What Voters Think

Thanks go once again to ace contibutor 'Getafix for truffling out an outfit I've never heard of before - Common Ground Justice Project - who claim to not only know what voters think is wrong with our criminal justice system, but what they think would fix it! This is one of my biggest takeaways:-

"Of key institutions, only the police narrowly retain majority confidence (51%) – with prisons (41%), probation (38%) and youth justice (33%) lowest."

Held to Account 

Understanding the crisis of public confidence in British criminal justice – and what voters want to change. 

Finding common ground on crime and justice 

With prisons full and reoffending high, the UK's criminal justice system isn’t working. Victims feel ignored and voters feel powerless. But a noisy, polarised debate on crime is getting in the way of change. The Common Ground Justice Project listens to the public across divides, finding common ground for a new way forward on criminal justice in the UK. We are an independent non-profit initiative, hosted by the Centre for Justice Innovation (UK charity no. 1151939)

What We Do
01 LISTEN ACROSS DIVIDES We conduct creative research and deep listening exercises across the UK, listening to voters, victims and communities who don’t feel heard.

02 FIND COMMON GROUND We uncover shared values and ideas on crime that cut across divides – uncovering a new way forward with broad public support.

03 SPARK BOLD ACTION We create a more constructive conversation on crime, shifting policy towards common ground solutions that cut crime and rebuild trust.

Foreword
I know what it means to be held to account. When I was 19, I threw a single punch that killed James Hodgkinson. I went to prison for manslaughter. It wasn't till years later, through restorative justice, that I sat down with James’s parents, Joan and David, and faced the harm I had caused in a much deeper way.

During that meeting there was no escaping that harm. Nor should there have been. Joan and David were able to tell me directly what my actions had done to them and their family. I had to listen, acknowledge it and take responsibility.

That process taught me something about justice that punishment alone never could. It gave me the motivation to completely change my life.

Joan and David still believe my sentence was too short. But over time, the question of accountability became about more than the length of my prison sentence: they wanted me to take responsibility for what I did and show that I had changed. Today, after helping me make that journey, they are senior advisers to the Common Ground Justice Project.

Our experience has taught me that justice is not necessarily a choice between consequences and rehabilitation, or between the needs of victims and perpetrators of crime. Acknowledging harm, giving victims a voice, taking responsibility, facing consequences and demonstrating change over time can all be part of holding someone properly to account.

It is one of the reasons I co-founded the Common Ground Justice Project along with Sam Boyd and Alice Dawnay. We shared a frustration that the debate on crime too often reduces complex questions to being “tough” or “soft”, pitting punishment against rehabilitation, and prioritising short-term point-scoring over long-term change. Our response was to start somewhere different: listening to people across the country who don’t feel heard.

The findings in this report suggest that Joan, David and I are far from unique in what we needed from the justice system. The British public want meaningful consequences – but also for people to own the harm they have caused, and change so they do not create more victims. And they want the system to be more accountable for delivering on its promises.

That core finding gives me hope: that when we really listen, the public are less divided about justice than our politics suggests. We hope this report encourages those in power to respond in kind: to put party politics aside and build the modern justice system that Britain deserves.

Jacob Dunne
Co-founder Common Ground Justice Project

Executive Summary

C H A PT E R 0 1 CRIME WITHOUT CONSEQUENCE
Understanding the crisis of confidence in British criminal justice 

Most Britons think crime usually has no consequence 

Fewer than one in five voters (18%) believe people who commit crimes usually face real consequences; half say consequences follow only occasionally or almost never. “Nothing happens” was a recurring refrain across our focus groups and interviews. Perceived lawlessness and unfairness in criminal justice appears to be contributing to a wider sense of national decline and erosion of trust in politics. 

Fear of victimhood is high, especially among young women 

Nearly two in three Britons (63%) expect to be a victim of crime within the next year, and one in three expects a violent or sexual crime. Fear of violence is concentrated among the young: over half of women under 35 (53%) expect to suffer a violent or sexual crime this year, as well as 39% of men under 35. These figures are roughly four times the actual rates of victimhood reported by the most recent Crime Survey for England and Wales, albeit this survey may underestimate actual victimhood on some crimes.

No core function of the justice system is rated well by a majority 

There is no function of the justice system a majority rates as doing a good job – just 22% say it does a good job of reducing crime, and only 38% of protecting the public. Of key institutions, only the police narrowly retain majority confidence (51%) – with prisons (41%), probation (38%) and youth justice (33%) lowest. The crisis of confidence in criminal justice appears to be feeding a wider sense of national decline and mistrust of politics. 

Underfunded, ineffective and unfair: the roots of mistrust 

Perceived leniency is only part of the reason for low confidence – voters point equally to underfunding, ineffective delivery and unfairness of treatment. Low confidence in prisons, probation and youth justice is mainly attributed to a failure to cut reoffending and lack of resources. Perceived unfairness is another key driver of mistrust, arising around questions of police treatment (66% believe policing is unequal by ethnicity, split evenly on who benefits), and inconsistency in sentencing. 

Voters want accountability to cut both ways 

Just as the public expects offenders to be better held accountable for their actions, they also want the system itself to be more accountable – for being fair, effective and honest. Broken promises and the cycle of crisis-response are seen as a system failing on its own terms and letting down victims, with every failure deepening the crisis of trust. 

The public want bold and balanced change 

Almost two in three Britons (62%) say the criminal justice system needs major changes – a demand spanning every party – with broad support for balancing punishment with rehabilitation and prevention. Keeping the public safe is clearly the top priority (87%), with youth services first in line for new spending. The public back bold but balanced change: a system that punishes but also treats and prevents crime.

C H A PT E R 0 2 ACCOUNTABILITY AS ‘OWNING, PAYING AND CHANGING’

Understanding what the public mean by accountability for crime

Punishment is seen as necessary but not sufficient for accountability 

Punishment is where many voters start, but only around one in ten lean towards the view that a served sentence delivers accountability on its own. Across five forms of accountability we tested – the '5 Rs' of repercussions, responsibility, repair, reform and reintegration – every one is rated important by at least 88%. The demand is 'punishment plus', not punishment alone.

Accountability as 'owning, paying and changing' 

The public see accountability as containing three key steps: owning the harm, paying for the harm, and changing behaviour. This is common ground that spans divides, and points the way towards justice reforms that will command widespread confidence. 

Responsibility is key – and the clearest common ground 

Accepting responsibility is the most widely endorsed form of accountability (96%) and the most unifying. On our 0–10 scale of importance, a tenth of a point separates Labour, Conservative, Reform and Lib Dem voters on this principle. But responsibility must be seen as genuine – demonstrated over time, not performed for a process. The public agree that taking responsibility includes engaging in treatment for addiction, where this is driving offending.

C H A PT E R 0 3 TACKLING PROLIFIC OFFENDING 

A case study of delivering accountability in practice 

Frequency of offending increases demand for punishment – but not at the cost of rehabilitation In response to repeat offending, the public raise their demands for punishment, but not at the cost of rehabilitation. Prison rises from the least popular response to a first offence (17%) to the top response once offending is repeat and organised (61%). Yet rehabilitative responses remain popular: compensation or unpaid work stays near 60% support, while treatment and help into work also stay high. Voters mostly want both. 

The role of addiction increases support for treatment – but not at the cost of punishment 

Told that repeat offending is driven by homelessness and addiction, support for treatment jumps 19 points to 73% and becomes the clear winner among every party’s voters – but support for prison never falls below 43%. Empathy is evident and reduces the demand for punishment, but it does not remove support for clear repercussions.

