Why All The Recalls?

Yesterday the Justice Committee conducted a hearing on the work of the Parole Board and it appears they were told some surprising things. This from the BBC website:-

Half of indefinite term prisoners being recalled to jail

More than half of prisoners freed after serving controversial indeterminate sentences for public protection are being sent back to jail for breaching licence conditions, MPs have been told. Giving the figures in Parliament, Nick Hardwick, chairman of the Parole Board for England and Wales, said the matter had now become a "critical" issue. In the last year, 760 IPP inmates were recalled - up 22% from the year before. Monitoring of those released had been "lacking", the prisons minister said.

What are IPP sentences?

Introduced by Labour in 2005, they were designed to ensure that dangerous offenders remained locked up until it was safe for them to be let out. Under the system, prisoners were given a minimum term - or tariff - which they would have to serve before the Parole Board then decided whether to free them on licence. However, hundreds of inmates found themselves locked up for years beyond the end of their tariff after finding it hard to access rehabilitation courses in custody in order to demonstrate they no longer posed a risk.

Courts were banned from imposing IPPs in 2012. However, 3,300 IPP prisoners remain in custody, 51% of whom are more than five years over the end of their tariff. The Parole Board and the Ministry of Justice have taken measures to ensure IPP offenders can access courses more easily and are better prepared for their parole hearings.

What is the problem now?

Currently, 75% of those whose cases are heard are let out or transferred to an "open" prison - which is usually a step to the road to release. But speaking at the House of Commons Justice Committee, Mr Hardwick said: "The most significant issue with the IPP problem now is that more than 50% are being recalled, not necessarily because they've committed another offence, but because they've broken their licence conditions - and that's a real problem.

"So, we're letting them out, but they're getting recalled often for relatively minor breaches of licence," he said. Mr Hardwick said IPP offenders were being sent back to prison for turning up drunk at their bail hostel - even though that presented no risk to anyone. When they return to prison, the Parole Board has to again assess each case to decide if they are safe to be freed. Mr Hardwick said 60% of recalled offenders were let out for a second time. 

Prisons Minister Sam Gyimah defended the system of recall. However, he warned that by 2020 the number of IPP prisoners sent back to jail was likely to be more than the 1,500 still waiting to be released for the first time. Dealing with the problem was out of the Parole Board's hands, he argued. "The Parole Board can do its part of the job... but that depends on there being the facilities in the community to manage them properly when they're out there and it depends on probation having a consistent view of risk with us - and there's a mismatch out there."

What does the government say?

Sam Gyimah, the prisons and probation minister, defended the recall system, saying it struck the "right balance" and prisoners would be sent back if the nature of the licence breach directly related to the risk they posed and their original offending. "These people are incredibly risky," he said. The minister said in future more IPP prisoners would be electronically tagged on release to ensure they comply with the terms of their licence and there would be other "innovations" to improve their management in the community. "I put my hand up - that was lacking initially," he said.

Asked whether the government would consider new legislation to re-sentence IPP prisoners or take other legal steps to speed up the process of their release, Mr Gyimah said "all options are under review". However, he gave a clear indication that it was unlikely to happen, adding: "The system is working."

The committee also heard that the Parole Board expects to pay prisoners a million pounds in compensation this financial year for delays in hearings and decisions. In 2016-17, 578 prisoners received a total of £938,000, which was almost double the figure the previous year.

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Readers had better prepare themselves because the lull is definitely over and we are very much entering stormy waters and about to be deluged with more information and bad news stories than you can shake a stick at. Some might recall my saying recently that there is definitely a feeling at blog HQ of the heavenly bodies at last coming into alignment and, right on cue, here we have a special Transforming Rehabilitation online edition of the Probation Journal. Packed full of interesting and rigorously-researched articles (sadly no pictures, to the disappointment of one questioner at the AGM) there is undoubtedly much here for us to pick over in the coming days:-

Virtual Special Issue: Transforming Rehabilitation

Transforming Rehabilitation involved a fundamental restructuring of probation services in England and Wales. The most radical element of these reforms was the fragmentation of probation services into a publicly run National Probation Service (NPS) and a number of privately operated Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). The division of labour between the two organisations is broadly predicated on risk, with the NPS supervising ‘high risk’ offenders and the CRCs ‘medium to low risk’ offenders (an approximately 20/80 split). The logic of employing a risk-based rationale for allocating cases has been criticised, not least because it assumes a static conception of risk, when risk is dynamic - people change, so do their circumstances. Perhaps more fundamentally, critics have also been opposed to the privatisation of a public service involved in the administration of justice. While part of the rationale put forward for privatisation was ‘transformation’, and the potential for innovation, this cannot be uncoupled from the profit motive crucial to private enterprise.

The criticisms of TR have been both practical and ideological, but three years on, what is the evidence of the impact of the reforms? Reports from HM Inspectorate of Probation, the National Audit Office and the Justice Committee have laid bare some serious concerns regarding organisational infrastructures; information sharing across the NPS and CRCs, contact with people under supervision and the provision of resettlement services to prisoners. The impact of TR has come increasingly into the spotlight, as media coverage this week demonstrates. The Probation Journal has covered the reforms prior to the enactment of the legislation and as the changes were rolled out. This virtual special issue contains a number of key contributions to this debate, including analysis of the impacts of restructuring and the pressures experienced on the ground by practitioners; insights from research and the implications for enforcement and compliance with community sentences. The insights presented in these articles should inform policy debates about the future direction of Transforming Rehabilitation.

