A Good Question

From yesterday:-

"I’m just going to cut across this conversation, and I do love how this blog is a conversation:Probation is a traumatised profession. The trauma is huge: organisational, personal. There can be little recovery while a death by a thousand cuts continues to be inflicted. To wit, A New Choreography, TR, HMPPS and now the (largely) disgraceful Sentencing Bill. Why the persistent mood on this blog is of searing anger, and nihilism.
It seems like everything and everyone is hell bent on erasing the identity, the contribution, the social role, the profession of Probation as it was founded.

I was struck by a comment by an inspector, it might have even been The Inspector of probation, on some seminar or other, that he was made suddenly aware of the real impact of TR on staff by the literally visceral reaction of individual probation staff when it was mentioned. Its so hard, so dam hard, to envisage a way out of this pain and social cost. Ranting at the dying of the light is no solution, or even healthy if momentarily cathartic. Regrouping might be a thing. 

Your previous blog post sparked some vitriolic comments about the Probation Institute. The next posted a statement by its President extolling just what we would want the conversation about Probation practice to be about. The PI response to the Sentencing Bill was absolutely on point. 

So if regrouping in the trenches requires a cup of tea and a reappraisal of where our best bets, and best comrades are, I’d suggest the PI is shaping up. Napo is our Union. Unison is there. Howard League is definitely onside. There are others. Look for the common purpose, not the deficiences or differences. Would anyone care to share other groups and organisations that are aligned?"

1) Frances Crook

Labour gets punitive again

I remember when Douglas Hurd tried to reduce the use of short prison sentences but his rhetoric was all about the promise to punish people more harshly and send serious offenders to prison for longer. This had the effect of increasing the use of prison, not reducing it. So it will be with the current regime who are talking about increasing punishment both in the community and in prisons. They boast about how many more prison cells they are building, about making community sentences more vicious and only releasing people from prison early if they are supine and compliant. It is a mess and it will end badly.

Justice ministers went a jolly to Texas to see carefully selected prisons where people can earn early release if they undertake work and are compliant. The problem with this is twofold: good behaviour in prison means being obedient and is not a good indicator of how people will face the challenges of the outside world, and, there are so few opportunities for people to do any meaningful activities in prisons that we cannot demand they engage if there is nothing to engage with.

Compliance in prisons just means spending time lying on your filthy bunk watching television and not complaining. Will good behaviour be judged if people make complaints about their treatment and conditions?

People with mental health challenges on entry to prison find their condition deteriorates due to the restrictive conditions. People who were otherwise healthy suffer new serious mental health problems in prisons; we only have to look at the catastrophic level of self-injury across the estate, particularly by women.

Prisons are awash with drugs. It is a more lucrative market than the community. It fosters bullying and gangs and addiction. If prisons were better places, drugs would not be so enticing.

But this is not my only concern about the proposals. Community sentences should be based on people making amends for the wrong they have done. This should be a positive experience to help people be citizens, not criminals. Yet the government proposes it will introduce more negative elements by restricting people’s civil rights and access to leisure. Whilst it is fair enough to take a driving licence from someone who is a dangerous driver or who contravenes driving rules, that is a clearly linked penalty, it is not appropriate to take away access to leisure activities in order to try to solve prison over-crowing.

I entirely support David Gauke’s recommendation that short prison sentences should be severely restricted, indeed I would go further and ban them altogether. There is plenty of research, from the ministry of justice itself, that short prison terms increase the likelihood of reoffending, compared to community sentences in like for like cases. We hear from the magistrates that they have imposed community sentences and still the person in front of them has committed another crime - yes - but the likelihood is reduced each time a community penalty is imposed whereas the likelihood of more crime is guaranteed with a prison sentence. But then, magistrates don’t read research and are profoundly ignorant of the evidence.

Labour has a lamentable history of exploding the use of prison for working class people, introducing increasingly punitive community sentences and restricting civil liberties. It looks like they are at it again.

Frances Crook was Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform for 30 years until October 2021.

Prior to taking up her role at the Howard League, she worked as a teacher, a campaigner for Amnesty International and in non-executive roles at both Greenwich University and NHS Barnet.