‘Punishment plus’ policy packages win broadest support 

In our conjoint experiment, eight of the ten most popular policy combinations to address prolific offending paired a clear consequence with treatment or visible repair. 'Punishment plus' consistently performed better than 'punishment only', while rehabilitation-only packages performed the worst. When it comes to community sentences and diversion, the public is mostly supportive; their biggest concern is not leniency but underfunding and ineffective delivery by overstretched public services.

C H A PT E R 0 4 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS 

Summary of recommendations for politicians, policymakers and campaigners 

This report concludes that rebuilding trust demands accountability that cuts both ways: for people who commit crime to be held to account for their actions, and a justice system that's held to account for honest and effective delivery. Our research suggests the public is less divided than political debate often implies – and political pointscoring on crime risks obscuring the common ground that does exist. Seven recommendations follow, for policymakers and campaigners in criminal justice: 

1. Ensure consequences and public safety are the foundation – reassurance here is what creates permission for bold action on rehabilitation and prevention. 

2. Focus on accountability and responsibility to reach across divides - responsibility is the clearest common ground, while punishment is a popular but more divisive frame. Policies which recognise this will win broad support. 

3. Restore visible consequences for prolific and low-level crime – everyday crime that visibly goes unaddressed is driving the confidence crisis and needs urgent action. 

4. Improve communication and honesty with victims and the public – say what sentences mean, follow through, and tell victims what happened in their case. 

5. Strengthen and amplify community justice – make non-custodial sentences more robust, more visible and clearly evidenced; scepticism is mostly about the system’s capacity to deliver, not leniency.

6. Make recovery from addiction central to tackling prolific offending – getting the balance of consequence and high-quality treatment right for this group is where the public's demand for 'punishment plus' can work in practice. 

7. Develop a cross-party 10-year plan for justice – politicians should respond to public frustration by working together across parties on a long-term approach to fixing the criminal justice system: a plan built on pragmatic 'common ground' solutions.

Upstream or Downstream?

I found myself paying careful attention to Andy Burnham this morning on the Laura Kuenssberg show as he spoke at length about the recent death of his father and his absolute determination to address the social care issue before he leaves office. Of course we all know this is going to be a monumental task, not least because it's likely to cost a fortune and he has little room for manoeuvre given the tax 'take' is already so high. But when pressed by Laura on this point he responded by saying "but it's preventative".

Wow, lets just think about that for one cotton pickin minute. Supposing he wasn't talking about social care at all, but instead the criminal justice system? Whilst expanding on his social care hypothesis ahead of his big speech on Tuesday, he convincingly made the case for the commonsense approach of spending money upstream rather than downstream as a "preventative" measure. Isn't that the ethos of encouraging healthy living as a way of preventing ill health? A good education system as a way of preventing illiteracy and poor life chances? A criminal justice system that encourages rehabilitation rather than increased prison population? A probation service that is part of a solution rather than part of the problem?

Well, by a stroke of good timing, a recent contributor pointed us in the direction of not one, but two recently published reports that expand on Andy Burnham's "preventative" hypothesis within the criminal justice system. Interestingly they don't seem to address either prison or probation directly, but do highlight the entirely predictable effects of scrapping upstream funding in the form of a functioning youth service, together with Sure Start. 

Lets hope Andy is a quick learner and appreciates his enthusiasm for the concept of upstream funding being "preventative" can be equally applied in other area's of social policy and in fact could be classed as an investment. I'm reminded that Prof Rob Canton is on record as saying quite recently that " Perhaps the best way to enforce, rehabilitate and protect the public is by advising, assisting and befriending."

The justice system's problems are not just about money

Higher spending, without attention to how resources are used, may not translate into better outcomes

The justice system is under visible strain. Crown Court backlogs stand at over 80,000 cases. A record 330,000 tribunal cases were open in early 2026. Since 2010, over 300 magistrates' court sites have closed and Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) reforms have significantly reduced the scope for legal aid, and the number of providers. Prisons are almost at full capacity, with high levels of violence. These are not abstract statistics: they represent real delays, unresolved disputes, and people left further away from services they may need.

When performance falls short, our first instinct is usually to look at the budget. And the budget does matter. Ministry of Justice day-to-day spending fell 33% in real terms between 2007-08 and 2016-17, compared with a 3% reduction across all departments. Spending per person remains around 17% below its 2002-03 level. Spending has recovered somewhat in recent years, though delivering on the scale of reform needed across backlogs, prison capacity and access to justice remains a significant challenge.

But new research from the IFS Transforming Justice programme finds that budget alone will not fix the system's problems. Across policing, courts, prisons and legal aid, how resources are used, where they are located, and what pressures arrive from outside the system are all important determinants of performance. This means that higher spending, without attention to how resources are used, may not translate into better outcomes.

Take the Crown Court backlog. Sitting days rose 32% between 2019 and 2024, yet case closures (disposals) increased by only 20%. Had pre-pandemic productivity been maintained, even when adjusting for changes in the complexity of caseloads, the backlog could almost have been cleared by the end of 2024, without additional resources. This shows that investing in more court time alone has done little to clear the backlog. Doing so requires every part of the system to be working effectively together: judges, barristers, court staff, prison transport and case preparation.

The same is true when we look at management more broadly. In the Metropolitan Police, the effectiveness of individual borough commanders accounts for around a quarter of the variation in policing productivity across London divisions. In prisons, independent inspections by HM Inspectorate of Prisons reduced violence by around 12 incidents per 1,000 prisoners per month over the 15 months following inspection, without any increase in staffing or expenditure. In other words, good leadership and management can deliver real improvements even when additional resources are not on the table.

Where services are located, and who can reach them, is another important dimension of how the justice system performs. Magistrates' court closures have more than doubled the average distance to the nearest court for many communities. Police station closures increased violent crime in surrounding areas by around 9%, a rise that the evidence suggests could have been avoided had different stations been selected for closure. And funding changes in legal aid have reshaped where private providers operate, leaving 12% of local authorities with no active civil legal aid provider. Behind these changes lies a pattern of uneven geographic impact that deserves closer attention.

A further dimension concerns pressures that originate entirely outside the justice system. Several pressures are driving tribunal backlogs: disability and social security cases make up the largest share, while SEND and asylum and immigration appeals have seen the sharpest recent increases. Youth club closures following cuts to youth services raised offending in their vicinity by around 14%. Evidence from Sure Start suggests that early years interventions can reduce more serious offending later in life. More broadly, decisions made in other parts of government, often years earlier, shape the demands placed on the justice system. The introduction of mandatory reconsideration by DWP shows this clearly: designed to resolve more disputes before they reached tribunals, it directly reshaped the flow of cases into the system.

Funding matters, and the cuts of the 2010s had a significant and lasting impact on the system. But it is not the full story. The evidence base being built as part of the IFS Transforming Justice programme suggests that better use of existing resources, more efficient allocation of services across geography, and a clearer understanding of how other departments affect justice outcomes could all make a material difference. The question is not only whether the justice system is adequately funded, but whether the resources it has are being used as well as they could be, and whether the pressures it faces are being understood and addressed at their source.

Magdalena Domínguez is a senior research economist at the IFS, working on its transforming justice project and the education and skills sector. Imran Rasul is professor of economics at University College London, co-director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and research co-director of the Entrepreneurship Research Group of the International Growth Centre. They are co-authors of a new report on the pressures and challenges facing the UK justice system

--oo00oo--

Transforming justice : the interplay of social change and policy reforms

Resources and the justice system

Executive summary

The justice system in England and Wales is a significant area of public spending (£11.8 billion in day-to-day spending in 2025–26) and touches on almost every aspect of economic and social life. It has also seen many important changes and reforms in recent decades. Despite the scale of change and the central importance of justice in underpinning economic and social relations as well as trust in the state, economists have paid relatively little attention to these developments.

