IZ , the  ghost town that is home to the international community of diplomats, aid workers and contractors , but it seems scarcely anyone else.

Venturing into the Red Zone requires close protection officers and an armed convoy and with limited resources support for missions has to be rationed. VIP visits and a long range mission meant our visit could not be supported until well after the workshop had finished.

Difficulties of international staff getting out of the IZ is matched by the problems Iraqis face in getting in. The stringent security meant the fourteen participants in our workshop could not arrive before 9.15 a.m. and had to leave by 2p.m. Bussed in and out of the IZ and checked numerous times, they reached the workshop venue not a little dazed and perhaps embarrassed by being on the receiving end of procedures they are more used to applying to others. Disappointed by the UN’s inability to authorise our visit to one of their prisons, the ICS staff none the less worked hard in the classroom at developing plans to bring their institutions into line with international standards. UNAMI’s human rights monitors may be able to check whether plans become reality, but their visits to prisons, like all missions into the Red Zone are severely restricted both in terms of time and place.

The technical limitations on UN activities are coupled with a political reluctance to embrace international norms. On the first day of our workshop, 26 death sentence prisoners were hanged - just a week after Ban Ki Moon had urged the country to suspend executions during his visit to Baghdad.

While security restrictions may frustrate the ability of agencies to do their work, they also shape everyday life at Tamimi and in the IZ. There is a curfew for staff and walking and cycling in the IZ  is prohibited at any time of day.  The UN’s Security Chief, visiting while we were in Baghdad, was told about the inhibiting impact of the regimen,  but given that the UN’s measures  are considerably less stringent than those operated by some other embassies, the deaths of UN staff in Kabul last weekend  and the upcoming elections,  any relaxation seems unlikely.

With a curious symmetry, on my last night  , the tannoy again instructed us to stay indoors,  this time to avoid some celebratory shooting – not it seems marking the successful end of the workshop but of a football match. Shortly after the all clear, staff descended on the bar where mysteriously free drinks were on offer. This came as a surprise to the visiting Security Chief next to me at the bar but was none the less a welcome one to everyone else. 

A Secure College misses the chance for really radical Youth Justice Reform

What is it that lies behind the desire of every generation of Tory politicians to invent new forms of institutions for juvenile delinquents? Sometimes it's political calculation; in the 80's, Willie Whitelaw needed short sharp shock detention centres as a tough counter weight to his controversial early release scheme for adult prisoners.  For others, it’s a genuine if misguided belief in the effectiveness of closed establishments. Kenneth Clarke arrived at the Home Office in 1992 with plans to revive approved schools to set straight the unruly youths who, the Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire told him, were responsible for most of the area’s offending. These morphed into Michael Howard’s Secure Training Centres which would take persistent young offenders off the streets as part of his 27 point plan to address “the tidal wave of crime”. But with crime nowadays much lower down the list of public concerns and with   huge financial pressures facing his department, what‘s driving Chris Grayling’s proposal for a new secure college?

Almost certainly his plans for the 320 bed “fortified school” in Leicestershire and enhanced educational provision in the Prison service Young Offender Institutions (YOI’s) spell the end of the road for secure children’s homes (SCH’s). These small, mainly local authority run facilities provide very good quality care for highly troubled children but at considerable cost.  That their role for young offenders is to be wholly or partly phased out is suggested by the admission that while the new Secure College will serve young offenders from the Midlands and the East of England, “offenders from other areas could also be taken”.

Grayling’s overall approach is to make the penal system cheaper not smaller so it’s perhaps no surprise that the SCH places costing more than £200,000 per year have caught his attention.  SCH’s are unlikely to have crossed his radar previously because by and large they work well with a vulnerable and volatile population. Whatever the rhetoric about combining security with an increased educational focus,  a single large cheaply run facility is likely to be fraught with difficulty. Recent French experience with "Établissements pénitentiaires pour mineurs", run jointly by the prison service and social workers does not inspire confidence in such a hybrid model.

Improving access to education in the YOI’s is of course welcome but can that on its own solve the fundamental inappropriateness of prison settings for juveniles.. NOMS has reportedly recommended that for every 12 young people there should be one officer as the minimum staffing standard which means a reduction in some establishments.   The new ratio emerged from a staffing review prompted by the large and welcome fall in the number of under-18s in custody in recent years.  But with more and more young offenders managed in the community, those who are locked up are the most damaged and demanding young people, requiring more generous not more restricted staff numbers.  