Frances has campaigned for the whole UK penal system to be subject to a radical overhaul. She has highlighted the structural inequalities and injustice of the existing system and argued that a smaller more ethical and compassionate prison system would save public money, transform lives and change incarceration for good. During her tenure at the Howard League, Frances oversaw work with the police to reduce child arrests by two thirds, and under her direction the number of staff and turnover of the charity grew twenty-fold. She was described by David Lammy MP as "the single most influential campaigner for prison reform of our times".

2) Revolving Doors

Costly failure finally addressed: Revolving Doors responds to the Sentencing Bill

After over 30 years of campaigning, the end of short sentences is a milestone – but this is just the first marker upon the long road to ending the revolving door.

With a staggering cost of over £1billion per year, and reoffending rates of 55%, it has long been clear that short sentences are no deterrent and do not rehabilitate. Rather, for our group they are the very mechanism that keeps the revolving door turning, facilitating a downward spiral of crisis and crime.

While we welcome the Sentencing Bill, we have strong concerns about the proposed use of suspended sentences as an alternative to short prison sentences, rather than community orders.

Too often, suspended sentences function less as an alternative to custody, and more as a delay before prison. Many people caught in cycles of crisis and crime breach their orders not out of wilful disobedience, but because of unmet health and social needs. Addressing these issues takes time, resources, and consistent support, yet services are often slow to respond and the stability people need is not in place.

For those in our group, help frequently arrives only after a breach has already occurred. Their lives are chaotic, and while they struggle, the responsibility for failed compliance does not rest solely on them – probation and wider systems are not providing the support required. Without that, a suspended sentence risks setting people up to fail rather than offering a genuine alternative to custody.

Instead of suspended sentences, the presumption must be in favour of community sentences if it is to succeed.

People in the revolving door need help to address the root causes of their offending in a consistent, supportive environment. They need wrap-around support in the community to divert them away from the cycle of crisis and crime.

The benefits of this are manifold: safer, stronger, happier, healthier people and communities. Money and lives saved.

As the Bill makes its way towards becoming law, and in the years ahead as we look to the future, Revolving Doors and our members will be here to make the case for what works: pre-arrest diversion, community sentences which address root causes, peer support to build empathy and understanding, and whole-system approaches to breaking the cycle of crisis and crime.

We are getting closer to ending the revolving door. Now, more than ever, it’s time for bold action.

3) NACRO

Narco responds to Sentencing Bill announcement

Nacro responds to the introduction of the Sentencing Bill today (02.09.2025). The Bill, in response to recommendations made by former Justice Secretary David Gauke in his Independent Sentencing Review, introduces the following reforms, amongst others:

• An expansion of tagging.
• End of automatic release for people who behaved badly in prison.
• People released after a third of their sentence under a “earned progression model”.

Campbell Robb, Chief Executive at Nacro, the social justice charity, said:

“This is a key moment for the future of the criminal justice system and those affected by it. The initial focus on tagging is an interesting start to a much bigger debate about how the Sentencing Bill could and should transform our justice system to put rehabilitation and reducing reoffending at the heart. We need to ensure that any changes on this scale are thoroughly examined to ensure they positively impact victims, those working in the system, and help people move away from crime.

“Tagging can play an important role in supervision and safeguarding. However, it is vital that electronic monitoring doesn’t replace the one-to-one human support that can make all the difference to someone’s life chances. Therefore, investment in tagging and probation must go hand in hand with increased investment for the community services to ensure that people get the vital help to turn their lives around. It is also important that tagging does not overly restrict people’s ability to integrate back into society, for example ensuring that people are able to work or spend time caring for family, as we know these are key elements to reduce reoffending.”

4) Centre for Crime and Justice Studies

Smart, self-critical and less patronising

Is it time for a rethink on the way criminal justice reformers do criminal justice reform?

Government plans to shake-up sentencing, due out next month, are expected to include a further toughening of community sentences and a Texas-style “earned progression model” for prisoners. A number of reformers, rightly in my view, worry that the shake-up could make the prisons and wider criminal justice crisis worse, not better.

We explored the pros, and the many cons, of recent Texas prisons policy in July, in a special event with US sentencing and prisons expert Michele Deitch.