In this report, we bring together insights developed through the IFS Transforming Justice programme, established in 2024 and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, to respond to this relative lack of quantitative economic analysis. These insights emerge from a range of studies undertaken to date that examine different parts of the justice system. The programme is interested in all areas of the justice system, but the examples we draw on reflect the areas in which our analysis under the programme is most developed. We organise the evidence presented in this report around one connecting theme: the importance of understanding the role of resources for the functioning of the justice system, where resources refer not only to financial spending, but to a fuller set of inputs that shape the justice system’s capacity and performance, including infrastructure and management. The studies presented demonstrate why it matters to understand how resources are deployed within the justice system, whether the system is allocating and using resources efficiently, and how resources shape justice outcomes and outcomes outside the justice system itself. While the important role of resources forms the backdrop of much existing legal and social science research on justice systems, our studies show how economics research can advance understanding of how justice systems work and how they may work better.

Key insights

1. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ)’s day-to-day budget – £11.8 billion in day-to-day spending in 2025–26 – is a key input into the financial resources of the justice system. It saw large reductions in the early 2010s, followed by a partial recovery in recent years. Between 2007–08 and 2016–17, this budget was reduced by 33% in real terms, compared with a 3% reduction in total day-to-day departmental spending. MoJ spending began to recover from 2016–17, and by 2025–26 the day-to-day budget stood 2.4% below its 2002–03 level in real terms. Current plans imply real-terms growth in day-to-day justice funding of around 1.8% per year between 2025–26 and 2028–29, faster than the 1.2% per year average for overall departmental spending. Recent increases are expected to undo, in aggregate, the spending reductions of the early 2010s, but spending per person in 2025–26 remains 17% lower than its 2002–03 level.

2. Pressures on justice system resources are shaped by demand on the system. For example, the number of open cases in party-to-state tribunals reached a record 330,000 in early 2026, driven largely by rapid growth in the number of appeals. As a result, average waiting times have risen substantially: asylum and immigration appeals were taking 61 weeks to resolve in early 2026, compared with 23 weeks in 2013, while social security appeals (predominantly for disability benefit applications) were taking 35 weeks, compared with 18 weeks in 2013. These delays – in part a result of increasingly stretched resources – appear to reflect rising demand more than a recent deterioration in the productivity of tribunals.

3. Productivity, management and organisation can, however, have large effects on outcomes in the justice system, helping to determine how effectively justice institutions convert existing resources into results. We provide three examples. In the Crown Court, sitting days increased by 32% between 2019 and 2024, but case disposals rose by only 20%, which helps explain why backlogs continued to grow despite increased court capacity. In policing, differences in the characteristics and operational practices of Borough Commanders explain around one-quarter of the variation in crimes solved per officer across London police divisions. Finally, in prisons, independent inspections reduced violence by around 12 incidents per 1,000 prisoners per month in the 15 months following an inspection, without requiring an increase in staffing or expenditure. Instead, inspections appear to work by changing how existing resources and practices are managed.

4. The geographic allocation of justice resources can affect access to justice and outcomes. Since the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, volumes of civil legal aid cases have fallen by around 57%, and the number of providers has fallen from roughly 3,000 in 2010 to 1,400 by 2024, leaving 38 local authorities with no observed civil legal aid provider activity in 2023. In London, police station closures increased the average distance for households to the nearest station from around 1.3 kilometres to 3 kilometres and were associated with a 9% increase in violent crime in affected neighbourhoods. Court closures have similarly increased travel distances, with the average distance for households to their nearest magistrates’ court more than doubling, from 5.7 kilometres to 12.1 kilometres.

5. The justice system can be affected by decisions made about resource allocation outside the system. For example, following a 71% real-terms reduction in youth service spending between 2011 and 2019, around 40% of youth clubs closed, and young people in London who lost access to nearby clubs became 14% more likely to commit an offence. Evidence from Sure Start similarly suggests that early years interventions can reduce more serious offending later in life. These examples show that spending on services for children and families can generate substantial downstream effects on crime and reduce pressures on justice institutions, meaning the returns to such spending may be larger than conventional assessments imply.

6. How we measure the benefits of justice interventions can substantially affect assessments of value for money. We illustrate this with an example using the fact that conventional estimates of the social costs of crime primarily focus on victims. However, evidence presented in this report suggests that crime also imposes high costs on witnesses. Accounting for these wider effects increases estimated social costs of individual crimes by around 25% on average and by around 28% for violent crime. Over time, victimisation rates fell by 25% between 2003–04 and 2014–15, yet once the costs borne by witnesses are included, the aggregate social costs of crime are estimated to have remained largely unchanged. These findings suggest that the returns to policies that prevent crime – from being witnesses to reducing victimisation – may be substantially larger than conventional measures imply.

7. Together, these findings point to a broader conclusion. Budget levels alone do not capture all the constraints facing the justice system. How resources are used and how different parts of the system interact matter as much as how much is spent, and decisions about resource allocation made outside the justice system can shape its outcomes too.

Burnham Doesn't Get It

Just as we thought, Andy knows nothing about the Criminal Justice System and the proof comes in his new government's announcement last night:-

Fixing the prison and probation crisis

The Government is taking action to keep the most dangerous offenders locked up, expand prison capacity and strengthen protections for victims and the public.

This Government inherited a prison system in crisis, putting the public at grave risk. Prisons were on the brink of collapse, with capacity dangerously close to being exceeded. That’s why the Government is taking decisive action.

1. The Government is building new prison places. By 2031, there will be more prison places than ever before

• This Government has already built around 3,200 new prison places and aims to create 14,000 by 2031, giving communities confidence that those who pose the greatest risk will be locked up.

• We are also speeding up the deportation of foreign criminals, saving money for taxpayers and protecting the public from dangerous offenders. Over 11,700 foreign criminals including murderers and rapists have been removed since July 2024.

2. The Government is making changes to sentencing so that prison places are used for the most dangerous criminals

• The most dangerous offenders must be locked up for a long time. That will not change.

• We are introducing reforms to prison release arrangements through the Sentencing Act 2026 which change the amount of time offenders will spend in prison. However, over 18,000 offenders serving life and extended sentences, murderers and those serving sentences for rape and serious sexual child and grooming offences, are completely excluded from these changes.

• For offences with sentences of 12 months or less, there will be a presumption against custodial sentences in favour of community sentences – including unpaid work, electronic monitoring tags, curfews and exclusion zones. Courts will still be able to send offenders to prison when there is significant risk of harm to the victim or public.

3. The Government is improving the monitoring of offenders when they are released from prison

• Prisoners who are released will not be free and can be recalled to prison at any time if they step out of line. Victims will have a say over tough new restrictions on offenders leaving prison.

• A record £700m investment going into probation by 2028/29, which has already helped us hire 1,000 new trainee probation officers, will enable 1,300 more to be added by March 2027.

• It also means we can ramp up the electronic tagging of offenders on release from prison, with nearly all offenders tagged and subject to curfews and exclusion zones to keep victims safe.

• Rape and certain child sex offenders will now face tighter controls than ever before after leaving prison, with more intensive probation supervision and a mandatory condition that will give constant access to their location via a GPS tag.

• We are also expanding other protections including chemical suppression for sex offenders, random drug testing, and bans from driving, pubs and events such as football matches.

