Fiction Mimics Reality

Cannes 2016: Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake wins Palme d'Or

This from the News Republic website:- 

Loach film on shame of poverty in Britain moves Cannes to tears

Director Ken Loach denounced the British government's "conscious cruelty" towards the poor Friday after his film about the poverty and humiliation inflicted upon them by welfare cuts had critics at the Cannes film festival in tears. The left-wing director, who turns 80 this year and is known for shining a light on the downtrodden, also got lengthy applause and shouts of "Bravo!" at a press conference after "I, Daniel Blake" was screened.

It tells of carpenter Daniel Blake's Kafkaesque journey to get benefits in Britain after suffering a heart attack and being told by doctors he can no longer work. But an invisible and oft-cited "decision-maker" rules he is too healthy for benefits. Blake befriends a young single mother of two who is sanctioned for being late to the benefits centre, leaving her with no money for food.

"The most vulnerable people are told their poverty is their own fault," Loach told reporters. "If you have no work it is your fault that you haven't got a job. It is shocking. It is not an issue just for people in our country, it is throughout Europe and there is a conscious cruelty in the way we are organising our lives now," he said.

Because Blake is denied illness benefits he is forced to apply for assistance for unemployment. That in turn forces him to spend hours hunting for jobs which he has to turn down because he is too sick to work.

Loach said that in researching the film, those who carry out assessments of people like Daniel admitted they were "given instructions on how to deal with potential suicides." The movie's writer Paul Laverty said the research team was stunned at how people with mental health issues and disabilities were targeted by the welfare cuts. He said people interviewed within the Department for Work and Pensions told them "they were humiliated at how they were forced to treat the public. There is nothing accidental about it."

The story taps into the despair over rising unemployment and austerity in Europe after the financial crisis. "When I read the script I thought we have really got to make this straight away, it's such an important story to tell," producer Rebecca O'Brien said. The movie was warmly received by critics and Variety magazine called it "a work of scalding and moving relevance."

Stand-up comedian and lead actor Dave Johns, who comes from Newcastle in the north east of England where the film is set, tweeted his delight at the notices: "Blown away by the reviews for our film I Daniel Blake. Let's hope it shames those that should be shamed into change."

Some of the most excruciating scenes in the film show Blake's frustrations in trying to understand how to use a computer to appeal the decision cutting his benefit. Another has the young mother he befriends, Katie, tearing open a tin of baked beans and shovelling the contents into her mouth with her hand.

At a photocall for his film's premiere Loach, in a typically down to earth touch, went to shake hands with photographers. The director and both his main actors have a working-class background and the actress who plays the young single mother, Katie -- Hayley Squires -- said her mother still lives in social housing.

Squires slammed anti-welfare "propaganda" that she said has turned working class people against each other. "Normal people are led to believe that this amount of people are on benefits and are therefore scroungers, and this amount of people are going to work to pay so that they can scrounge. They've left us to argue among ourselves so they can keep doing what they are doing."

Loach agreed: "It's how the far right rises, isn't it? It's how the far right rises."

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From the Guardian:- 

Suicides of benefit claimants reveal DWP flaws, says inquiry

A series of secret internal inquiries into the deaths of people claiming social security reveal that ministers were repeatedly warned of shortcomings in the treatment of vulnerable claimants facing potentially traumatic cuts to their benefits entitlements. The conclusions are contained in 49 Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) inquiry reports finally released to campaigners on Friday after a two-year Freedom of Information (FOI) battle. Some 40 of the reports followed a suicide. In 10 cases, the claimant had had their benefits sanctioned.

Although the heavily redacted reports do not draw a direct link between the death of a claimant and problems caused by their dealings with the benefits system, they highlight widespread flaws in the handling by DWP officials of claims by people with mental illness or learning difficulty. The reports, called “peer reviews,” appear to challenge blanket claims by ministers that there is no connection between government welfare reform policies and the deaths of vulnerable claimants.

Several suggest that claimants who died may not have received adequate support from DWP staff handling their benefit claims. At least five of the reports call for major reviews or substantial changes to procedures on identifying and supporting vulnerable claimants. Many of them centre on the much-criticised Work Capability Assessment (WCA), the test used to assess whether claimants are fit for work. Campaigners argue the tests are flawed and linked to health relapses, depression, self-harm, and suicides.

Activists have linked the WCA to a string of tragic deaths – including poet Paul Reekie, former sheep farmer Nick Barker and ex-security guard Brian McArdle – all of whom died after being found “fit for work” and told by the DWP that they would lose their out-of-work disability benefits.