Beyond the specifics of the earned progression model, and the wisdom of following the lead of high-incarceration jurisdictions like Texas, I do wonder whether our current approach to discussing, and advocating for, prison and wider criminal justice reform, is working.

One of the problems, I think, is that reformers have tended to approach the public and politicians like visiting missionaries: intent on converting them to their way of thinking. “If we could just share these facts with you”, the message seems to be, “then you’ll understand why you are wrong, and why we are right”.

I parody somewhat of course, but only somewhat. For all sorts of reasons, a missionary approach is probably not going to be very successful, if it ever was.

As we enter what is looking like a period of heightened populist demands for tough policies and tough action – linked in part to claims and concerns about immigration – it would be as well for criminal justice reformers to reflect on their current approaches.

In particular, reform organisations should get better at reflecting on why it might be that so many members of the public appear open to what reformers might consider to be punitive or counter-productive policies, and why so many politicians champion them.

They should be spending more time thinking afresh about what policies are needed in response to the coming challenge, and less time worrying about how they might better communicate long-standing policy commitments that, to be frank, do not have traction with the public or politicians.

Listening empathetically, being on receive, as well as broadcast, is crucial. Smart and bold, yes. But also self-critical and less patronising with those who disagree.

It would also be helpful if ministers got over themselves somewhat, and accepted that a vibrant, independent criminal justice reform sector, confident about telling them things they do not want to hear, is a strength and a resource to draw on.

In a parliamentary democracy such as the UK, it is easy for power to become deaf to critical challenge, treating it as an irritation or sign of disloyalty. This is why it is important that the voice of the reform sector is confident and bold, but also self-critical and open to fresh thinking.

5) Howard League

How will the sentencing review recommendations be turned into operational reality?

Now that David Gauke’s sentencing review has delivered its recommendations, we expect legislation to be introduced any day. This legislation will start to fill in what is currently an incomplete picture, as we wait to understand precisely how the government will interpret the review’s recommendations and go about turning them into operational reality.

In hindsight, the sentencing review was a game of two halves. The first half led to a report published in February on the history and trends in sentencing. This was an excellent piece of work that identified the current use of custody as profligate and unsustainable. The review diagnosed penal populism as the driver behind this and recognised, as the Howard League has been campaigning on for some time, that sentence inflation must be addressed if our ballooning prison population is to be checked.

The review’s second half, however, is considerably less ambitious in scope. That’s partly because certain matters, most obviously the sentencing law around murder, were excluded from the review’s remit. This made tackling sentence inflation especially difficult. But other issues around longer sentencing, such as the escalation of maximum sentences and the use of mandatory minimum sentences, were put aside by the review in its final report. The euphemism used is that the review “did not have enough time” to look at these issues. It’s hard not to conclude, however, that these issues were shelved because they were viewed as too politically challenging.

At the heart of the review’s recommendations are five proposals that are estimated to save between 9,000 and 10,000 prison places. These are: 

• Curbing the use of short custodial sentences. 
• Extending the use of suspended sentence orders. 
• Introducing an ‘earned progression’ model for those on standard determinate sentences (SDS). 
• Introducing a similar model for those on extended determinate sentences (EDS). 
• Simplifying the recall system for those on SDS.

The government has already rejected the recommendation for people on EDS. If all the other proposals go through and save the prison places they are intended to save, we would expect this only to buy the government perhaps two more years before it starts to run out of prison places again.

What’s worrying about this prospect is that the government will be closer to the next general election by that point. It will have faced two more years of the attrition of being in power. In that scenario, how likely is it that there will be an appetite for making bolder policy choices?

There is also some concern about how an ‘earned progression’ model will work when the prison system is so overcrowded and unable to deliver positive regimes in a consistent manner. Staying out of trouble is already difficult in the current system – for example, new Ministry of Justice (MoJ) research shows that prisoners in overcrowded cells are 19% more likely to be involved in an assault.

The operational challenge of implementing an earned progression model has implications for many people in prison, but we are particularly concerned about young adults. There is a very real danger that young men in this age group will be set up to fail. It is worth spelling out why, with an example of how a poorly implemented model of earned release could backfire on the government.

We know that young adults continue to develop physically and psychologically until their mid-twenties and that maturity affects judgement, decision-making skills, and impulse control. Moreover, young adults reside in some of the most violent and unsafe prisons in the estate. Safety in custody statistics show that young men aged 18-20 have the highest rates of involvement in assaults (including as victims).