4. The Government is improving support for victims

• The Government is introducing a stronger package of support for victims, including increased and improved contact to all affected victims.

• This will be supported by a £10m boost for victim support to fund extra local frontline services for victims to get trauma-focussed support.

• This is on top of the largest ever investment into specialist services that offer practical and emotional support to victims and witnesses. Over half a billion pounds of funding over the next three years will help charities and others deliver support like counselling and advice on attending court.

• A dedicated victim helpline will be available by October for all those affected by the reforms to provide emotional support and practical guidance.

--oo00oo--

The future appears to be already written. Published a few hours ago, here's the answer, here's the fix! I personally struggle with the logic of creating more routes to recall people back to prison whilst at the same time trying to free up space. Available capacity stands at around 1800 places. Early release scheme hopes to free up a further 1500 places. Recall figures however exceed 50,000 in the last year. My maths are not great, but I just can't see how they hope to achieve anything.

'Getafix

*****
The order of priority & language is essential to understand that nothing has changed in downing street or whitehall for decades & decades:

"As Home Secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s government from 1979 to 1983, Willie Whitelaw pursued a hard-line law and order agenda. He is best known for introducing the "short, sharp shock" policy for young offenders and embarking on major prison-building programs to tackle rising street crime."

Michael Howard: "Prison Works": Argued that keeping serious and persistent criminals behind bars reduces crime rates through incapacitation and deterrence.

Deterrence and Detection: Advocated for an across-the-board approach focusing heavily on measures to catch and punish lawbreakers rather than relying solely on social or economic explanations for crime.

Rejection of Fatalism: Maintained that rising crime is not an inevitable fact of modern life and can be reversed with political will.

The bliarweasel project: "Tony Blair famously defined his approach to law and order with the 1993 political slogan: "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime." This dual strategy balanced strict enforcement and punishment for offenders alongside social interventions addressing poverty, lack of opportunity, and family breakdown" - sadly he unleashed tough on criminals but failed to deliver when it came to "the causes of crime", viz- "The government policy under Tony Blair has been one of relentless attack on our civil liberties; the expansion of new police powers, the introduction of new offences, and harsher penalties with longer custodial sentences – all of which has been matched by an increased weakening of the safeguards in the criminal justice process."

Now we have burn'em & co:

1. The Government is building new prison places. By 2031, there will be more prison places than ever before "HUZZAHH!"
2. The Government is making changes to sentencing so that prison places are used for the most dangerous criminals "LOCK 'EM'UP"
3. The Government is improving the monitoring of offenders when they are released from prison "MAKE THE PUNISHMENT LAST AS LONG AS POSSIBLE"
4. The Government is improving support for victims

A serious point can be made here whereby prioritising & elevating the victim's status whilst confabulating it with the means or severity of the punishment is not healthy. It runs the risk of making the victim a 'legitimate' target (in the eyes of the perpetrator) & potentially places the victim in greater peril, e.g. if the victim can be silenced then the punishment might be less harsh. The victim's voice is undoubtedly important, but the justice system should be the arbiter of punishment, not the volume, articulation or skill of the victim's opinion. Similarly I would argue that the imposition of victim work upon the probation service was, again, a big mistake. It has led to some terrible conflicts of interest.

*****
And there it is again.

The Government’s shiny new “Fixing the prison and probation crisis” page tells the public that prisoners released under these reforms “can be recalled to prison at any time if they step out of line”, that nearly all offenders will be electronically tagged, and that short sentences will increasingly be replaced by community sentences.

Who exactly does Government think is going to manage all of this? Because every one of those policies creates work for probation. More people managed in the community. More licence supervision. More electronic monitoring information. More curfews and exclusion zones. More potential breaches. More decisions about whether behaviour represents escalating risk. And, inevitably, more recall decision-making.

Then comes the reassurance: £700m and recruitment. Except read the Government’s own words carefully. The investment has apparently helped recruit 1,000 new TRAINEE probation officers, with another 1,300 to be added by March 2027.

We have literally just been discussing Millsike, where the Government accepts that having physical capacity isn’t enough because inexperienced staff require time to develop the skills and confidence to operate safely. Apparently probation works differently. And Getafix raises another rather obvious problem. Government is desperately trying to create prison capacity while simultaneously creating more routes through which people in the community can be recalled back into those same prisons.

Meanwhile OFPS is supposed to release 25% of probation capacity by reducing the amount of professional supervision some people receive. Which part of this is the coherent strategy?

More people in the community. More tagging. More surveillance. More potential breaches. More recalls. Less practitioner contact. An inexperienced workforce being recruited at pace. And a WMT that’s about to disappear. Yet the Government page presents all of this under the wonderfully reassuring heading:

“Fixing the prison and probation crisis.”

From the frontline it looks rather more like moving the crisis out of the prison gate and expecting probation to carry it. And when that doesn’t work, I suspect we’ll hear the same thing we always hear: “Lessons will be learned.” Perhaps somebody could try learning them before this time.

Romeo Special

From Daily Mail:-
Andy Burnham's top mandarin is facing questions over her own role in the prison overcrowding crisis that is leading to thousands of criminals being released early.

Dame Antonia Romeo, now Cabinet Secretary, was in charge of the Ministry of Justice for four years as problems mounted with the plan to build more cells. She was accused by MPs of presiding over a 'ticking timebomb' as her department knew that existing jails were rapidly running out of space yet the construction of new sites was delayed.

On her watch the MoJ built just 6,518 new places were built out of a promised 20,000, and the target will only be reached five years late according to the National Audit Office. When grilled by the Public Accounts Committee last year, Dame Antonia admitted there had been a 'degree of slippage in the delivery' but blamed unexpected developments including planning hold-ups.

She was also challenged over the MoJ's decision to sign a 10-year lease on HMP Dartmoor despite knowing the site had high levels of radon gas, meaning that hundreds of much-needed cells cannot be used.

Former prison governor John Podmore told the Daily Mail: 'She dug a big hole and Andy Burnham jumped right into it. 'While she was at the Ministry of Justice she watched it all go wrong. I didn't see any intervention that she did. 'The overcrowding crisis has been around for a long time but they haven't taken any responsibility.'

He said the department could have created more room by stopping so many suspects being held in jail on remand ahead of long-delayed trials, or by reducing the large number of released prisoners being recalled to jail for minor licence breaches.

Instead, the Prime Minister is now having to consider more radical proposals to free up space - in order to prevent the killers of PC Andrew Harper being included in the looming early release scheme - such as putting men in women's jails.

Another ex governor, Prof Ian Acheson, pointed out that Dame Antonia was previously responsible for the disastrous £4billion part-privatisation of the probation service, which later had to be reversed. He said: 'The connected upper class of the Senior Civil Service giving the PM advice on this political crisis bear some of the blame for the mess the criminal justice system is in.

'Romeo now sits at the side of the Prime Minister and represents continuity of the administrative class who have presided over chaos with no answers apart from 'No, Prime Minister'.

'The Ministry of Justice in a tight field is one of the worst departments in Whitehall. When the dust settles on this latest debacle, Andy Burnham would do well to consider a wholesale clear out of officials who have served him so poorly.'

But a Government source insisted: 'It is totally ridiculous to claim that anyone is responsible for the prisons crisis Labour inherited other than the Tory ministers who ignored repeated warnings from officials and refused to take action.'

Insiders said that key decisions that led to the overcrowding crisis, including increasing prison sentences as well as failing to provide enough funding, were taken by Tory-era ministers rather than officials.