Arguably, the falling juvenile custodial population has brought the MoJ the economies it needs and opens an opportunity for a much more radical overhaul of  youth justice than the one announced today.  

First, reshaping the Detention and Training Order so that very short periods of detention can be followed by a longer spell of training in the community could perhaps halve the number of custodial places currently required. It would better meet the requirement of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that “the arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child   shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time”.

Second local government could be made responsible for meeting the costs of these orders. Devolving funds could stimulate the kind of creative alternative provision that over time would take the place of imprisonment. In this way prison custody could be phased out for 15 year olds perhaps within a year, 16 year olds within two, and 17 year olds within three. 

Finally,  Mr Grayling should be looking to shift responsibility away from his department. If he is serious about educating young offenders,  it’s a job for the Ministry of Education, not for him.

Another Step towards the Strange Death of the Probation Service

Today will almost certainly see a further nail being hammered into the coffin of the probation service as the Offender Rehabilitation Bill reaches Third Reading and Report stage in the Commons. Twenty or so amendments have been tabled, most of which are last ditch efforts to save the service, delay its demise or failing that, instil greater health in the new bodies which will replace it.

The most radical “wrecking” amendments would keep the new statutory supervision of short term prisoners with the existing Probation Trusts or at least the National Probation Service, thereby seeking to undermine what passes for the Government’s rationale for the changes. They will at least provide an opportunity to press Ministers on the proposed system for allocating cases between the NPS and the new companies, previously described as straightforward but looking anything but.

“Delaying” amendments would make the restructuring of probation dependent on parliamentary approval separate from the Bill itself; or on the independently evaluated results of a piloting process; or on a review of the prison service’s ability to implement the Transforming Rehabilitation changes.  The Opposition front bench will be pressing the first two of these, but it is only the piloting option which might produce sufficient delay to enable a new labour Government to call the whole thing off next year.  The Justice Secretary was famously quoted as saying that you don’t pilot a revolution, so a change of heart seems unlikely.

Gaining parliamentary approval from both houses would be a headache for the government but probably not the 16 month migraine needed to prevent contracts being signed before the election.   Although the Commons are unlikely to pass the amendment requiring such approval today, the Lords will have a chance to do so when the Bill goes back there.  They are likely to back down in any resulting ping pong since the reforms could be seen to be part of a manifesto commitment.

“Improving” amendments   would regulate more tightly the new providers of probation services requiring greater transparency about contracts and performance and require certain programmes to be provided. These may have the best chance of success given the growing concerns about outsourcing and the commitment the Public Accounts Committee extracted from four big private providers to show more openness about government contracts.    But they would be scant consolation for those who see the Government’s plans as fundamentally misconceived, ideologically driven and very likely to fail.

 In a recent paper for the World Bank, Paul English and I argued that   “the starting point before the consideration of private sector involvement in prisons must be a full analysis of the infrastructure and processes required by a country in its criminal justice system in order to meet international norms and standards”. The same is every bit as true for Probation. British MP’s should be asking whether such an analysis of Probation has been carried out, before they vote this afternoon to dismantle it.   

Old , New, Borrowed or Blue: What kind of penal policy can we expect from Labour in 2014?

2014, the last year before the general election, will see political parties developing their policies on, amongst many other matters, criminal justice. What will the Labour party come up with? Will they revert to an old Labour position, concerned as in their 1992 manifesto, to improve prison conditions, promote non-custodial sentences for non-violent crimes and take steps to eradicate the discrimination in sentencing policy which particularly affects women and ethnic minority offenders? Or will it be the tough on crime approach adopted by new Labour which saw prison numbers leap from 61,000 when they entered office in 1997 to 85,000 thirteen years later? 

A glance at their 2010 manifesto, drafted by current leader Ed Miliband, shows a compromise between the two approaches .On the one hand there are commitments to expand community payback for criminals who don’t go to prison, to increase alcohol treatment places and introduce a Restorative Justice Act to ensure its availability wherever victims approve it. On the other hand, the manifesto promised to create 94,000 prison places by 2014, a number way in excess of the present prison population.

