More Prisons Really the Answer?

Here we have the latest from CCJS:-

Great Britain is on course for a massive expansion in prison capacity, according to a new assessment from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, out today.

In England and Wales, nearly 22,000 additional prison places are being planned in the coming years, while in Scotland an additional 3,600 prison places are under development.

The governments in London and Edinburgh are planning to take approximately 10,500 of old prison place capacity out of circulation. But even when this is taken into account, this still means additional prison capacity of some 15,000 is planned in the coming years. Previous experience also suggests that prisons slated for closure often stay open.

The analysis is contained in the latest edition of UK Justice Policy Review, from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. It comes as the government in London reaffirms its plans to spend £2.5 billion building four new prisons in England.

Last year, the Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland told parliament that the new prisons model being developed at one site, in Wellingborough, was intended to take the prisons estate "into the 22nd century".

Speaking today, Richard Garside, the director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and one of the report authors, said:

"While the governments in London and Edinburgh pay lip-service to the notion that a smaller prison population is desirable, all their actions suggest a commitment to further growth and a long-term commitment to unnecessary incarceration. Rather than attempting to build their way out of the current prisons crisis, they would do better to rethink some of their basic assumptions, developing a long-term strategy to prevent unnecessary criminalisation and tackle unnecessary imprisonment."

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A useful reminder of how we got to where we are with probation:- 

Probation 

The period under review was marked by a rapid series of developments in England and Wales. The events resulted in the scrapping of the failed probation arrangements introduced in 2015 and proposals for, what seemed to many observers, equally flawed new arrangements. There were no probation developments of a similar scale or significance in Scotland or Northern Ireland. This section focuses exclusively on the England and Wales developments.

Irredeemably flawed 

The Chief Inspector of Probation in England and Wales, Glenys Stacey, stood down in May 2019. She was replaced by Justin Russell, a longstanding Whitehall insider who had served under both Labour and Conservative governments. 

A couple of months earlier, Glenys Stacey had used her final annual report to launch a stinging critique of the ‘irredeemably flawed’ changes to probation: the so-called ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ programme implemented in 2015 (see former UKJPR reports). Probation leaders, she wrote, had been ‘required to deliver change they did not believe in, against the very ethos of the profession’. The changes had delivered a ‘deplorable diminution of the probation profession and a widespread move away from good probation practice’. 

Stacey’s was but one of a series of interventions strongly critical of the ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ programme. Also, in March, a National Audit Office report highlighted how badly wrong the government had got its sums (see Transforming rehabilitation?). Then in May, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee concluded that the programme has ‘left probation services underfunded, fragile, and lacking the confidence of the courts’. Moreover: 

Inexcusably, probation services have been left in a worse position than they were in before the Ministry embarked on its reforms. 

Reducing the rates of recriminalisation and reconviction of those released from prison having served a short (under 12 months) prison sentences was a key government rationale for the ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ programme. A report by the probation inspectorate in May 2019 found ‘no tangible reduction’ and ‘no material change’ in rates of recriminalisation, while ‘almost one in four are recalled to prison’. Rather than receiving ‘intensive and holistic rehabilitative supervision’, released prisoners were ‘locked in an expensive merry-go-round of criminal justice processes and the public are left at undue risk’. 

A Ministry of Justice statistical bulletin on deaths of offenders in the community, published in October 2019, pointed further to a general state of malaise. The number of deaths of individuals under probation supervision had doubled since 2015, and was at the highest number since recording had stared in 2011. This included a steep rise in the number of suicides (see Suicide under probation). 

New model for probation 

In July 2018, as UKJPR 8 notes, the then Justice Secretary, David Gauke, announced his intention to bring the disastrous probation changes to a premature end. Glenys Stacey had praised Gauke for this ‘bold decision’, in the March 2019 annual report. She also expressed doubt about his working proposals for a new model, which in her mind ‘would leave serious design flaws unaddressed’. 

