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

Residential Assessment

When I stepped down as a member of the Youth Justice Board in 2006, I published a paper suggesting a wide programme reforms that would improve the way we prevent and respond to youth offending. Amongst the proposals was shifting responsibility for youth justice to the Education Department and looking at how residential provision within children’s services, education and health settings could, in appropriate cases, be made more widely available to young people in conflict with the law.

I was interested to see that the DfE review of residential care announced today includes not only children’s homes (both open and secure) but the full gamut of settings in which young people can find themselves living. These include “hostels and supported lodgings, residential special schools, care homes, NHS provision, family centres or mother and baby units, and young offenders institutions or prison”. The review will explore “when and for which children residential care settings of all types should be used”. It’s an ambitious, overdue and important agenda – as a 2003 study noted “historically whether the problem child has been cared for, punished, educated or treated has often been a matter of chance, depending upon which individuals in which agency happened to pick up his or her case.”

There are however two oddities about the review. The first is that a review of youth justice is already underway, announced in September by Justice Secretary Michael Gove. This will be considering inter alia “the delivery models for detaining young people remanded or sentenced to custody and for supervising and rehabilitating young offenders in the community… and the interaction with wider services for children and young people”. These are precisely the services which the DfE review will be looking at.  The centres of gravity of the two reviews are different of course but there is substantial overlap. Let’s hope there is scope for some joint activities between the two reviews as they consider the kind of residential options which might work best for young offenders living away from home .

The other oddity concerns the leadership of these reviews. The MoJ’s youth justice review is being led by a former head teacher, Charlie Taylor and the DfE residential care inquiry is headed up by former prisons chief Martin Narey, (who now sits on the MoJ board). Perhaps this apparent paradox will help ensure that the pieces of work are complementary in scope and consistent in message; or at least avoid the kind of departmental turf wars that  used to characterise policy on the care of troubled and troublesome children.

Martin has plenty of child care experience running Barnardo’s and subsequently advising the Government on adoption and on social work.  I'd like to have seen more transparency in the review documentation about the work he has done in the past for private security giant G4S.    After all the firm runs children’s homes as well as a secure training centre, and presumably stand to gain or lose depending on the outcome of the review. For the avoidance of doubt, Martin and the DfE should make it clear that he has severed his links with the organisation.

Brave New World or False Dawn? The Tory Agenda on Prison Reform

I haven’t checked but I’d guess that prison policy has seldom made it into a Prime Minister’s Tory party conference speech. On the face of it, David Cameron’s promise that “this is going to be a big area of social reform in the next five years” should be hugely welcomed by those of us who want to see radical improvements in the way we punish people in conflict with the law.

There’s no denying the Conservatives have come a long way since I (and Cameron as it happens) worked in the Home Office twenty years ago. When then Home Secretary Michael Howard (for whom Cameron worked as special adviser) announced in 1993 that prison works, he invited a victim of rape to address the conference. Yesterday Michael Gove was preceded by an ex offender made good and went on to say that “the best criminal justice policies are good welfare, social work and child protection policies”.

So are we about to enter a golden age of change in which offences are decriminalised, vulnerable people diverted away from the courts, greater use made of community based sentences and shorter prison terms served in genuinely rehabilitative facilities?  

Three big question marks hang over the reform policy. First of course is the strength of the political will behind it. Gove may have complained yesterday that those sent to prison spend their sentences in enforced idleness but he was quoting almost word for word what Kenneth Clarke had told the conference five years ago. Despite Coalition with a party with a track record of commitment to penal  reform , prison policy and practice was something of a disaster between 2010 and 2015. Partly this was because Clarke did not last -and there must be long odds on Gove staying the course. One wonders how widely his reforming zeal is shared- presumably not by Mrs May.

The cynic may wonder too if the PM’s apparent conversion to the cause may be in part to prepare his troops for a climb-down on votes for prisoners.  Once Cameron has taken his anti-emetic, bowed to the inevitable need to allow some prisoners at least to vote,  perhaps the party will return to a more familiar stance – particularly if by then he has  lost Gove  his “the great Conservative Reformer”.

The second problem is the money.  Gove’s laudable desire for more education and help for prisoners to address the often catastrophic life experiences which have led them into jail does not come cheap. Even training prisons for young offenders – the highest priority in a sensible system- have been pared back so that almost half of prisoners are kept in their cells all day. On the day Gove made his speech, the Prison Inspectorate was describing Aylesbury YOI as having a very poor regime that fosters inactivity and indolence. The reason? Chronic staff shortages.

