Is jailing drug addicts really the way to strengthen community sentences?

I remember many years ago hearing ex prisoner turned probation officer Bob Turney explain the difference in the response to missed probation appointments in the UK and US. In the States, he said, a probation officer would go armed to their errant client’s home and arrest him. In England and Wales, he’d send him a letter. The caricature summed up how probation here was about keeping people out of prisons while in the US it was about getting people into them. 

While dealing with breach has become a lot tougher since then, the British Government is being urged to go further down the American road. Today’s Centre for Social Justice report is the latest to favour a more robust approach to those who fail to comply with community sentences. Threatening Americans on probation with immediate short spells in prison has apparently reduced the numbers not only of those who miss appointments but also who fail drug tests and who re-offend. The mantra of swift and certain punishment is becoming a new orthodoxy in probation, promising to make community sentences both more effective and more credible. As our friends across the pond might say, “What’s not to like?”

Three things actually. First, those with long memories will recall how the fruits of North American research have been touted as the saviour of probation once before. The overblown claims made by proponents of accredited programmes in the early 1990’s took community based supervision down a psychology dominated  road that many have come to regret.  At the very least some British pilots are needed to see whether the admittedly impressive results reported in Hawaii are replicated here and whether it is in fact the deterrent threat of prison which makes the key difference.  

Second in the UK putting people into prison for short periods is generally agreed to be a problem not a solution. This is partly for practical reasons. Intermittent custody was quietly abandoned in 2006 in part because courts were reluctant to use it and in part because the prison service could not manage it. Today’s report seems to envisage failing probationers being held in police cells for several days at a time, a role for which many police stations are simply not equipped.
  
Finally the automatic unleashing of custodial sanctions on people who fail to comply offends both the values and evidence base for probation. It’s true that the European Probation Rules say that where offenders fail to comply with conditions, probation staff should respond actively and promptly. But they go on that “the response shall take full account of the circumstances of the failure to comply”. Swift and certain imprisonment comes close to violating this requirement as well as the rule that in gaining the offenders’ co-operation, probation staff should not rely solely on the prospect of sanctions for non-compliance.

Moreover swift and certain punishment seems to fly in the face of the growing acceptance that giving up drugs and going straight involve a process of desistance. In encouraging desistance, using authority is a crucial part of a probation officer’s role; but effective supervision demands very much more than the policing function envisaged in the simplistic and punitive approach put forward by CSJ.

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times. A Tale of Two Prison Services

 As the Prison service prepares to make more deep cuts in its budget, two sharply contrasting views have emerged about whether the 146 prisons in England and Wales are in a fit state to shed more staff and reduce what they are able to provide for prisoners. Last month, Chief Inspector Nick Hardwick condemned Brinsford Young Offender Institution as the worst prison he has visited since taking up the role in 2010, adding to a growing list of jails unable to provide basic levels of decency and safety. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) meanwhile proposed that the government’s management of prisons over the last four years should be disseminated across Whitehall as an example of best practice. Who is right?

Of course not all prisons contain the squalid cells and enforced idleness found at Brinsford. But a range of other prisons have come in for heavy criticism in recent reports – whether for the dilapidated state of the buildings at Pentonville and Winchester, the high levels of violence at Feltham , or the restricted  regimes provided at  the newly opened  private prisons Oakwood and Thameside.

The limitations of these two private prisons feature too in the report by Margaret Hodge and her colleagues which despite noting their poor performance is however a generally positive one. The PAC welcomed the fact that the prison service has achieved significant savings in running costs (which is certainly true) and also reported that improvements are being made in the way offenders' needs are met, allowing more of them to work and stay closer to their homes.

This is a far more questionable claim. In addition to criticising the two new private prisons, the PAC itself quotes Hardwick's findings that the quality and quantity of work, education and training across the prison system had 'plummeted' over the year 2012-3.  What they do not say is that the cost cutting on which they lavish praise is in large part the cause of the poor performance they decry. 

If the PAC had looked at the Brinsford report they would have seen the negative consequences of staff reductions; too many evening and weekend recreational sessions cancelled because officers were redeployed to other areas; inadequate supervision in the health care unit; and significantly in the light of Chris Grayling’s assurances that prisoners do not need books to be sent in to them, inadequate access to the library because of the lack of available prison staff.

