Alternatives to Prison

The prison capacity crisis together with a new government is at last giving us the opportunity of having a grown up debate about everything, including the urgent need to look at sentencing policy. This from Rob Allen:-  

Intermediate Treatment

Not surprisingly, we’re seeing a plethora of proposals for new Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood about how to solve the prison crisis. If I was in her job, I’d be particularly attracted to the Howard League’s idea of returning responsibility for prisons and probation to the Home Office. But I think that’s unlikely and undesirable. Peter Hennessey rightly described the Home Office as the graveyard of liberal thinking since the days of Lord Sidmouth.

Most of the suggestions being floated by think tanks, charities and experts focus on reducing demand for prison places in the short term through early release. Implicit in many proposals is the notion that when the 20,000 new prison places are up and running in a few years’ time, some sort of equilibrium will be restored between supply and demand.

I’ve argued that a new way of developing policy about who should go to prison and for how long, distanced from party political competition, might reverse the sharp rises in the custodial sentencing rate and length of prison terms we’ve seen in the last 14 years.

In addition we need to diversify the range of options that can be used as alternatives to prison.

Some of these are institutional alternatives. Many people in prison should be in hospital but thresholds for transfer and waiting times are both too high. The Justice Select Committee asked then Prisons minister Ed Argar about the number of available secure hospital beds for prisoners but doesn’t seem to have received a reply. There are simply not enough.

Other prisoners could potentially be transferred to residential treatment facilities which are being expanded as part of the 10 year Drug Strategy.

Other options include hostels and other supervised accommodation. From 2019 to 2023 the Approved Premise Expansion Programme delivered 169 additional beds, including opening 4 new Independent Approved Premises (83 beds) and 51 additional beds in dedicated premises for women. But there’s a case for a much more ambitious increase in half way houses. It could be paid for by paring back the prison building plans to say 15,000.

Back in 2001, the sentencing review carried out by senior Civil Servant John Halliday recommended that the Home Office- they were responsible back then- should

“establish a review of the existing “intermediate estate” for accommodating and managing offenders in the community, with the aim of developing a strategic plan for its future use, staffing, management and development. The review should embrace all types of accommodation, whether owned by the prison or probation services, or the independent and voluntary sectors, and whether used for prisoners on temporary release; prisoners on conditional release; offenders serving community sentences; or ex-offenders receiving support voluntarily”.

I am not sure such a review was ever done – but it’s certainly needed now.

Three years after Halliday’s review, then Home Secretary David Blunkett announced that “satellite tracking technology could provide the basis for a 'prison without bars', potentially cutting prison overcrowding, and expensive accommodation”.

Progress with electronic monitoring has been chequered during the intervening years. But the review should look at whether the role its currently playing is optimal or whether it can serve to manage security risks for people placed in non-secure accommodation- what Halliday called “containment in the community”.

As well as the where of alternatives to prison, there’s a need to look at the how.

Back in 1979, I started work as a volunteer in IT- not computers (there weren’t many back then) -but Intermediate Treatment. With mixed results, I spent most of the next ten years trying to keep young people out of residential care homes, detention centres, Borstals and their institutional successors.

A generous description of the approach might be “eclectic”- camping trips, sports and drama sessions as much as counselling and groupwork. One troubled young man was placed on a ship in the Caribbean for several months, and an IT officer in a neighbouring area allegedly entered a crew into the Henley Regatta.

Quirky some of it might have been, but with relatively small caseloads, we were able to fashion a wide-ranging package of therapeutic and constructive activities for each individual which would help give them the best chance of staying at home, at school or work and out of trouble.

Of course there are resonances with the best of the approach in youth justice and even parts of probation today. There's a growing recognition that relationship based practice is a key to successful supervision and desistance from crime.

Practitioners need to have the opportunity and training to put that into practice so that more offenders can serve their sentences in the community and those that leave prison don’t go back. By enabling that to happen alongside a wider range of treatment and accommodation options, Ms Mahmood may be able not only to find a solution to the immediate crisis but chart a more positive long-term course. She will need to work with her colleagues responsible for health and local government to make it happen. Let's hope she does.

Rob Allen

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This from Frances Crook 9th July:-

There has been a lot in the news about the crisis in prisons. They are full, rat infested, ridden with drugs and violence, and the most serious challenge is that they feed the crime problem thus creating more victims and mayhem in the community. This has been a problem for more than a hundred years and cannot be solved with a few quick fixes like extending early release.

There are plenty of papers from academics and voluntary organisations suggesting ways to ease the crowding in prisons that would get the issue off the front pages but I would argue that unless we want to revisit this every few years something more fundamental needs to happen.

A succession of ministers have come and gone and given speeches about making prisons work better and introducing initiatives to improve education and ‘rehabilitation’ and yet nothing has changed. Things can only get worse unless we do something radical.

It is interesting that the new government is planning to fix the front door of the NHS by diverting billions to local services. That is what needs to happen in the justice system. We should divert funding to front end services which means to probation but also to mental health, drug services and to support for housing and crime reduction. If we want to prevent crime, this is the sensible way forward. Just in the health service, the expensive use of residential services like hospitals and prisons, should be used as a last resort and the emphasis should be on the front end and prevention.

We cannot build our way out of the challenge. Building more prisons is a criminal waste of public money that embeds the problems. I have written about how new prisons simply replicate the problems of old prisons in a previous blog.

The new government has to get to grips with sentencing reform. The inflation in sentences has seen people spend many years longer in prison than before and I have never seen any research that showed that sending someone to prison for twenty instead of ten years makes them safer. Too many people are sent to prison in the first place and too many are sent to prison on remand. Big changes are required. It will take legislative bravery which is why it needs to be done in the early years of a government.

Secondly, money needs to go to probation. It deals with the majority of people convicted of a crime, either under sentence or on release from prison. It has been starved of funding and respect. Probation should be untied from the shackles of the civil service, linked to local democracy and the service given the freedom to act with professionalism.

Most importantly we need new leadership. It is depressing to hear some senior politicians repeating the tired and failed rhetoric of ‘we must build more prisons quicker (yes, I mean you Yvette Cooper) which will waste public money and embed more crime and drug addiction. New thinking, brave thinking, is needed that talks to the public as grown ups. With a massive Parliamentary majority and a crisis that is generating front page news, the new government should act with integrity and speed. It can do in the justice system what it is doing in the health system. Learn the lessons of past failures and make things better.

Frances Crook