With at least 25% further cuts to come, Gove will have to explain sooner or later how he will do more with less. He may have been able to conjure up a standing ovation by calling for better prisons but he’ll need to magic up some serious funds to create them. Selling off inner city jails may help but there are sequencing problems in that strategy - developers won’t take kindly to Gove’s brand of sitting tenants.    The cynic may wonder too whether Gove’s plan to give Governors greater responsibilities may be a way of sloughing off his own. Without enough staff, the most able governors will struggle to cope let alone innovate.

There is of course a way of solving the money problem which is to lock up fewer people for shorter periods.  But this is the third and biggest problem. Cameron urged us to “get away from the sterile lock-em-up or let-em-out debate, and get smart about this”. The reference may be to the "Smart on Crime" movement in the US, but there, behind the neutral sounding slogan is some pretty serious “let em out”. Indeed the Justice Department is about to release 6,000 drug offenders serving terms now considered way too harsh.

Yet sentencing reform does not seem on the agenda here at all and restrictions being introduced on cautioning fly in the face of the first smart on crime principle which is to prioritise prosecutions on the most serious cases.

It may be that the government will be able to pursue alternatives to prison for low level non- violent crimes; Cameron suggested that “where it makes sense, let’s use electronic tags to help keep us safe and help people go clean”. But let’s remember David Blunkett was heralding tags as Prisons without Bars a decade ago and they have delivered considerably less in the meantime. And diverting short term prisoners away from custody doesn't save you much in the great scheme of things.

Where the Coalition government has taken action is in trying to improve re-entry to curb repeat offences. But the results of the introduction of post release supervision for all prisoners (let alone the impact of the wholesale re-organisation of the probation service deemed necessary to fund it) are not yet known.

Lack of evidence about success may not stand in the away of a similar regime change in the prison system. Cameron’s description of prisons as “a service run by the state that all too often fails and entrenches poverty” suggests radical change may be on the way. Whether it will bring with it radical improvement must be open to doubt.

Jailed for Watching Daytime TV: the Need for Prison Reform in Africa

In a recent report on over incarceration and overcrowding, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights has argued that that custodial sentences should be imposed as measures of last resort and applied proportionately to meet a pressing societal need.   A recent visit to East Africa illustrated that much more needs to be done if that is to be achieved in the region.

One 22 year old Tanzanian explained that he had been sentenced for watching television during the day- his offence seemed to be one of “idleness”.  Although his punishment was community service, this had only been imposed after he’d spent four days in prison. Throughout Africa prison appears regularly used to punish these kind of colonial era offences or for failures to comply with contemporary government regulations whether about conducting business, (such as operating a club without a licence) or obtaining fuel (such as making charcoal in the forest).

Most of the Kenyan cases we heard about involved illicit alcohol- brewing it, selling it, getting drunk on it even carrying it.  A presidential decree in July urged a crackdown on so called secondary alcohol and this is being vigorously enforced by local administrators. The country has a serious problem with drinks known as Changaa or Mugacho which, when adulterated have led to deaths by poisoning, blindness and what was described to us as a failure by men to carry out their husbandly duties.  But some at least of the drinks play a role in traditional customs at weddings, parties and other gatherings.  

Evidence outside a Kenyan Court

More than a third of the 300 women (and their 50 babies) we saw in Meru prison had been committed for a failure to pay large fines imposed for alcohol related offences of one sort or another.  While many are likely to see their sentences commuted to community service through a High Court “Decongestion Programme”, using criminal justice to crack down on the problem has created additional hardships on those who make their living by producing it and put considerable pressure on an already overstretched prison system. 

That system still suffers from the persistent problem of excessive pre- trial detention; almost 800 of the 1200 men locked up at Meru were awaiting trial. Some were charged with serious and non bailable crimes but more than half, according to the Superintendent, were facing charges for petty offences. One barrier to their release is that magistrates worry about being thought corrupt if they free a defendant. Another is that, if they do so, the police are unwilling to pursue him should he flee. The result is unaffordable bail and routine remands in custody, sometimes for longer than any likely sentence.