The PAC make the point that  additional cost savings could be made if the prison service provided more offender behaviour programmes to help prisoners serving indeterminate sentences to be released at the earliest opportunity. Such savings would be even more substantial if the experience of imprisonment for all prisoners better equipped them for a life back in the community so that they are less likely to end back inside.

But rehabilitation programmes have an upfront cost which the PAC are unwilling to acknowledge. Instead by prioritising economy and efficiency over effectiveness, they are encouraging a further round of cuts rather than sounding a warning siren. Their investigations into the costs of Oakwood prison in particular have been cursory. The prison’s claim to be able to deliver the same regime as other Category C prisons at less than half the average cost has always seemed fanciful. As this level of economy is now being held up as an example for the rest of the prison service to follow, the case for it to be properly scrutinised is overwhelming.

 Earlier in the year the PAC recommended far greater visibility about the private sector’s performance, costs, revenues and profits. The Committee should put the private sector to the test and take a much closer look at whether the much lower budgets in their prisons are genuinely delivering what is required.  Alongside this the Prisons Inspectorate should look much more systematically at the impact of staffing and resource levels on what is happening in the prisons they visit.  These two assessments would help answer the question of whether prisons can sustain any more cutbacks

25 Years to Life: Why the Need for Penal Reform International is as Great as Ever

  This week,  Penal Reform International (PRI) celebrates 25 years of work to improve prisons around the world, an unfashionable cause if ever there was one, but as in need of attention today as it was back in 1989.

I first worked with the international ngo in 1994, to deliver training to prison staff in one of the Baltic States on human rights and resettlement. Such was the enthusiasm of the participants that they took photos of the acetates as we placed them on the overhead projector so that the information could be quickly disseminated beyond the classroom. This was not so much down to the quality of the material as to the keen desire – shared by many who work in prisons the world over- to learn from international standards and experience in order to improve the way they do their jobs.  Encouraging a professional and positive ethos within prisons has been one of the staples of PRI’s work, whether through staff training, the development of rehabilitation projects or working with civil society to increase oversight of places of detention.

Sadly the capacity to make improvements is all too often frustrated by chronic under resourcing, gross overcrowding and crumbling infrastructure.  If, as they reported this week, inspectors in the UK can find cells in a young offender institution not fit for occupation, it’s hardly surprising that in lower income countries conditions are often far more squalid and even life threatening. 

In 2000 I helped PRI assess prison conditions in the Middle East. What we saw shocked even the most experienced members of the team. In one establishment, the overflowing mass of humanity packed into rooms scarcely larger than store cupboards, stood in barbaric counterpoint to the elegant exterior of the Levantine villa which housed them.  The adverse physical and mental consequences of such congestion weigh particularly heavily on women, children and other vulnerable groups, for whom PRI has always attached a particular priority.

As PRI has always recognised, the answers to most of the problems within prisons lie beyond their walls. Developing diversion programmes for juveniles and para legal programmes to reduce unnecessary pre-trial detention have been notable successes which have been emulated in many countries by both government and non-government organisations. More challenging has been the creation of meaningful and sustainable alternatives to prison sentences for petty offenders.

The work that I’ve been involved in most recently has been to strengthen the community service programmes in East Africa which PRI originally helped bring into being in the 1990’s. Despite initial impact, courts have sometimes been reluctant to impose non-custodial orders, probation services ill -equipped to implement them and the public uncertain about supporting them. PRI is testing how best to turn the tide, with promising results. 

 PRI has always been keen to promote such results from its work with a range of global and regional bodies concerned with human rights and with criminal justice. The UN’s 2012 Principles and Guidelines on Access to Legal Aid owe much to the organisation’s work and the current initiative to update and improve the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners was really set in train by PRI. But unlike some organisations, success for PRI is not measured simply by impact in Geneva, Vienna or New York but through practical improvement on the ground. Similarly, PRI’s campaigning to end the death penalty does not stop with abolition but includes work to develop humane alternatives to put in its place.

AS PRI enters its second quarter century, there may be some encouraging signs. The global prison population rate looks stable, the USA may be finally edging away from mass incarceration, and the war on drugs if not coming to an end is entering a less violent phase. But there are threats too not least to some of the human rights standards that underpin PRI’s approach. Mapping the trends and challenges facing prison systems across the globe is one of the projects underway in its anniversary year in readiness for next year’s UN Crime Congress in Qatar.