A Government spokesman added: 'As Permanent Secretary at the MoJ, Antonia led the programme for new prison places, which included opening three new prisons with over 4,500 new prison places and plans to deliver 14,000 by 2031.

'She and her team consistently worked to prevent the prison system reaching maximum capacity, including during the summer riots in 2024 where she led the response of the Criminal Justice System to bring offenders swiftly to justice.'

*******
A significant Twitter thread:-

I've absolutely avoided the tittle tattle around Romeo's previous conduct mainly because of my own experience of being a pushy outsider in CS. I've focused on aspects of her performance which have been effectively memory holed. 'Transforming Rehabilitation' is exhibit A.

Romeo while DG at the MoJ was Senior Responsible Officer for this part privatisation of the probation service which was a total disaster from start to finish. Government ideological vandalism certainly but implemented by her.

She assured parliament the doomed transformation programme “is going to work and isn’t taking on any unnecessary risk” It was a total fuck up from start to finish when Probation was returned to public sector after wastage of £467 million underestimated costs and bail outs.

The probation union said the process was a “shambles” with “zero communication”, increased paperwork, fragmented risk management, deskilling and demoralisation of staff, and poorer outcomes for offenders being supervised. In other words it put the community at greater risk.

£9 million alone was spent on consultancy trying to gild this turd while probation officers had their pay frozen. The National Audit Office demolished the programme finding 'systemic failings' in design and implementation, aspects she was fully responsible for as SRO.

So it's for this reason and this alone I have serious reservations about the spin that says she's equal to the task of 'rewiring government.' It doesn't matter that she's a women and ambitious (oh no!) or all the fluff around her media profile. What matters is *delivery*.

But airbrushing serious failures won't cut it either. The systemic rot in the senior lanyard class in public service is a 'mediocracy' - people promoted up to and well beyond their level of competence. Not sure she's the best exemplar of how to tackle that. We shall see.

Ian Acheson

*******
"The systemic rot in the senior lanyard class in public service is a 'mediocracy'"

After all of the failures & waste of public money la romeo has been responsible for, someone with media clout has finally said it out loud.

John Podmore also alluded to it last week on R4 (referred to on this blog previously), but without going as far as Ian (possible bbc editing? possibly being cautious?). But la romeo has been at the heart of the destruction of justice for a long time, at least 8 years' at the helm in varying roles:

2011-13, Director General, Transformation.
2013 -15, Director General, Criminal Justice
2021-25, Ministry of Justice as permanent secretary

Dame Antonia Romeo (Jan 2021 – Mar 2025)
Sir Richard Heaton KCB (Aug 2015 – Aug 2020)
Ursula Brennan (July 2012 – July 2015) – Retired
Sir Suma Chakrabarti (May 2007 – 2012)

There's also this motley crew from noms/hmpps who aided & abetted the catastrophe:

Martin Narey (2004 to 2005)
Helen Edwards (2005 to 2008)
Phil Wheatley as Director-General (2008 to 2010)
Michael Spurr (2010 to 2019)
Jo Farrar (2019 to 2022)
Amy Rees (2022 to 2025)
Phil Copple as interim (2025)
James McEwen (2025 to present)

And any assortment of shadowy senior civil servants who shun the limelight but happily impose stupid, uninformed policies upon the minions.

******
There is an interesting contrast between the discussion about Antonia Romeo and the SFO discussion above. When accountability reaches senior organisational level, suddenly context matters enormously: political decisions, funding constraints, planning delays, competing pressures and decisions made elsewhere in the system.

And actually, context should matter. Complex systems fail for complex reasons. But surely the same principle has to apply when examining the actions of an individual PP.

If a practitioner was carrying an excessive workload, covering sickness, working within an organisational supervision model, unable to access accommodation or treatment, dealing with poor information sharing and making decisions within the time and resources available, those aren’t excuses to be stripped away before examining their practice. They are part of the evidence.

Perhaps genuine organisational learning starts when we become as interested in the context surrounding frontline decisions as we apparently are in the context surrounding decisions made at the top.

******
When there's glory to be grasped, Alpha Romeo is more than happy to be in the spotlight.

“To get large transformation programmes working, you’ve got to have really good assurance in place so that you know you’re not believing your own hype”

“My job as senior responsible officer is to make sure we deliver the benefits of the programme. We need to really understand what’s going on – and there are no prizes for not listening.”

Most offenders, she points out, have “a very complex and intractable set of problems that need to be looked at holistically.”

As the new system is established, these will be identified using what Romeo calls an “actuarial tool”: a piece of software that “looks at all the indicators and does something rather complicated and determines what level of risk someone is.” ... Romeo emphasises that the final decision will be made by NPS professionals – as will decisions over whether to recategorise offenders once the system is up and running.

There is clearly a political timetable behind the pace at which the MoJ is moving... Romeo acknowledges that the ministry hasn’t trialled its final proposals anywhere. “You have to turn on the statute once nationally,” she says.

“The Cabinet Office has a very clear process for awarding contracts.”

"I personally listen very carefully to what people tell me; and I go out all the time and talk to trusts, and to local authorities, and to police and crime commissioners.”

******
Powerful friends are useful, especially when you share a longstanding agenda.

"The Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team broke into a safe and destroyed the department’s copy of a historic bullying investigation into the new head of the civil service. In 2022 Darren Tierney, the then director-general of the government standards watchdog, asked maintenance staff to force open the vault. Reports surfaced that the department's copy of the Romeo file was disposed of following the vault breach... He later said he had wanted access to a confidential report about Dame Antonia Romeo. The Cabinet Office stated that the manual opening of the broken safe was routine due to a mechanical failure" - The Times/Telegraph & others

* Darren Tierney previously worked under Antonia Romeo when she headed the Department for International Trade (DIT) before later becoming the Director-General for Propriety and Ethics in the Cabinet Office

It seems there's a strong link between Romeo & the Cabinet Office...

"In July 2022, Francis Maude launched an independent review of UK civil service governance and accountability... Antonia Romeo—acting then as the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Justice—officially sponsored and supported the review alongside Maude.. Romeo later advanced to become Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service, putting her at the head of the department where Maude previously drove major structural reforms as Minister for the Cabinet Office" civil service world & others.

"News of the government’s intention to reform the civil service began to emerge in 2020. At the time, the agenda was being pushed by then-Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser of PM Boris Johnson. Maude will chair the latest review, with the support of Ministry of Justice permanent secretary Antonia Romeo"

2010: Romeo transferred to the Cabinet Office as the Executive Director in the new Efficiency and Reform Group under Francis Maude.

But not everyone's in thrall to alpha romeo:

"Antonia did not arrive in the senior civil service by the usual route of decades in a single department. She arrived through the coordination layer, the place where the various arms of the British state meet and agree their stories.

[romeo's] is not the career of a specialist. It is the career of a fixer. Intelligence liaison, efficiency reform, transformation, implementation, delivery. Every job title is a verb dressed up as a noun, and none of them leaves a paper trail you can scrutinise in a newspaper.

There was a reason for the trajectory, and his name was Jeremy Heywood, later Lord Heywood of Whitehall, who was Cabinet Secretary from 2012 until his death in 2018... Heywood was Romeo's mentor. He personally asked her to stay in the civil service when she was considering leaving, and sent her to New York. He smoothed her path to DIT, reportedly striking a "trade-off" with Theresa May, according to the Mail on Sunday's 2020 reporting, to secure her appointment despite the New York investigation.

Past performance is the best predictor of future performance. On past performance, Antonia Romeo is precisely what a failing administrative state produces, elevates, and protects. Not despite the record. Because of it.