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I notice that Russell Webster has chosen to highlight the article entitled “It’s relentless”: the impact of working primarily with high-risk offenders by Jake Phillips, Chalen Westaby & Andrew Fowler of Sheffield Hallam University. The article looks at both the positive and negative aspects in only having a high-risk caseload and of course helps set the context for the high level of recalls referred to above. This from Russell's blog post:- 

To some extent you do because it’s kind of relentless if you know what I mean. Every sort of person you’re looking at is, has got fairly serious potential to do something serious to somebody. So there’s, I suppose, maybe more, I don’t know if worry is the right word, but, you know, obviously there’s concern. It plays on your mind and you need to make sure you’ve done what you can do.

Another finding was that a consequence of having to manage more high-risk offenders has led to POs conceding that they compared high-risk offenders with each other, to determine who will be prioritised:

And we now find that where you used to have say 5 high risk offenders you’ve now got 15... . . . because when we were as a Trust those 5 got the vast majority of your time and, you know, you were more careful about what you did and how you did it. But whereas now you’ve 15 and you can’t do it [and] you sort of grade the high risk; it’s grades within that. And so some of people who are high risk and you would know were previously getting more of your time are not getting it anymore because they can’t, we haven’t got the time.

The researchers note that probation officers don’t have an appropriate framework to allocate resources when all cases are nominally high risk with both interviewees and researchers comparing the role of a probation officer in the NPS with that of child protection social workers — operating under constant stress.

Conclusions 

The researchers reported that:

participants presented serious concerns about the impact of the changes on their work with an acute sense of anxiety about the intensification and volume of cases who pose a high risk of harm. The high risk of serious harm and the imminence of that harm being committed by offenders on the caseload in combination with the volume of cases is clearly putting a strain on the wellbeing of NPS POs.

They concluded that the situation is untenable in the long term and should be a priority area for the organisation in terms of supporting its staff.

A workforce that suffers from high levels of stress, and that is not supported sufficiently, is unlikely to be able to deliver the high-quality work that is required of them. This is especially important when one considers the high-risk nature of the offenders with whom our participants are working.

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I thought these comments were interesting:-

High risk as adjudged by the Oasys? You have to be very careful. It’s a tool carrying inherent bias. So the headline could easily read: the impact of working with black people.

There is undoubtedly an impact, and I am by no means contesting any of the findings of the Sheffield Hallam research. Nor am I contesting the idea that we should be sympathetic and annoyed at the conditions Probation Officers have to work in. But two things are important which are in danger of being seen as glossed over: one is language and the other is reflection on Probation’s punitive aspects.

Situating the idea of risk as residing solely in the person being supervised omits to discuss the widespread failures in social care, and in society more broadly. And there is friction which inheres between the individual desire for autonomy and the paternalism of supervision. This is amplified where paternalism slips into punctiliousness (4300% rise in recalls in 20 years). Friction like this no doubt takes its toll too.

******
I worked for the Probation Services for over 25 years. During this time I have witnessed it become entangled in bureaucracy and a relentless growth of regulation. At the very heart of the Probation Services’ work is its commitment and diligence towards changing and improving the life chances of those most affected by crime and those responsible for harming members of the public (including you and me). The Probation Services’ were once recognised as a ‘Moral Force’ that brings to bear an expert understanding on the causes for crime, whilst delivering credible social-economic and personal changes to the lives of countless families. 

The TR ideology and business model for correctional services in Britain has not truly assimilated the core values and beliefs of the Probation Services work. People matter irrespective of the position in society or legal status during the course of their life. The public are you and I plus all those affected by crime and even those who are responsible for harming others. These inalienable truths have got lost during the recent modernisation of the Probation Services. A government select committee inquiry into the TR programme will establish why and how the Probation services finds itself where it is today. In short - it has moved far away from its original purpose and has less autonomy to effect change at grass roots.

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Finally, these are some comments on the article seen on Facebook:-

This all fits with how I'm feeling at the moment. From actually enjoying my job and feeling I was helping people in some way I now HATE every minute of it. It's de-humanising and nasty and every day I get more and more deskilled and demoralised...

The concentration of high risk work is draining, but it's the weird sandwich we have with political and MoJ will to avoid recall where possible, promote early release etc, which by and large fits the PO agenda working on with the individual clients, and then in the middle the most risk-averse, terrified, micromanaging probation management STRESSSSSSS plus silo's of activity eg MAPPA, ARMS, etc, all endlessly setting up not quite duplicate processes. MAPPA manager asked me the other day "how often" I visited the helpful sexy all singing all dancing MAPPA website? FFS. It takes about a working day to submit a referral.

“Relentless” has become the most overused word in my office. Although I know I have ‘positive outcomes’ from my caseload, it’s hard to consistently evidence this (in the unusable/not fit for purpose sentence plan) when we are constantly flipping between risk management, activating your contingency plan, firefighting, trying to safely get them out/keep them out of custody! That’s before I even get started on the targetted stuff...

Only 15 high risk offenders?

Yeah I thought that too!