In the meantime, in most of the world, prisons continue to be humanitarian disasters, comprising a complex set of problems to which the world too often turns a blind eye. We need PRI both to keep these problems high on the agenda, and to develop just and sustainable ways to address them.

The Worst Prison Inspection in Four Years - Does Anyone Care?

Chief Inspector of Prisons Nick Hardwick says today’s report on Brinsford Young Offender Institution is the worst since he took over in 2010. That’s saying something since he’s made   damning criticisms of among others, Pentonville, Feltham and Oakwood.  The Brinsford findings are indeed shocking, more so since for the first time the report contains some photographs of the squalid conditions. But the report has received relatively little media attention, drowned out it seems by coverage of Cardiff University’s violence study. Whether or not a fall in numbers showing up at A and E is a good indicator for levels of violence in society, it’s almost certainly not for violence in prisons. More than 10% of the young people surveyed by the Inspectors said they had been hit, kicked or assaulted at Brinsford compared to 8% in the last inspection in 2011. 

I visited Brinsford in November 2012 with colleagues from the T2A Alliance when I was preparing a report on young adults in custody. I noted that the buildings were scruffy “but that atmosphere in the prison was calm and positive. Young men were moving to their activities in an orderly but relaxed way, with staff engaging positively.”  It looks like things have gone downhill.  Why might that be?

By coincidence on the day we visited, the results of the competitions for the running of nine prisons were announced by the MoJ. Governors at Brinsford had been fearing industrial action by the POA should the establishment have been chosen to be part of a future round of competition. As it was, they told us they would have to make cuts but without the threat of privatisation.

MoJ figures show that the cost per place had already fallen by almost 8% between 2010-11 and 2012-13; we will not have figures for the last financial year until the autumn. But it seems certain that that resources were further reduced and that when the Inspectors visited in November last year there were fewer staff on the landings.

Today’s report spells out the consequences. Too many evening and weekend recreational sessions were cancelled because officers were redeployed to other areas; nurses reported that prison officers were not always available to provide supervision during medication administration times;  the inconsistent allocation of custody officers to the inpatient unit meant that most patients were spending only a few hours out of their cell each day; and , significantly in the light of Chris Grayling’s assurances that prisoners don’t need books to be sent in to them , the young men  had inadequate access to the library because of the lack of available prison officers. Library staff were frequently unable to run activities they had planned.

Many will say that prisons must cut their costs along with every other part of government. The problem is that even before any cuts prisons like Brinsford were unable to meet required standards. Back in 2005 Inspectors found an establishment that was struggling to provide appropriate levels of safety, respect and even basic cleanliness.  Two years later despite the critical 2005 report, managers had failed to remedy many of the deficits in safety and respect that inspectors considered were within their control. In 2009 Brinsford was not able to provide a sufficiently safe and purposeful environment for young adults and in 2011 this was still the case.  

Given its history how could a cut in resources produce anything but the catalogue of failure reported today?

Grayling, Grotius and the Howard League

 Earlier this month, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling told charities that they did far too much campaigning and should instead concentrate on delivering services to the needy.  In a wonderful riposte to his authoritarian bluster, the Howard League has managed to mobilise the entire literary establishment against the petty restrictions on prisoners’ contact with the outside world which he introduced at the end of last year. It’s an exemplary campaign- an unarguable message (even the most punitive baulk at banning books), disseminated via social media and backed by anything but the usual suspects.

Grayling may feel unfairly done by in the media coverage but the fact that there is no specific prohibition on books but rather on all parcels makes the impact worse not better. His argument that parcels cannot be checked for contraband is feeble -it’s done for pre-trial prisoners, why not for the sentenced? His claims that reading needs are met by libraries are dishonest. The three most recent Inspection reports have found insufficient easy read materials at Kirkham, very low use of the library at Liverpool, and limited access at Belmarsh.

His harsher system of incentives was trailed in the Daily Mail last year as the introduction of Spartan prisons. Since the Spartans believed in feeding their young men so they had a taste of not having enough, Grayling will no doubt have been pleased that according to today’s Inspection report, prisoners at Liverpool complained about the inadequate size of food portions. While Jonathan Aitken may think that Grayling is actually progressive and that tougher prisons are the price he has to pay to get hard-line backbenchers to support his rehabilitation revolution, there is more than enough evidence of his illiberal world view. His wish to restrict judicial review because it undermines parliament and to defy the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human rights are two examples. What would Hugo Grotius have made of him? After all the founder of international law escaped from prison in a chest that brought his books in.