She will also, we are told, rewrite the Civil Service Code, which is a bit like asking the fox to redraft the henhouse security policy."

*****
Reading that old interview alongside this discussion is quite sobering. Forget personalities for a moment because the more important issue is institutional memory. We have been here before.

A major transformation programme. Pressure to release capacity. Increasing reliance on actuarial tools. Assurances that professional judgement will remain with practitioners. A nationally implemented model accompanied by confidence from the centre that the risks are understood and appropriately managed.

TR subsequently failed, at enormous financial and human cost. So surely one of the most important questions for OFPS is: what has HMPPS actually learned from that experience? Because the line from that 2014 interview that really stands out now is: “You’ve got to have really good assurance in place so that you know you’re not believing your own hype.”

Quite.

If OFPS is deliberately attempting to release 25% of practitioner capacity through new tiering and supervision arrangements, where is the independent assurance that the model can safely do that? What happens if the assumptions underpinning the actuarial tools prove wrong? How will unintended consequences be identified once implemented? And crucially, who owns that risk?

That’s why this connects directly with SFO accountability. It cannot be acceptable for the organisation to design the model, determine the available resource and set the parameters of supervision, but for the individual practitioner to inherit the consequences if those assumptions subsequently prove wrong.

TR should have taught HMPPS that organisational optimism is not evidence. The question is whether anyone retained the lesson.

Without Probation None of This Can Happen

“Promises of extra investment are starting to sound like snake oil... Napo is urging government to listen to probation professionals... HMPPS has previously been issued with seven key demands, with deadlines for implementation"

Probation's been spoon-fed snake oil for decades. Local, regional & national management have been collectively holding the noses of probation staff & pouring it down their throats. No matter how its been disguised & delivered - Choreographed, Trusted, Transformed or Reset - it still tastes like shit.

Difficulty is that the unions (plural) have no authority, no gracvitas, no meaningful presence... just wobbly words of if's, but's, maybe's, wild claims & empty promises. They do a lot of "urging", so much so its a wonder they haven't had a prolapse. They do a lot of "demanding", but from a position of subservience & learned helplessness.

The "indicative" ballot is, as [has been pointed out] above, not exactly overwhelming when 9% of however many of the 6,135 members (no AR21 for 2025 yet, so this remains the 2024 membership figure) do not vote for it.

IF *all* members voted (I doubt they did) that's over 550 union members who, in this current climate of ever-worsening shitstorm, did NOT vote for "potential industrial action over workloads". If the current & impending situation isn't enough to make you fear the worst, what will it take?

Severally & individually you're in a position of extreme jeopardy, with the current dangerous levels of workload about to be ramped up beyond what is imaginable. The govt & hmpps haven't a fucking clue what they're doing & as an ex-prison governonr said on R4 yesterday, the PM is getting shit advice from a pack of inexperienced blowhards & his cabinet sec - ***who used to be the DG of HMPPS***. What he didn't go on to say was she was responsible for so much of the catastrophe that's been brewing for the last decade at least.

The whole Sentencing Act is about to be re-written - again - and it aint going to be pretty. Its already been rebranded as The New Progression Model ... one where the loudest cries of "foul" result in failure to release because hmpps will find some means of keeping the chosen ones in gaol for a few more weeks or months.

Meanwhile those moderate rightwingers wanting to 'reform' the country are having a ball, with ex-prison governor flakey frake signalling the return of the death penalty wouldn't go amiss. And 9% of however many voted (will we ever know?) think there's nothing to fret about?

Anon

*****

Whatever anyone thinks of Napo, 90.76% of those voting in an indicative ballot supporting potential industrial action should be impossible for HMPPS to dismiss as a few disgruntled staff.

I agree that Napo should publish the turnout and actual voting figures because transparency matters. But perhaps the bigger question is what happens next.

Probation has an unusual amount of public attention at the moment. Channel 4 is actively asking frontline staff to describe what is happening. Early release is dominating the news. Government is relying on “tougher community supervision” to reassure the public, while simultaneously expecting an already overstretched service to deliver it.

If ever there were a moment for probation staff to stop being the invisible part of the criminal justice system, surely this is it.

And this cannot be allowed to become simply an argument about wanting more pay or doing less work. Workloads, retention, experience, training, professional autonomy and yes, pay, all ultimately lead back to the same thing: public protection.

The government cannot tell the public that probation will provide the safety net for its sentencing and early-release policies while ignoring warnings from the people expected to provide that safety net.

The really interesting question now is whether Napo is prepared to use the leverage its members currently have, or whether we get another round of strongly worded statements, meetings, “urging” HMPPS to act and then watch the moment pass.

Because “without probation none of this can happen” is only a powerful statement if probation is finally prepared to act like it believes it.

Anon

Guest Blog 108

I can't help but wonder if our current Criminal Justice System has reached a point where it's now beyond repair, and a whole new system needs to be created across the board? Apart from the chaos of the early release scheme, I read this week that prison wings are being closed under the guise of renovation to hide staff shortages and high levels of sick days being taken.

I read too that the MoJ may have to close down more prison space because of dangerous levels of radon that is affecting several of our victorian prisons as the building materials used are starting to decay through age.

I also read that whilst the MoJ are struggling to release prisoners early, they have at the same time decided to increase prison punishments, increasing the number of added days a prisoner can be awarded from 42 days to 84 days.

https://insidetime.org/information/mean-spirited-and-unjust-why-the-mojs-new-rules-risk-undermining-rehabilitation/

It seems that every policy that is introduced has an alternative policy that works against it. Within my social group there is a retired probation officer (CQSW) who is very left wing in their views. There is also a retired prison officer (10 years a block screw) and extremely right wing in their views. There is also a couple of ex-cons (old lags now and also long retired) who's views stretch in betwwen. 

However, regardless of political opinion, everyone is on the same page with the CJS. It was never perfect, but it worked well. More importantly, it was respected. The police caught the offenders and brought them before the courts. The courts heard the case, weighed up all the circumstances and decided on the most appropriate punishment. If that happend to be imprisonment, then the convicted person would serve two thirds of the total sentence and be released without any post sentence supervision. For those sentenced to two years or longer the possibility of being granted parole after one third existed, and if granted release, came with the provision to engage with probation services. No consent, no parole.

The public respected this process. There was never any outcry that someone hadn't been given long enough, or someone was being released early on parole. There was never any media or victims making headlines demanding that someone serve the amount of time that they wanted to see them serve. The system was respected. The sword and the scales, and what ever decision the courts arrived at, or who ever the Parole Board released was just acceped as part of the overall process.

Probation was respected too. It worked to resettle and rehabitate those being released on parole, not by enforcement and control, but by support and encouragement.

The CJS needs to go back to somewhere near to what it was. Each agency needs the freedom to do it's own job and achieve its own specific purpose, what it was designed to do. The CJS needs to assert itself and not be driven by the court of public opinion because pandering to one group will always upset another group. It may not of been perfect, but there was a time when it all worked so well, and its really not all that long ago.

'Getafix

Memo to Andy

Dear Prime Minister, Andy

I've just watched your unscripted speech this morning in Enfield, the home of my formative years, and I believe you must earn considerable praise for your obvious determination to at last address the shame social care has become and deliver a solution. Well done for bringing forward Dame Louise Casey's Review, even though I've personally never forgiven her for further stigmatising offenders on Community Service by making them wear orange high vis jackets.

You clearly speak passionately on the subject of social care and this is to be welcomed, but seeing as we are still awaiting the appointment of a Probation Minister, one is left pondering firstly regarding your knowledge of the criminal justice system, and secondly your appetite for addressing a topic that the public has come to regard as requiring 'reform' by means of locking more people up, for longer?