Denied by the electorate the opportunity to implement these measures, early signs were that as leader of the opposition Miliband wanted to break from the immediate past and support Ken Clarke’s more moderate approach to penal policy. But he could not pass up the opportunity to savage Clarke’s plans for greater sentence discounts for early guilty pleas and since then Labour’s attitude to punishment has been ambivalent.

The party has never accepted, for example, that the indeterminate sentence of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) was an unjust folly and indeed seem unsure how far they dare stray from the Howard /Straw doctrine favouring the incapacitation of both dangerous and persistent offenders. With Straw standing down as an MP and his successor David Blunkett at least somewhat repentant about his shocking tenure at the Home Office, there is perhaps a chance for Miliband and Sadiq Khan to escape the historic influence of these big beasts and chart their own course on sentencing policy.

As for the Coalitions’ Probation reforms, the current leadership is equally compromised by the past. While The Independent may have reported that Khan would rip up contracts with private companies put before him to sign, he will have little choice but to honour those already in place. Straw had to do so in respect of private prisons despite his description of them, when in opposition, as morally repugnant. Khan, by contrast, is on record as basing his policy   on what works, rather than dogma, and claiming that the nine new private sector prisons provided by the Labour government have played a successful role in the prison system.  Even the spectacular failures of G4S and Serco seem unlikely to shift Labour’s fundamentally blue approach to private providers.

There are however three big ideas that Labour would do well to borrow as they put their manifesto plans together. The first would be to apply more thoroughly models of Justice Reinvestment which would see responsibility for the costs of imprisonment move from Whitehall to the local agencies which produce the supply of prisoners. Creating incentives for local partnerships to invest in prevention and reintegration would shift the centre of gravity away from unproductive use of prison towards more effective community based measures.

The second might see the largely successful work of the Youth Justice Board, created by new labour in 1998, extended to the next age group up- 18-21 year olds.

The third would adopt a similar approach to women; a separate Women’s Justice Board needs to be established to drive the hitherto piecemeal and uncoordinated efforts to establish an appropriate system for women in conflict with the law.

In the run up to the 1997 election a considerable amount of policy development was undertaken by Labour on criminal justice- largely on youth justice but also on community safety and prisons. What emerged may not have been universally welcomed, but the result was a relatively clear idea not only of what needed to be done but how. A similar project is surely required in 2014.   

2013 Back to the Future in Penal Policy

2013 will probably be remembered as the defining year for the coalition’s penal policy. Kenneth Clarke’s rejection of policies that “endlessly and irresponsibly inflate prison numbers for their own sake” has given way to Chris Grayling’s desire to   “create a fairer criminal justice system where … those who break the law are more likely to go to prison for longer”.  Inside prisons, the laudable ends of the rehabilitation revolution are proving increasingly undeliverable in a climate of severe cuts and harsher regimes. The wholesale reorganisation of community supervision looks overambitious, poorly conceived and overshadowed by a seemingly never-ending string of wrongdoing by the private sector.

In a number of areas of its penal policy, the Coalition government is looking to implement and extend approaches which have been developed and then discarded by the previous Labour administration. Controversial plans to outsource most of probation work were originally proposed back in 2003 and in large part rely on unimplemented provisions of Labour’s Offender Management Act 2007. The recently announced proposal to scrap separate Young Offender Institutions (YOIs) for the 18-21 year old age group and instead to place young adults in the wider prison system, was recommended back in 2007 but the Government then considered the time not right to proceed.   The decision to embark on the construction of a  “super” prison in North Wales for 2,000 prisoners and to consider a similar size establishment on the site of Feltham YOI in West London mark a return to the Titan prison concept also proposed in 2007 but abandoned two years later. All three policies have attracted almost universal condemnation from professional and academic commentators which perhaps makes it all the more striking that each has to a large extent and at different times  been supported by all three main parties.

It’s perhaps most surprising that the Lib Dems, in recent times the most inclined of the three  to champion penal reform , have signed up so willingly to such risky and questionable policies. Perhaps that will change with the arrival of Simon Hughes at the MoJ. Hughes urged Labour ministers back in 2007 to bring prison numbers down and more recently sat on the Joint Human Rights Committee whose report on the Offender Rehabilitation Bill welcomed the opportunity for the fuller consideration of changes to the probation service introduced by Lord Ramsbotham’s amendment.  Hughes’s appointment may be too little too late to hold up the sell- off of probation but he should be able to ask some serious questions about Titan prisons and stop the YOI plans in their tracks.    Whether he is able to influence events will be a test of his party’s resolve in this policy area and an indication of whether a liberal agenda on criminal justice will make it into their 2015 manifesto.