Fortunately there are many who don’t share Grayling’s ideology, preferring the view that people go to prison as a punishment not for a punishment.  Whether or not the Howard League force Grayling to amend his small minded privileges scheme, they have succeeded in bringing to light some of the hidden realities of life behind bars. It goes to show that charities should do more campaigning not less.

What the Public Accounts Committee should ask about Transforming Rehabilitation

This week feels like the denouement of the Government’s reform of the Probation system in England and Wales.  This morning Chris Grayling addressed Policy Exchange on the wider question of Privatising Justice. This afternoon the Lords considered the Offender Rehabilitation Bill which needs to enter into force before short term prisoners can be supervised on release. Tomorrow the Public Accounts Committee will question Ministry of Justice officials about a rather weak NAO landscape review of the Probation service.  The three events give us an idea about whether the Government will change course themselves or might be pressured to do so for political or administrative reasons. 

Justice Secretary Chris Grayling certainly showed no sign of any "policy exchange". He seemed discomforted maybe twice, once when he revealed he did not know the extent of a private company’s liability if one of their prisons was burned to the ground – he’d have to check with his contracts people.  He also saw no paradox in the fact of private companies proving successful in the rehabilitation world if they shrink rather than grow their market.  He thought they would be in demand overseas- a successful work programme provider apparently now plies its trade with the government of Saudi Arabia.  Otherwise he assured his audience that privatisation was not a dogma; he had after all scaled back on the proposed outsourcing of prisons. Bringing in new providers was not about profits to shareholders but about innovation and private sector management skills.

In the same breath, he told us that nothing much would change. The rehabilitation revolution was, after all, an evolution. Grayling has no truck with those who say payment by results is untried and untested- it’s no more than performance related pay. As for private providers, he could not say as much as he’d like about G4S and SERCO because they might yet be prosecuted. But no private company would henceforth be able to play fast and loose with government contracts which had been subject to a root and branch review.

Grayling assured his audience that failures in the management of contracts go back many years and were in fact picked up by his new broom. He was not asked why tagging company Buddi found their relationship with his department so “unproductive and frustrating” that they withdrew from their contract nor had what lessons been learned from the Ministry’s failures in respect of the Court Interpreter contracting during the coalition government.

Unproductive and frustrating might well describe the relationship between parliament and the ministry during the last twelve months, with requests for more information about costs and risks repeatedly denied to legislators. The House of Lords seems to have fired its last shot in the battle for more transparency. With this afternoon’s narrow defeat of their attempt to subject the probation changes to greater parliamentary scrutiny, responsibility for extracting more details about the plans moves to Mrs Hodge and her colleagues on the Public Accounts Committee.

There are three basic questions areas that the PAC should probe if they are to fulfil their obligation to test the economy, effectiveness and efficiency of the changes.

On economy the simple question is whether the government plans are affordable. Grayling may say that contracts will be let on quality not price but in order to supervise 50,000 more offenders with the same resources, something has to give. His own strategy says that “from previous competitions for Offender Management services, we have seen evidence of the potential to generate efficiency savings, which allows us to invest in support for short sentenced offenders and those who need it most. The private sector is driving savings within the CJS.” The permanent secretary needs to tell the PAC for example whether the  estimated £25m saving on the Community Payback bill in London after SERCO took over in October 2012 is still valid- presumably not since the contract is being terminated early. The NAO should also press on the costs and performance of HMP Oakwood – allegedly operating at half the annual cost per prisoner place of comparable prisons.  The MoJ see this is an example of how the private sector can cut costs. But performance so far has been very poor. Is this a genuine or responsible benchmark for costings in criminal justice and if not what is?

On effectiveness, the key questions relate to the manageability of the new arrangements. How and with what resources, are the Ministry going to ensure that contracts are delivered properly? And how will the Department make sure that that the crucial operational interfaces are properly managed between the public Probation service on the one hand and the Rehabilitation Companies on the other and between the Companies and the range of other relevant agencies. The NAO last week published a separate report on criminal justice which found that governance and management arrangements are complex and that delivery partners “need to be working well together at national and local level, focusing on how best to achieve the overall objectives of the criminal justice system, rather than optimising the performance of their own organisations.” In probation, arrangements are about to get a whole lot more complex and the PAC should want to know how they will work.