Elsewhere in her report, Stacey set out four ‘design principles’, for use both in evaluating of existing probation services, and in guiding future system design. The four principles covered the importance of: evidence-based practice; meeting individual needs; system integration and professionalism; and instilling confidence among victims, the judiciary and the wider public.

Against these four principles, the current probation system fared badly. In day-to-day work, for instance, Stacey had found ‘a notable drift away from the evidence base for effective probation services’. This was a systemic issue with the current system, Stacey argued, as she made clear to the House of Commons Justice Committee in May 2019:

 …a model where companies are in different ownership hardly suggests that you are going to be openly sharing best practice. I know of no mechanism at the moment for that. Sodexo owns a good number of CRCs, and good practice can promulgate in that company, within that ownership arrangement, but it might not cross a boundary into Interserve or whatever. 

On system integration and professionalism, Stacey argued that provision of probation interventions was patchy, that there was a ‘national shorted of professional probation staff’ and that the profession as a whole had been ‘downgraded’. 

Looking forward Stacey argued that future probation arrangements needed a structure and culture that ensured consistent, evaluated, evidence-based practice. Professional judgement and consistent practice also needed to be at the heart of probation work. To rebuild confidence in the system, she argued for national strategies in areas such as estates, workforce planning and commissioning. She also called for effective integration of key probation activities ‘to ensure more consistent and effective supervision for ALL offenders’ (her emphasis - in bold). 

The Commission on Justice in Wales, which published the report of its two-year review in October 2019, was impressed enough by these four principles to argue that they ‘should be applied to the design of the new integrated National Probation Service of Wales’ (see Commission on justice in Wales). 

The response from the government in London was somewhat more muted. Stacey told MPs on the Justice Committee in May 2019 that the Ministry of Justice had not consulted her on its probation workforce strategy; an answer the Labour MP Marie Rimmer said left her ‘quite shocked’. Stacey’s apparently upbeat tone of her report’s reception could also not mask a somewhat downbeat note: 

[M]y report from March is fully accepted by the Secretary of State and by Rory Stewart, although he is no longer the Minister. No one has said to me that the report is in any way ill-informed or wrong. The issues are understood and, in large part, accepted. The question is where we go from here. 

Two days after Stacey’s appearance before MPs, the Ministry of Justice announced its ‘new model for probation’. It planned ‘to build on the successful elements of the existing system’, while introducing ‘fresh ideas and innovative new rehabilitative services from private and voluntary providers’. 

The government blueprint for the new model for probation, published in June 2019, went some way to meet the challenge posed by Stacey and others. In a nod in the direction of greater system integration, for instance, the model proposed that all those under community supervision would be the responsibility of the National Probation Service, working at a regional level. The blueprint also expressed a commitment to ‘recognising probation work as a professional vocation’, a commitment the government proposed to underpin via a ‘regulatory framework for setting qualification requirements and practice standards’. 

In other respects, though, the blueprint signalled an ongoing attachment to commercialisation and competition that many in the service, including Stacey, saw as part of the problem. The delivery of much probation work – including unpaid work and accredited programmes – would be undertaken by private or voluntary sector ‘innovation partners’, rather than by the probation service itself. To many this looked rather like the discredited community rehabilitation company model, albeit in reduced form. 

Seasoned probation observers in any case struggled to see the ‘successful elements’ in the existing system and were concerned that the new model looked like repeating the fragmentation of probation work that had bedevilled the ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ changes. When the Financial Times reviewed the plans in early December 2019, they reported criticism of a ‘stack ‘em high and treat ‘em cheap’ approach, and concerns over the split tendering approach, which would mean probation officers ‘having to coordinate an individual’s probation plan with two separate organisations’. The [Vice] Chair of the National Association of Probation Officers, David Raho said: 

What is needed is an entirely joined up and integrated public probation service that frees up frontline professionals to tackle reoffending.