You quite rightly highlighted the wisdom of trying to work collaboratively with other political parties in the hope of finding common ground rather than resorting to irritating point-scoring, but you are going to have to have rather more 'bottle' to tackle criminal justice which is equally crying out for reform, but with little or no hope for political consensus or indeed public understanding. But the cost savings and benefits to society could be enormous as our European neighbours have discovered with prison numbers significantly falling. Yes, falling!

May I be so bold as to suggest now would be a very good time to fulfill the Labour manifesto pedge of a thorough Review of the role, organisation and functioning of the once gold standard Probation Service and ensuring it returns to being part of a solution rather than part of the problem it's become under centralised HMPPS command and control. It has to break free of HM Prison Service subjugation and the civil service and return to local control as it was prior to part-privatisation. The current model is utterly failed and long-past regarded by many informed commentators as unfit for purpose.

Unlike social care, you may not have personal experience of the criminal justice system, but I urge you to appoint a suitably experienced person to undertake a Review of probation at the earliest opportunity because this vital public service is close to collapse.

I will end by applauding your Downing Street words on assuming office and particularly the pledge to treat people with decency and end rough sleeping. Of course these should be honourable aims of any government, but is particularly striking because you chose to 'say it out loud'. One of the main routes to rough sleeping is of course via the criminal justice system, so this should fit perfectly with your core belief and of course desire for devolution.

Our Collective Addiction

Just spotted this interesting Prospect article on our love of locking people up for ever-longer periods, the crisis it has created and inability of politicians to do anything about it.

We’re addicted to locking people up—but it doesn’t make any of us safer

Does Andy Burnham have the attention span, the will and the courage to tackle a collapsing justice system?

And there’s another one gone. So, farewell then, Lord Timpson, who managed a daring escape from his role as prisons minister just days before the latest farce engulfed his former department. He was over the wall and gone. As a reward for his 24 months in the job, he can attend the House of Lords for the rest of his days. Think of it as a form of rehabilitation.

Timpson was an imaginative appointment by Keir Starmer—and, by all accounts, pretty ineffective. But at least he put in a shift. In the past ten years there have been no fewer than 13 prison ministers. On average they serve for about nine months, which is the sort of term you can expect for ABH or possession of Class A drugs with intent to supply.

There is no organisation on the planet—barring Sunderland and Andy Burnham’s very own Everton—who would expel the boss on such a regular basis and hope for a different result.

Some will protest that the decision to grant early release to violent thugs isn’t the fault of the prisons: they just sit at the tail-end of a criminal justice system that is utterly broken. But you’re wasting your time looking for accountability. There have been ten justice secretaries in ten years. Average term: one year. About the same you’d get for carrying a knife or for dangerous driving.

Why are we releasing dangerous criminals back onto the streets? Because prisons are at a bursting point and by November there will be nowhere to put new offenders.

The easy thing here is to point the finger at one obvious cause. But there isn’t just one. After 14 years in power the Tories had expanded the prison estate by fewer than 500 places. So, it’s the Tories' fault. The Starmer government claimed to have opened a further 2,500 places. But most of those were due to a prison building programme started by the Tories. So, not all the Tories’ fault.

If we had a properly functioning probation service things might work better. A staggering number of ex-convicts—around 40,000 a year—are currently being recalled to prison. At any one time there are 13,000 to 15,000 people held in prison on recall, compared with the early 1990s when the figure was less than 100. So let’s not forget to blame Chris Grayling, whose dramatic reform of the probation service just over 10 years ago failed on every single count.

But the bigger problems lie further up the food chain. As a country, we are addicted to the pathetically deluded idea that by locking up more and more people for ever lengthier periods of time, we are solving anything.

Have we ever stopped to wonder why in England and Wales we incarcerate twice the proportion of the population of Germany and three times that of the Netherlands, Norway or Finland? We are currently scrambling to empty the bath at the bottom while both hot and cold taps are gushing away at the top.

We sling convicts in cells for up to 22 hours a day at a cost per head (£58k) which roughly equates to the school fees at some of our more exclusive private schools—say, Uppingham, where Lord Timpson spent his formative years. Do we educate or otherwise attempt to rehabilitate them while they’re in? Only in your dreams.

So let’s blame the judges, who will insist on locking people up for ever longer sentences. Unless you have the memory of a goldfish you will recall that barely a year ago David Gauke, one of those ten hapless MPs who briefly served as justice secretary in the last decade, published a weighty review about our addiction to sentence inflation. In 1993 we locked people up for 16 months on average: now it’s 22 months. For murder you used to get 12 years: now it’s 21 years.

But the judges are only doing what the law obliges them to do. Which takes us back to the politicians who keep ramping up prison sentences. Why? Well, Gauke partly blames the media for its persistent “tough on crime” narrative which has, over the years, convinced the general public that—in Chris “failing” Grayling’s words—our “jails are like holiday camps”.

So MPs think they are responding to public pressure. But public opinion is, in fact, all over the place when it comes to our criminal justice. More than three quarters of us believe that sentencing in England and Wales has become shorter in length, whereas the opposite is true. In other words, we’re not soft on offenders, but the public thinks we are.

However, public opinion is also much more nuanced on the effectiveness of prison. We do think violent people should be locked up, but 75 per cent of us think the prison system is failing. And we’ve got this far without even mentioning the crisis even further up the chain.

Two blockbuster reports from Lord Leveson have warned us that the court system has been so catastrophically destroyed that we have to contemplate junking aspects of the cherished jury system for it to stay afloat.

With some serious offences, you might now have to wait until 2030 to have your case heard: that’s four years of kicking your heels in a prison cell costing the taxpayer over £50k a year. As Leveson notes, the real day-to-day budget of the Ministry of Justice is set to be 14 per cent lower than in 2007/08. So let’s remember to blame George Osborne.

But don’t worry, because we have a new justice secretary, one Alex Norris. He is not a lawyer, but then neither were Chris Grayling (2012-15) or Liz Truss (2016-17), so there are, um, precedents. Mr Norris’s main professional experience hitherto is as an East Midlands area organiser for Unison while serving as councillor for the Basford ward on Nottingham City Council.

If the past is a guide to the future, he’ll be lucky if he’s still in post in a year’s time. Ands who would bet on the latest prisons minister, Catherine McKinnell, still being there in 10 months’ time?

When Andy Burnham walked into Downing Street he acknowledged that politicians haven’t been good enough and that they needed to raise their game. He promised a “circuit-breaker”.

If any part of government needs a circuit breaker it’s the entire shattered, malfunctioning criminal justice system. Is Burnham the man to have a painful and honest conversation about the multiple failures and the need for a drastic rethink of attitudes to crime and punishment? He has the vibes. Does he have the attention span, the will and the courage?

Alan Rusbridger

Alan Rusbridger was editor of Prospect from 2021 to 2025 and is the former head of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He was editor of the Guardian from 1995 to 2015.

An Explanation

It goes deeper than probation as a service. What we’re really seeing is the result of society and government failing people earlier and earlier, and those failures being funnelled into the criminal justice system. When housing, mental health care, education, youth services and addiction support are stripped back, people don’t disappear, they fall forward. By the time probation meets them, the harm is already layered and entrenched.

Probation was originally built on the principle of advising, assisting and befriending because it recognised that reality. It needed people with life experience, emotional intelligence, credibility and the confidence to exercise judgement. That model naturally attracted practitioners motivated by understanding people and working with complexity, not just enforcing rules.