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This from the Independent:-

Calls for Government investigation after benefit assessors caught ‘mocking the disabled’ by undercover reporter

MPs and campaigners are calling for an urgent investigation into the Government’s benefit tests after an assessor was filmed dismissing a claimant’s “disability known as fat”. The man, who conducts Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessments for Capita, was filmed by an undercover reporter claiming employees could earn £20,000 a month “most months” by rushing through claims.

Channel 4’s Dispatches programme sent a psychiatric nurse through Capita’s 20-year disability assessment training, where a senior staff member urged him to do “as many assessments a day as you can possibly manage”.After being sent to Northampton to learn the ropes, a disability assessor called Alan was filmed claiming he could get paid £20,000 a month by “flying through” interviews, sometimes even completing forms before meeting claimants.

The same staff member was seen dismissing a claimant’s “disability known as being fat”, adding: “She asks for help to wipe her arse because she’s too f***ing fat to do it herself.”

The footage has generated outrage as controversy continues over the Government’s changes to disability benefits and how they are awarded. Mencap condemned the “derogatory and offensive attitudes” on show, saying it showed policy was failing to support claimants. Dan Scorer, the charity’s head of policy, called for an urgent independent review into how PIP assessments are carried out.

“We already know that disability benefit assessments are flawed, with wrong decisions made every day causing thousands of people to suffer emotionally and financially,” he said.

Owen Smith, the shadow Work and Pensions Secretary also called for a probe into the “extremely troubling” report. In a letter to Stephen Crabb, Iain Duncan Smith’s successor, he wrote: “There has long been widespread concern about Government contractors and their ability to accurately conduct these tests. “But this Dispatches report shows a flagrant disregard for the claimants and is extremely troubling.”

Perspectives on Prison Reform

I suspect prison reform is going to be topical for some time and to be honest it's quite refreshing to see the subject being examined intelligently for once. The trouble is though that when the penny finally drops that any improvement will have to involve sentencing reform, normal hysterical service in the tabloids will resume. Thankfully until that point we can at least rely on the Guardian to talk sense, as in this extract from an editorial in today's sister paper the Observer and which even mentions the probation service:-

The Observer view on prison reform

There has long been strong evidence that suspended and community sentences are both vastly cheaper and more effective in rehabilitating low-risk offenders. Yet ministers from all parties have failed to reform sentencing for fear of looking soft on crime. Kenneth Clarke was the first justice secretary to pledge to cut prison numbers in 2010, but after being attacked by some in the press for being “soft on the causes of crime” was swiftly moved out of post.

The government’s proposals for prison reform, announced in last week’s Queen’s Speech, mark a break from the past. Governors of six “reform prisons” will be given new freedoms over budgets and the running of their prisons. There will be a greater emphasis on life after prison, with improvements to the shockingly bad existing education provision found in most prisons described on these pages by Peter Stanford, and prisoners will be able to access the internet to support independent learning and contact with families. Prisons will be held accountable through league tables that compare reoffending rates, literacy levels and employment outcomes for prisoners who have been released.

There is much here to be welcomed. But there are also significant risks to the government’s stated objective of improving outcomes for offenders once they are released.

Justice secretary Michael Gove has drawn inspiration for his “reform prisons” from his expansion of academy schools while he was at the education department. But are we really to believe ministers will allow prison governors to take risks with their new freedoms, given how risk-averse they have been in this area in the past? And, even more importantly, is it really prison governors’ lack of freedom that is the main factor in preventing prisons from playing a rehabilitory role? The most immediate problem facing the prison system is overcrowding. Many prisons are now operating at more than 150% of capacity. The prisonsbudget has been cut by a quarter since 2010, and the number of prison officers has fallen by a third, with many of the most experienced officers taking redundancy in recent years. This has resulted in intolerable conditions in many of our prisons: violence and drug dealing are rife; suicides are at their highest rate in years; and one in five prisoners in prisons inspected last year said they spent at least 22 hours a day locked in their cells. Overcrowding will stymie any attempt at progressive reform.

The key to reducing overcrowding is sentencing reform. A significant proportion of prisoners is made up of people churning in and out of prison for those short sentences that are so ineffective and expensive. As the Howard League for Penal Reform has argued, we should stop handing out custodial sentences of less than a year: if a crime is not serious enough to merit a prison sentence of longer than a year, offenders should as a default be receiving community sentences. But sentencing reform is conspicuously absent from the government’s agenda. Gove has denied overcrowding is a problem, or that it would be a good thing to reduce the overall prisoner numbers.

A high quality, innovative probation service is also critical to prison reform because of its role in overseeing community sentencing and supporting the reintegration of prisoners into the community. But Chris Grayling, Gove’s predecessor, decided to apply the approach he previously took with the Work Programme to the probation service. As a result, probation services have been contracted out, mainly to private companies like Sodexo, who have promised to deliver more for less. This has happened despite the serious concerns raised by many, including the Public Accounts Committee. One year in, the National Audit Office has noted the reforms risk hindering the development of innovative approaches to tackling reoffending.