The third focus of the PAC is efficiency. The NAO criminal justice report found that “changes to one part of the system can have unexpected consequences for others”.  The PAC should ask about unintended consequences of the Transforming Rehabilitation changes. Grayling told Policy Exchange that if he were running a CRC he’d want to set up a housing operation. He’s right of course that prisoners need a place to live but do we really want to develop offender specific services that could inadvertently reinforce rather than diminish their social exclusion. Is there not a risk that mainstream services will see an opportunity to wash their hands of offenders safe in the knowledge that their needs are to be looked after by these new private agencies? 

On the sharing of good practice, the PAC will want to know how the Ministry will develop a contracting regime that encourages encourage providers to share what works when there is a commercial advantage not to do so.

When Grayling first announced his changes, he was reported to have said that you don’t pilot a revolution.   By contrast, his junior minister told the Sunday Mirror at the weekend that the government has  always been clear that the changes “will be rolled out in a controlled way, with robust testing at every stage”.  Although they are interrogating officials rather than ministers, the PAC has the right to press them hard about the results from of this alleged testing so far  and the plans for the future . In fact they have the duty to do so.

One Last Chance Saloon for Probation ?

 Next week the Offender Rehabilitation Bill returns to the House of Lords, where the upper House has a last chance to disrupt the Government’s plans to dismantle and privatise the bulk of the Probation service.  But the parliamentary ping pong will almost certainly end one way. The Government will say that the unelected chamber cannot frustrate a measure contained in the Coalition agreement which promised to introduce a rehabilitation revolution paying independent providers to reduce re-offending. There may be debate about whether, in constitutional terms, an item in the Coalition agreement is the same trump card as a manifesto commitment; or whether the item necessarily requires the destruction of probation in the way that’s proposed. But notwithstanding the severe doubts raised about the rationale for, and practicability of, the proposed changes, the Government will most likely get their way.  

Unless that is, the Ministry of Justice decide that slowing down what many see as a headlong rush to disaster, might after all be the wiser course. Yesterday’s  decision by the technology company Buddi to pull out of the electronic monitoring contract it won last year, should start enough alarm bells ringing in Whitehall or Westminster to haul the Ministry of Justice  back from the brink.

By coincidence, the National Audit Office yesterday published a landscape review looking in part at the plans for Probation. Most of the report’s material about the future outlines specific administrative challenges related to the winding up of Probation Trusts (such as who will do the books). But it also  lists generic risks inherent in a programme of this scale and complexity.

Presumably through concern about overstepping their remit rather than sloth, the NAO makes no effort , however, to assess how well these risks are in fact likely to be managed by the MOJ in this specific programme. The Ministry, they say, will need “to identify and retain, and if necessary, develop or acquire, knowledge of the service area being commissioned, as well as commissioning skills themselves.”   Surely the NAO should offer an assessment of the MoJ’s commissioning capabilities? Evidence from the court interpreting contract where according to the Public Accounts Committee  "almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong", and from the commissioning of the new electronic monitoring services, is hardly reassuring. 

The NAO say that once services are commissioned,  the MoJ will require contract management skills that are "a scarce resource", suggesting that “recent difficulties in the management of existing tagging contracts provide useful learning”. Strangely, they do not specify what the learning is- perhaps it’s that private companies can run rings around government officials for years. Finally the report talks about managing the risk of market and supplier failure, again without saying if the MoJ has put proper contingencies in place.

It is not only the critics of the policy who have expressed concern about the manageability and timescale of the plans and frustration that the Government have not shared key information about costs and risks. It is not easy for any Government to expose the state of its most complex and high risk projects. But this Government pledged to do so, setting up the Major Projects Authority (MPA) to provide “unprecedented transparency” to “help prevent problems being hidden and left to spiral out of control.”

Sadly it seems, the MPA along with the rest of Westminster and Whitehall’s machinery has so far totally failed to scrutinise the proliferation of fiascos to have emerged from the Ministry of Justice.    If there is a question of the outsourcing of probation joining that list, the Government  should call a halt to it next week.