Criminal Justice and the March of Technology

Facebook continues to develop as a lively place for probation staff to discuss matters of interest and occasionally the airing of more wide-ranging, discursive pieces. I think the following deserves a wider audience and is published with the author's agreement:- 

IT firm that tracks offenders for the National Probation Service is sold

A Newcastle IT company whose software is used by 18,000 members of staff at the National Probation Services (NPS) has been sold. Beaumont Colson’s (BCL) nDelious software is used by the NPS to manage offenders through the entire probationary system. It tracks their case from the moment of arrest, while they are in prision, as well as during their time in the community.

The company, based on Newbridge Street, has been acquired by national player The Unilink Group. Unilink said the tie-up would fuel its international expansion and allow it to create integrated systems from justice departments overseas.

Francis Toye, CEO and founder of The Unilink Group, said: “From the very first we have found enthusiasm and energy from the team in BCL that matches our own. The fit between these two innovative organisations and the logic of the tie-up is irrefutable. I am delighted that BCL is joining The Unilink Group today.”

Along with providing software for the NPS, Beaumont also carries out work for MTC-Novo, which runs the London and Thames Valley Community Rehabilitation Company. Its other clients include the Home Office, and the States of Jersey and Guernsey. The company employs 45 members of staff at its Newcastle office, which Unilink has pledged to keep open.

Paul Ryder, Beaumont Colson’s technical director, said: “The combination of Unilink’s and BCL’s skill sets will support the evolution of a generation of new products, extend our reach and allow us to provide enhanced service to existing customers and to new ones.”

Following the acquisition The Unilink Group now employs around 120 members of staff and has a turnover of between £12-£13m across the UK, EU and Australia. The company also has a base in North America. Over the last four years Unilink has trebled in size. It now consists of four companies: Unilink Software, BCL, Unilink Technology Services, and Acante. Unilink’s software applications are used by more than 80 organisations with almost 70,000 prisoners across the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Austria.

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Just a little snippet of news that cropped up in some other research I’ve been doing on the tech side of probation that now seems to be the missing piece connecting several threads on my cork board neatly (I like red cord and pins). I have somehow previously not been able to find a common link like the unknown actor in a crime drama, although it makes sense to me that this exists. Now some things are starting to make a little more sense. With probation IT on both sides of the bridge driving every hardworking probation frontline worker nuts recently, I was interested to see that the company that developed nDELIUS (Beaumont Colson or BCL) has been sold to fast growing multinational company that I am already familiar with called UNILINK.

So just a few random thoughts here and nothing fully worked through evidenced or particularly well argued - which might irritate some. Make of it what you will as I will continue having a go at trying to unravel strands of this in the next few weeks and months to come and as with all tangled webs, it may be something or nothing much and may lead to a slightly different place that I had not anticipated. We shall see.

It seems though that BCL investors will have been convinced that the buy out was a very smart move. What interests me is what may have convinced them? It is no secret in the IT world that BCL have been doing some work for CRC owners, including as the article says, in London and Thames Valley MTC of late. They are proud of that and I think is now starting to be rolled out and my guesstimate of the value of this work (if it is what I think it is) is that it is likely to have been worth enough to attract the attention of competitors, especially with other work on apps and even bigger stuff in the pipeline. I guess that there will also be some work being done or considered at HMP Rainsbrook and it won’t hurt to have some coders onboard to iron out the glitches that will inevitably arise.

‘Unilink Software are a supplier of prisoner self-service technology and their systems are currently used in 28 prisons’. They have been mopping up on the technology front in prisons probably only slowed by those who run prisons not fully wishing for them to be modernised and for prison numbers to be reduced at a slower rate than is probably possible were the system to be fully digitised and integrated. I wouldn’t say that all this is necessarily bad or good news as such but rather that it is interesting news (maybe not only to me) as we could soon see some of the technical innovations that are currently unevenly distributed across a number of jurisdictions - that have in some cases been around a while - including greater technology enhanced linkage between custody and community, being increasingly rolled out and demonstrated by private companies (rather than public sector actors) and presented to be effective in reducing numbers and meeting elusive targets. 

Indeed these innovations if successful might well be seized upon by ministers - starved of potentially positive news - as some sort of ‘easy win’ vindication of the policies that they inherited and are now struggling to admit publicly were actually risky and are increasingly regarded across the sector as having failed and roundly discredited even by the hang ‘em and flog ‘em right of centre corporate media. 

Let us not also forget the timing of recent announcements regarding sentencing and the considerable investment that the government has already made in developing digital justice systems. It is logical to me at least to assume that all parts of the system need to be at the same level of technological development in order to work. It is obvious that change has not been universally welcomed across the system - to say the least - by key actors and players. 