The current model is based on something else entirely. It treats social failure as individual non-compliance and manages risk through restriction, surveillance and recall because meaningful support has been hollowed out elsewhere. In doing so, it reshapes who the service attracts and retains. Experience becomes inconvenient. Judgement becomes risky. Longevity becomes expensive.

Instead, the system now favours staff who can tolerate high throughput, follow process, meet targets and apply rules consistently, even when those rules don’t improve outcomes. That isn’t a criticism of individuals, it’s a consequence of design. When discretion is discouraged and autonomy removed, the role no longer rewards depth or experience, it rewards compliance.

Younger people are arriving already failed by multiple systems, and probation inherits the responsibility without the tools to repair the damage. When outcomes don’t improve, the response is tighter control rather than upstream investment.

Probation hasn’t just lost its original purpose. It has been deliberately reshaped to absorb social failure while presenting enforcement as solution, and in the process it is transforming both who the service is for and who it wants working in it.

Anon

A Parallel Universe?

Free Thinking : Crime and punishment medieval to modern 

Now here's a question. How can you have an hour long BBC Radio 4 radio discussion on the English criminal justice system and talk a lot about how prisons don't work, but never once mention the Probation Service? Lord Sumption mentioned pre-sentence reports, but only in the context of mental health and community service as an alternative punishment. He was completely dismissive of rehabilitation being possible in any meaningful way. He was correct in saying the public, and consequently politicians, were only interested in 'revenge', so we were highly likely to carry on spending vast sums of money on a system that makes people worse. Other guests felt people needed 'help' with issues such as drug addiction or mental health, but there seems to be a complete systemic bout of collective amnesia as far as probation is concerned, like it never existed. Maybe we've all been in a parallel universe for the past 100 years or more. Listen to it and either get angry or weep.

Crime and punishment medieval to modern 

How have attitudes to punishment changed over time, and what ideas about the rationale for punishment are circulating today? 

In Radio 4's roundtable discussion programme, Matthew Sweet and guests explore the criminal justice system through history. With: 

Stephanie Brown, Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Hull and BBC / AHRC New Generation Thinker on the scheme which puts research on radio 

Scout Tzofiya Bolton, poet and broadcaster who presents on National Prison Radio, and for Radio 4 the Illuminated episode called The Ballad of Scout and the Alcohol Tag. Her poetry collection is called The Mad Art of Doing Time 

Joanna Hardy-Susskind, criminal barrister and presenter for Radio 4 of a series called You Do Not Have To Say Anything 

Stephen Shapiro, Professor of American Literature at the University of Warwick 

Jonathan Sumption, former Supreme Court judge and now Moral Maze panellist for BBC Radio 4 and author of a five-volume account of The Hundred Years War

--oo00oo--

As an aside, this got a mention (AI generated):-

In January 2026, UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood expressed a desire to modernize the criminal justice system by using AI and technology to replicate the surveillance goals of Jeremy Bentham's 18th-century "Panopticon" prison design.

Here are the key details regarding her remarks:

The Vision: In an interview with Tony Blair, Mahmood stated her "ultimate vision" was to achieve, "by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon".

"Eyes of the State": She explicitly stated that her goal is for "the eyes of the state can be on you at all times," aiming to use AI to get ahead of criminals.

AI-Powered Policing: The proposal is part of a broader, £140 million plan to overhaul policing, which includes a massive expansion of live facial recognition (LFR) technology, increasing surveillance vans from 10 to 50.

Criticism: The comments have been heavily criticized by opposition politicians and civil liberties groups, with some describing it as an "authoritarian" or "dystopian" move towards a "Big Brother" state.

Context: While the original Bentham Panopticon was a design for a prison where inmates could be observed without knowing they were being watched, Mahmood’s vision extends this concept to the use of data, AI, and facial recognition in public life.

Fair and Sustainable to Blame?

We all know there's a crisis in the prison system and I was struck by the following contribution posted yesterday:- 

Problems in staffing prisons go back many years and include the introduction of a two tier system for pay, terms and conditions known as ‘Fair and Sustainable.’ (FAST). Essentially, you could undergo career progression if you agreed to a new contract of employment which offered lesser terms and conditions. 

The old hands quite rightly refused because of the impact upon pensions and as a consequence, were not allowed to apply for permanent promotion, although many were given ‘temporary,’ or ‘acting,’ positions which they kept for years.

What happened next was that young or inexperienced officers, denied pay progression because of austerity, applied for promotion to grades they wouldn’t normally be qualified for, and in the absence of any competition, they got the job.

The problems on the wings became enormous and over time, the longer serving members of staff left or retired. This is a part explanation for the exodus, but of course, as with probation, the problems are multi-fold and the solutions complex.

The most obvious solution in my mind would be, don’t try to screw your staff and introduce change by negotiation, consultation, and listening. Who knows, the idea might rub off on other areas of the CJS.

Of course the man in charge was hugely optimistic in 2012:- 

Fair and sustainable 

Revision to proposals for working structures in HM Prison Service following the consultation with trade unions

Foreword 

This document sets out a revised set of plans following consultation with our trades unions, staff associations and our broader engagement with staff. Since we launched Fair and sustainable in November 2011, we have met with hundreds of staff and received feedback and questions from hundreds more. This process of consultation and listening has been essential in helping us identify gaps and issues in our plans which we have sought to address where possible. 

The feedback that you and your union representatives have provided collectively has helped us improve our thinking and clarify our plans. As a result we have made a number of amendments that we believe will enhance the ambitions of these plans to be both sustainable for the future and particularly make our plans even fairer for current staff. 

These amendments are set out in the beginning of this document but include: the retention of the non-consolidated payments for Staff Personal Development Record (SPDR) performance for eligible staff remaining on current terms and conditions; an acknowledgement of the impact of the changes to local pay allowances, with the provision of a compensation package on promotion within affected sites; and moving the transition timetable to allow DPSMs to complete their Job Similation Assessment Centre (JSAC) before selection to roles takes place.

I hope that you are now clear that the plans for new terms and conditions set out in Fair and sustainable only relate to pay arrangements – that is salary, hours, pay point progression allowances, and payments. Unless you opt-in to the new terms and conditions set out in this document, Fair and sustainable makes no changes to your current pay. Nor does Fair and sustainable impact on any other parts of terms and conditions such as leave entitlement, sickness or pensions.

In an environment of increased competition and diverse market for the provision of offender services these plans remain absolutely vital for the ongoing competitiveness of HM Prison Service. The future presents a clear challenge for the Service, and these plans represent the Service’s intelligent and necessary response. 

It is this fact that has driven a very productive relationship with all trades unions to deliver their support for these plans which, for the POA, was validated by a ballot of their members who voted overwhelmingly to endorse Fair and sustainable. In introducing these changes we have been clear that our aim is to avoid compulsary redundancies as far as possible. The transitional measures set out in this document which we have agreed with trade unions, mean that we are now in a good position to do that. 

Preparations are now underway to introduce these plans in establishments. New structures will be in place for April 2013, when staff will all be working in their new roles, to new job descriptions which have all been assessed by the new job evaluation system (JES). 

To get there we have a clear and structured process to guide all prisons through the transition as smoothly as possible. However, I do not under-estimate the impact that this will have on all of you, and the Service in general. This is not just about structural change but, much more importantly, about moving to a new, and better, way of working. To do this we will need to manage this change in a way that is fair and decent to our staff and protects the spirit, pride and strong delivery that defines HM Prison Service. I am determined that we will achieve this.

Michael Spurr

Chief Executive Officer