Some defendants choose to bear the miserable conditions rather than change their plea, either through determination to maintain their innocence, fear of mob justice in the community or to benefit from the limited food and shelter unavailable to them outside. Judicial reform and performance management initiatives in both Kenya and Tanzania look so far to have failed to tackle some of the underlying dysfunction in the countries’ criminal justice processes. Indeed it may have made things worse. One magistrate told us his target of completing 250 cases a year provided a disincentive to adjourn cases for a report on an offender’s suitability for an alternative sanction.         

There look to be some relatively easy prison reform wins; Kenya has no remission or parole, and Tanzania does not even subtract time spent on remand from the length of prison sentences.  Taking action on these are the kind of steps the UN Commissioner wants states to take to prison  overcrowding so that they "comply with their international obligations, and  guarantee detainees the dignity inherent to every human being"

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Defining Decency Down

There were wry smiles among staff at the headquarters of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) last week. Apparently bailiffs turned up in Reception in pursuit of an unpaid debt. It took a senior legal adviser a couple  of hours to get them off the premises but at least the  furniture still seemed to be in place in the bit I visited anyway.

It doesn’t get much starker as an illustration of the financial pressures facing the Ministry of Justice but it wasn’t the only one to surface in the last few days. A far more serious example lies in Nick Hardwick’s inspectorate report into Cookham Wood, woeful  even by the standards we have sadly come to expect . High levels of violence, a backlog of disciplinary cases and worsening outcomes no longer shock as they should. All are symptoms surely of the need for greater numbers of capable staff to work with these troubled and troublesome boys in the care of the state.  The failure to provide enough well trained people is as much a sign of reckless cost cutting as are bailiffs at the door of hq.  

What did surprise was the response of the Youth Justice Board to the inspection, its Chief Executive pleased to see that inspectors had recognised the progress made at Cookham Wood  “which is especially encouraging in the light of the challenging and vulnerable cohort of young people whose needs the establishment seeks to address”. 

It’s true that the report commends certain improvements – in the reception process, safeguarding and resettlement for example. But progress? It is the deterioration in safety and in basic care which should really be worrying the YJB as the body that commissions the places at the establishment. In the inspectorate’s survey, only 14% of the boys said they had association every day and exercise in the fresh air was limited to 30 minutes a day, a breach of the best known international prison rule which requires double that. Many of the 25% of staff who were from other prisons “did not know the work, the institution or the boys.” Not long after the Inspectors visited, a boy died in Cookham Wood.  The YJB’s response to the findings looks like a case of “praising with faint condemnation”.

As Hardwick hints, all this is yet more evidence, if it were needed, that prison is no place for this age group. Yet if there is to be fundamental change, there is a need to be outraged by what is happening in places like Cookham Wood. The YJB , MoJ and NOMS are in danger of turning a blind eye to the impact of the budget cuts they oversee.  Given the state to which the youth custody sector has been reduced, looking to it to help the YJB find fresh savings imposed on it by the MoJ seems a poor call.

In one of his well- received pre-recess speeches Michael Gove  warned , in his philosophical way, that reforms to the criminal justice system should not be achieved by “defining deviancy down”- a phrase coined by Daniel Moynihan in the 1970’s to decry a permissive tendency to normalise what was once offensive. Whether or not he’s right on that, he certainly should not be defining decency down and accepting what is happening in prisons for young people. He should not be reviewing them- he should be planning to shut them. 

PS from America

The final leg of my Justice Reinvestment (JR) study tour took me to North Carolina where the Department of Public Safety provided a valuable insight into how their 2011 JR Act has brought down prison numbers and taken small but important steps to rebalance corrections away from incarceration and towards community based sanctions. There will be more of that in the report I’m preparing for Transform Justice who have commissioned the follow up to the paper I produced last year. I was struck today however by what has not changed and how in some respects at least the philosophical underpinnings of the American approach contrast so starkly with our own.

There is rightly growing concern in England and Wales about the criminal court charge and how it places a simply unaffordable burden on poor defendants and incentivises them to enter a guilty plea. When I mentioned it, American colleagues couldn't see what the fuss was about. 

In North Carolina, defendants are expected to pay not only a court cost ($180) but fees for time they spend in jail before trial- anything between $10 and $40 a day. If they have been represented by a public defender, they must reimburse the state for the attorney’s costs - $60 for an hours work in court, nearer $1000 if the case goes to trial.

But this is just the start. If they get Probation, offenders are expected to pay a supervision fee of $40 a month. If their sentence involves community service they pay a $250 fee while house arrest will set them back a one off bill of $90 plus $4.37 per day. CAM – Continuous Alcohol Monitoring in the form of a sobriety tag -runs closer to $15 per day- unsurprisingly it’s seldom used. Fees for courses required of those who drive while intoxicated are set by the providers at roughly $300-400 for 20 hours.