The prime minister clearly sees prison reform as central to the social legacy he wants to be remembered for. Yet prisons and probation are fundamentally end-of-the-road services. They cater for the symptoms of societal dysfunction and disadvantage that should have been tackled much earlier. Yes, we need a prison and probation service that is more effective at preventing reoffending: but there should be at least as much focus on preventing the social causes of crime in the first place.

On this, the government is failing measurably. Even while it claims to be concerned with improving children’s life chances, the poorest councils have faced the sharpest cuts, affecting vital services such as children’s centres, special educational needs and child mental health services. It has cut in-work benefits for families with children, while delivering an expensive, across-the-board tax cut that most benefits the affluent.

The government deserves credit for recognising, at long last, that prison doesn’t work. But reforming prisons, while a worthy task, will not by itself end the cycle of disadvantage so many children are born into.

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A prison governor puts the present crisis into context in the Guardian:-

Gove's prison reform cannot undo the harm already inflicted by cuts

Earlier this month, Michael Gove addressed prison governors and admitted that the most recent figures for deaths in custody and violence in prisons were terrible.

This chimed with the Justice Committee’s report into prison safety published four days later. In this report the committee examined the government’s response to the ongoing and rapid deterioration in prison safety in England and Wales that began in 2012.

Gove, in his speech, went on to say that there is no point trying to minimise, excuse or divert attention away from the increasing problems we face. Unfortunately, the grim statistics he presented only tell part of the story. He was correct when he said that there were 100 self-inflicted deaths in custody, up from 79 the year before and he was also correct when he said assaults on staff were up by 36% to 4,963 and that there has been an increase of 25% in incidents of self-harm.

But as bad as these figures are Gove still managed gloss over the reality of the situation. To understand the true state of the decline in decency and the increase in the awful conditions prison officers and governors are working in, Gove should have gone back three years, not 12 months.

In the 12 months leading up to March 2013 there were 52 self-inflicted deaths in custody, three years later there were 100 – an increase of 92%. In 2012 there were 23,158 incidents of self-harm and three years later there were 32,313 – an increase of 39%. The number of serious assaults in the same period was approximately 1,200 and three years later it was 2,813 – an increase of approximately 130%. Almost every statistical graph the Ministry of Justice produces in this area shows a slight variation in serious incidents of harm or deaths in the nine years before 2012 then an alarming shift upwards.

So what happened in 2012 that might explain the reason for this shift? Between 2010-11 and 2014-15 the National Offender Management Service (Noms) made cumulative savings of almost £1bn and the savings made in public sector prisons were £334m.

A large chunk of these savings was made by shedding staff while the prison population continued to grow. This was achieved with the implementation of a prison benchmark applied across the service, which changed prison regimes and dictated both the grades and numbers of prison staff. In order to get the staff out as quickly as possible, Noms offered them severance payments to leave. This resulted in the loss of experienced staff and, when staffing levels fell below what was required, Noms was unable to recruit replacements quickly enough – even offering those they had paid to leave the opportunity to return.

On top of that the new staff coming in did not have the experience of those they were replacing and many simply left under the pressure adding to the recruitment problems. The impact of these changes were seen in 2012, when the changes were being phased into prisons. The statistics provide good evidence of what happened – prisons were cheaper to run, but this came at a cost.

The government wants to give governors more autonomy and this will be achieved with the prison reform programme referenced in the Queen’s speech. This is what prison governors have been crying out for; but not at any cost. The early adopter prisons are all very different and have their own unique challenges, ranging from local issues such as staffing turnover to the age of the prison buildings and cost of maintenance.

When giving governors autonomy the government must re-invest what it has stripped out in the past five years. Prison reform will inevitably bring some immediate improvements with the long overdue abolition of the all-pervasive public managerialism that has infected the service. Governors are, however, starting from a much lower position than they were before austerity deprived them of resources. The changes made to prisons to cut running costs cannot simply be reversed at the stroke of a pen: they will take many months, maybe years, to turn around. Centralisation of contracts, procurement processes, budgetary controls, recruitment, and the management of education was introduced to initiate savings and cannot be instantly jettisoned. In order to understand the enormity of the challenge ahead it is necessary to appreciate where we really are now.