Perhaps also consider how our European neighbours are effectively reducing prison numbers by increasing the use of technologies such as electronic monitoring and electronic self management systems but perhaps importantly and perhaps most tellingly are working towards combining measured use of technologies with the provision of more and more resources aimed at delivering community sentences by well trained highly motivated staff not with less demoralised staff and with fewer resources as seems to be the case with probation over here. 

I am fairly optimistic that the development and application of some techno solutions in our sector of the industry (we are after all part of a global criminal justice industry) do look promising as tools to deliver services effectively and efficiently (expect increased automation and more terminals and robots) but less optimistic when I look at the state of the people institutions organisations and systems that will need to lead and deliver what is required and address the increasingly yawning gap between where we are now and where we need to be in probation as key players in a new modernised joined up justice system that is fit for purpose after being decimated, put into reverse, repeatedly hammered and impeded by the cloddishness of the TR1 debacle.

Then after thinking about all this a bit more I began to realise that companies buying other smart companies up might actually be a more significant development just now than it might first appear. It is after all the expertise to develop stuff and technologies in Probation such as software applications that work that are being bought - presumably in anticipation and with high level assurances - and that some fairly major movements are about to take place and that there is a real prospect that more well paid work will be generated soon for those who have positioned themselves well (expanding markets) and that this will allow investors in those companies that have done so and are doing so to potentially make much bigger profits from either an enlarged existing contract or more lucrative future contracts.

A company like UNILINK with expanding global reach now takes fewer risks and is growing rapidly and steadily increasing its influence exponentially (count the knighthoods). It is also potentially disruptive in a volatile artificially created UK justice market and is capable of game shaping/changing moves should it choose to make them. The MoJ is looking for solutions that are publicly acceptable and face saving and technology may be a get out of jail card that might be more palatable than others.

Unilink is a company I have been following closely for some time. They first cropped up on my radar in relation to the now abandoned London biometric reporting kiosks https://www.unilink.com/ some years ago now - perhaps testing the market. They did get the kiosks to talk to DELIUS but not much else as systems weren’t really up to the technical demands required. They are however a forward looking tech company and certainly have some experience expertise and reach in several related sectors now and interestingly they have some fairly radical ideas for instance about how digital prisons should be run using self service kiosks and in cell terminals for starters etc. That interests me as it is an example of a technologically mediated sentence provision and after a few false starts quite probably the shape of things to come in prisons, courts, police stations and in probation - not everyone’s idea of the direction of travel. No technology is neutral and how something is designed and conceived to be used is quite important to me. The Australian connection will also interest many who will know that MTC also run prisons there - an interesting and not unsurprising association evidencing the bigger picture.

Bidders for new contracts of course always want to offer something that their competitors may not be able to offer - or indeed want to offer - to the commissioners/bid assessors as something they might want to roll out more widely (usually because it might reduce costs and help meet targets). Could this be the point of origin of the promised revolution? UNILINK could potentially make interesting things happen for CRC owners faster technically than the more cumbersome and less agile MoJ (Digital by default?) and has some experience of the technical and political challenges faced having been there before. They have certainly shown that they are adept at penetrating justice markets elsewhere but the MoJ may feel that they need to move more slowly given past failures and problems and their own processes might not be helping them to be agile in a fast paced market. 

But is it really a techno corrections/solutions heavy approach ‘the approach’ that the UK government will want to adopt over others? The UK is already the biggest user of electronic monitoring in Europe - a position that is unlikely to change - but it has been slower to use this technology more effectively, as others have done, and has been beset by scandal and controversy arguably due to poor commissioning and governance - once bitten twice shy. I would argue that we should be cautious to engage but not dismissive of technological potential and developments even though we in probation have often been let down or found ourselves at the sharp end of previous poor technological implementations and plans.

Some very telling quotes in the article attached to be unpacked and certainly a lot to consider in the round. I think it is worth keeping a watchful eye on such things and keep trying our best to map out the connections that together might give us a clearer idea of the shape of things to come or what things are eventually going to look like even if such developments such as a single takeover may at first glance seem relatively irrelevant or uninteresting. 

But if you want to get to the bottom of something you could do worse than to follow the money. The sums of money involved are certainly eye watering (£1bn on Court services and millions on software development including applications to better interface with the MoJs own clunky and now ageing systems) and as this is taxpayers money we should perhaps all pay some attention to how it is being spent in our name in the public interest, especially as it is potentially the future of our work and our industry that is at stake.

David Raho