As in England and Wales, offenders may be fined (fines help to pay for the public schools system) while restitution is commonly ordered too- whatever it takes “to make the victim whole”. This will be the reimbursement of the value of stolen or damaged property and medical and counselling costs in cases of personal harm. This can run into hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Failure to pay these sums represents a violation of probation. Offenders cannot complete their orders until their account is clear. Not surprisingly, I heard that many low risk offenders who otherwise fully comply with probation reach the end of their orders in arrears. This is in spite of help they receive with budgeting and scheduling payments. Fortunately, judges seem to show some sense, prioritising restitution and suspending or writing off the other debts where failing to pay is not “wilful” and where efforts have been made to pay at least something.  But owing money to the justice system is surely an unnecessary block to rehabilitation. Up to half of people on probation have no driving license- it has often  been forfeited and they simply cannot afford  to clear the many debts they need to in order to get it back. In a country with very limited public transport, this is a huge disadvantage.

There is, I suppose, an argument for this approach- offenders have to be accountable and should literally pay for the consequences of their actions. It’s not the balance of responsibilities allocated between individual and the state that we are used to in the UK or indeed in Europe.  But it could well prove attractive to a conservative mindset which looks to roll back further the frontiers of state, shift costs from government to the citizen  and emphasise individual accountability irrespective of  social circumstances. I hope it's not an approach that Mr Gove finds attractive when he visits the US later this month..

Another Letter from America

I spent Friday in the delightful city of Annapolis observing a session of the Maryland Justice Reinvestment Coordinating Council. The sleepy colonial era state capital might be a slightly incongruous setting for discussions about improving the justice system’s response to crimes and misdemeanours on the mean streets of cities like Baltimore but there was no doubting the energy with which the Commission engaged  and interrogated a comprehensive presentation about its current performance.

A technical assistance team funded as part of the Federal Justice Reinvestment initiative (JRI) bombarded the meeting with data on trends in incarceration and recidivism and how well current practices across the state and its 24 counties comply with evidence about what works to reduce offending by adults.  The meeting was one of a series designed to enable the State to reform its law, policy and practice to obtain greater public safety, better value for money and less unnecessary use of imprisonment.

Two things stood out about the meeting. First is the range of participants. Representatives from all three branches of government took part – legislators from both parties and both houses, judges, prosecutors and public defenders  and a variety of executive agencies including police and corrections from state and county level. Such a wide ranging presence is not an accident. It is a requirement if States want to join the JRI and benefit from the federal support in diagnosing problems and proposing solutions.

Second, the type of reforms which the Council will consider are equally wide ranging. Three sub groups have been established to look at possible changes to sentencing, to release and re-entry arrangements and to the type of supervision available in the community.  They will work speedily to ensure proposals are on the table by year end. If Maryland follows the other 27 states who have worked on Justice Reinvestment, legislation will follow soon after. The reform measures introduced in these states have included, repeals of mandatory minimums and reductions in the going rate for certain crimes; increases in the ability of prisoners to earn early release and more generous parole eligibility and improvements. Resources freed up by the resulting reductions in prison numbers have funded more and better education and treatment programmes both in prison and the community.

A forthcoming report for Transform Justice will look at what might be learned from this approach in England and Wales. Many of the specific reforms made in US States are of course first attempts to start to unwind the catastrophic growth of incarceration seen over the last thirty years, an increase which makes our own prison population  increase over that period look extremely modest. But some of the principles of JR may well have a good deal of relevance.

Michael Gove’s announcement on Friday of a review of youth justice suggests for example that quite a lot might be learned about how best to go about introducing  reform in the justice field.. It is scarcely credible that the review he has ordered will not consider the age of criminal responsibility, the way young people are dealt with in the criminal courts or the youth sentencing framework.  Quite apart from the fact that the UK is in clear breach of international law by prosecuting children as young as ten in England and Wales, it is hard to see how a meaningful assessment can be made of how youth justice agencies are performing without considering the legal framework within which they are operating and the effectiveness of the sentences imposed on young people.

The whole thing may simply be a fig leaf to complete the unfinished business of abolishing the Youth Justice Board. But youth, and come to that adult, justice needs something much more comprehensive in scope along the lines of the exercises being conducted in respect of adult offenders across the US.