Next year will see all three parties shaping the policies with which they will fight the next election.  It seems likely that the Tories will continue to toughen their approach; a group of up and coming MP’s sees a  need to reverse the tide of soft justice, make prisons  tough, unpleasant and uncomfortable places , to ensure that persistent offenders are sentenced for prolonged periods and to privatise all prisons.  

But what about Labour? In the run up to 1997 they developed some big new ideas on crime and disorder, youth justice and drugs.  Serious work went into the development of policy and the infrastructure to deliver it.  I’ll consider what they might focus on this time round in the first blog of 2014.  

Inspectors Give Succour to Grayling’s Grand Folly

Whatever irritation Justice ministers may have felt about the weekend leaking of the risk report on their Transforming Rehabilitation changes , will have given way to delight with today’s inspection findings about the failures of offender management.  Why?  Because the findings can be used to make the case for the radical changes that they want to introduce to the prison and probation system. 

Yes, the findings cast doubt about the Prison Service’s capacity to implement their part of the new strategy designed to reduce reoffending rates, especially for short-term prisoners. But concluding that the National Offender Model is “more complex than many prisoners need and more costly to run than most prisons can afford” will be music to ministers’ ears. It will strengthen their resolve to cut costs and to roll back the frontiers of this little bit of the state. They will feel vindicated in replacing a failed national model with an assortment of arrangements paid for only if they succeed. It will be goodbye to an approach based on research findings and a desire to raise standards across the board. Welcome now to a black box approach in which government can withdraw its interest in finding out and implementing effective practice and leave that to the market instead.

The failings identified by the inspectors are real and need attention but the report does not make the case for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Prison staff may be insufficiently trained to do the work; there are too few rehabilitation programmes, poor recording and a limited integration of offender assessments into the wider prison experience. But these are capable of fixing through proper resourcing and good management.

The Inspectors may even be right to conclude that the current arrangements should be subject to fundamental review. Where they are wrong is to say that this should be taken forward as part of the strategy of implementing Transforming Rehabilitation.  The review is needed before the landscape of offender management is profoundly and irreversibly reconfigured, not when the bulldozers have moved in. 

Reducing Rehabilitation

 When in opposition, the Conservatives were critical of the legislative hyperactivity of new Labour in the criminal justice sphere. But the coalition is proving just as adept at confusing the courts and the public alike about their approach to law and sentencing. Today they are implementing one set of reforms to non- custodial measures which became law in the Crime and Courts Act in April, while legislating for yet more changes in the controversial Offender Rehabilitation Bill.   

We should perhaps be celebrating the coming into force of the provision enabling courts to defer sentence so that offenders can engage in restorative justice activities with the victims of their crime in appropriate cases. But without resources, a much needed option, used very widely on the continent, is likely to remain the exception rather than the rule; we are left to wait for "secretary of state guidance" to see how it will work.

In the meantime, alongside this potentially positive measure, courts will now have to include a punitive element whenever they impose a community sentence on an adult. This means a fine and/or a requirement made for the purpose of punishment. This seems potentially to include any of the existing requirements (which in individual cases might be punitive)  but courts are likely to impose more in the way of unpaid work, curfews and exclusions from certain areas. As the Government themselves acknowledge, there is a risk that some of the rehabilitative benefits of current Community Orders could be lost with adverse implications for the re-offending rate . Tougher requirements may also make compliance more difficult and breach more likely.

Whether the net  result will be more  prisoners depends on two other factors- will the changes persuade sentencers to make community orders today in cases that yesterday were deemed so serious that only custody will do?  Arguably they should do since the punitive weight of the new orders will be greater than they were. The government made a commitment to discuss with the Sentencing Council   whether any changes would be needed to existing sentencing guidelines but nothing seems to have come of it.  It is also possible, though highly unlikely, that tougher community sentences will have some kind of deterrent impact on offenders or the wider public.

So the costs of custody may go up as a result of these changes . But what about the costs of community orders.Some punitive elements are a good deal cheaper than rehabilitative ones.  The government’s strategy is to fund the supervision of short term prisoners by reducing the costs of community orders. As well as achieving this through privatisation,  they may end up doing so, paradoxically by reducing rehabilitation.