If additional days of imprisonment are used as a mechanism to keep people in prison who are viewed as not having ‘earned’ their release, then it is notable that two prisons holding young adults (Isis and Brinsford) saw the highest use of additional days in 2024. We are currently conducting data analysis that suggests more than a third of additional days handed out in 2024 were given to people aged 24 and under. It is hard not to conclude that young adults might be disproportionately impacted by the proposals around earned release.

The legislation we expect to see published soon will start to answer some of these questions we have coming out of the sentencing review. As it is debated in Parliament, there will be further opportunities to scrutinise the detail of what is being proposed. In the meantime, what we do know is that the government is ploughing ahead with a prison building programme. In the recent spending review, the MoJ was allocated £7billion of capital expenditure to create 14,000 new prison places.

While the department’s day-to-day budget also received an annual average increase of 1.8%, it is worth noting that those 14,000 new prison places represent an expansion of the prison estate by about 15%. The sentencing review alone can’t fix this colossal mismatch in the department’s sums. In other words, the MoJ is struggling to provide lasting solutions to the problems it faces today, while storing up even greater problems for the future.

6) Prison Reform Trust

PRT comment: Publication of the Sentencing Bill

Commenting,  Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust said:

“With the prison population just days from a new all-time high and capacity running critically low, the government has had little choice but to introduce a series of emergency measures over the past year. England and Wales already has one of the highest imprisonment rates in western Europe, and today’s bill offers an opportunity to begin restoring our justice system to a more proportionate, sustainable, and effective footing.

“The belief that ever-longer prison sentences are the key to tackling crime has brought us to this point: dangerously overcrowded prisons and a justice system close to breaking down. These conditions fail victims, who face unacceptable delays in seeking justice, and they fail those we want to stop from reoffending. We must abandon the long-standing fantasy that building more prisons will solve this crisis — history shows it will not.

“The Sentencing Bill rightly seeks to expand the use of effective alternatives to custody, while reserving prison for more serious offences. For too long, prisons have become the last stop for people in desperate need of support they never received. For these reforms to succeed, probation must be properly staffed and resourced to help people rebuild their lives and reduce reoffending.

“Some measures, however, require careful scrutiny. Earned release must not replicate existing inequalities, particularly for young adults and minority ethnic groups; electronic tagging should only be used where evidence shows it is effective; and executive sign-off of Sentencing Council guidelines risks undermining judicial independence. This bill alone will not solve the crisis, but with the right investment and political will, it could be the start of building a justice system that works better for victims, prisoners, and society alike.”

7) Unlock

MoJ’s AI Action Plan for Justice raises questions for people with criminal records

The Ministry of Justice has announced a new three-year strategy for introducing artificial intelligence across the justice system in England and Wales. The plan aims to improve efficiency and fairness throughout the justice system.

While we can see there is a clear need to tackle issues like prison overcrowding and the courts backlog, we believe it raises clear concerns for people living with criminal records.

A major concern for Unlock is the creation of joined-up digital systems linking court, prison and probation records. These so-called ‘digital offender IDs’ risk embedding a person’s past, making it even harder to move on from the long shadow of a criminal record. We are especially concerned about how data is retained and reused across departments to not only inform IDs, but to also provide information for research.
We can’t hard-code barriers into the system

“At Unlock, we already see how a criminal record follows people into every aspect of life,” said Paula Harriott, Unlock CEO.

“The rollout of AI tools must not hard-code barriers into the system; everyone deserves the chance to be seen as more than their past. We are particularly concerned about how a person’s record will be used throughout the criminal records system. For us, the idea that a child’s record might be saved and shared forever is of particular concern. Because of these concerns, we need guarantees with this action plan, that there is room for people to be allowed to reset and move on.”

Other AI tools planned include mobile phone data scanning in prisons and predictive models that assess how ‘risky’ someone is. These could be systems that could unfairly flag or label people based on outdated or biased data.

Unlock will push to ensure that any AI-driven decision-making remains transparent, challengeable and rooted in fairness and compassion. People who live under the long shadow of a criminal record should not be impacted further in the digital transformation of justice.