Gove acknowledges that a radical reform programme will take years to implement before it begins to yield the positive difference governors are capable of delivering. I hope that this is not simply rhetoric and that governors really will be given enough time, and resources, to rehabilitate prisoners and make society a safer place. Governors, without the imposition of centrally-driven diktats, are capable of so much more than they are currently allowed to demonstrate. Gove states that only when our prisons are places of calm stability and order can we make the difference we need to. That is probably true but in order to achieve that we must recognise that the prison population is overcrowded and the cuts went too far. We are all now paying the price.

John Attard is national officer, Prison Governors’ Association

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Finally, here's an academic writing on the Left Foot Forward website and highlighting the need to look at wider social structures:- 

Gove’s prison reform plan blames individuals and ignores structures

The Justice Committee have just published a grim report on prison safety, yet another catalogue of concerns about the decline in safety and the rising tide of violence in Prisons in England and Wales. Statistics attest to rising rates of self-inflicted deaths, self-harm and violent assaults in prisons. It concludes by suggesting that the Ministry of Justice and the National Offender Management Service must produce an action plan for improvement.

None of this comes as a shock for anyone who has contact with prisons and prisoners in England and Wales. While the call for an action plan will no doubt be welcomed by a number of individuals, before the Queen’s Speech it seems safe to suggest that the Ministry of Justice already has one. The justice minister, Michael Gove is committed to reform, but few seem to have picked up on the ideas driving his plan.

In July 2015, Gove was photographed leaving hospital after injuring his foot with a with a copy of right wing American academic John DiIulio’s book Governing Prisons (published during the American carceral boom of the 1980s) under his arm. Diullio argued that the violence occurring in the most troublesome prisons in the US was not due to overcrowding, poor training or shortage of staff, explanations like those on the Justice Select committee have offered for the turmoil in prisons. Instead he averred that prison violence was merely a matter of a failure of prison managers to impose an appropriate social regime.

Gove’s plan to give greater power to prison managers suggests a similar mentality — by holding individuals to account for successes and failures, he believes we can have a better, less violent prison system. While such a view doesn’t reflect the wide range of factors believed to be contributing to problems in prisons, it is likely that it is these ideas will support the core legislative elements that will be revealed in the Queen’s Speech.

Yet moving forward, it is worth remembering that not all prisons are violent and dangerous places. Indeed most of the problems with violence, suicide, self-harm and disorder are being encountered in a minority of jails. Some prisons witness quite low levels of violence, for example, those institutions that hold sex offenders (a population which tends to be older) see far less violence, disorder and self-harm. Others have greater problems. Prison management and leadership is likely to be a factor, but the rise in violence may be deeper rooted still.

The reasons for the rise in violence and suicide have been much debated. Prison staff and prisoners alike know well that the influx of new psychoactive substances (sometimes daubed legal highs), have had a significant impact on the working of the prison sub rosa economy, and debt and indebtedness is a driver for much prison violence (and always has been).

So too the decline in safety has variously been attributed to a more challenging mix of prisoners, and a higher than anticipated prison population, at a time when staffing numbers had been reduced quite drastically and budgets have been cut severely as part of a drive for austerity (of course prisons are an easy place for the financial axe to fall because prisoners elicit so little public sympathy). All this suggests that there are a number of factors that taken together can influence violence, a point which is seemingly at odds with Diullio’s central contention.

While it is undeniable that significant number of prisons had been operating at staffing levels below what was necessary to maintain reasonable, safe and rehabilitative regimes, it is also undeniable that outside the prison walls, society has changed and its current ethos is one that blames individuals for failure, not social systems. This is the essence of Diullio’s argument, forget the social, blame the individual. Such is the doxa of contemporary neoliberal society.

Neoliberalism, an ideology and concept usually associated with a ruthless brand of free-market economics now dominant in the UK and US, has now penetrated the very core services of the state and its institutions. These were once considered strictly off limits to financial speculators and entrepreneurs, yet the NHS, social services, the police, the prison system and the criminal justice system now feel its full weight.

At the level of the everyday, this neoliberalism ideology is tied to consumer society, where instant gratification is achieved predominantly through various forms of conspicuous consumption in highly stylised lifestyle markets. If an individual fails against this backdrop and context, it is because they cannot generate the capital to consume. If they fail, it is because of their own individual faults. Yet the essence of neoliberal consumerism is also the permission to forget others, to look after number one, to be nakedly self-interested and selfish.

In prison, status hierarchy has a consumerist imperative as well as a machismo hierarchy where acquisition and display are regarded as important markers of distinction are all much in evidence. Those with violent potential exploit these social rules ruthlessly to take advantage of those they see as weaker. If you get into debt in prison, a system of interest charging called ‘double bubble’ (which makes the interest rates of unscrupulous payday loan lenders look reasonable) ‘kicks in’ and if your debts are not repaid, your head may well be too.

Many prisoners would instantly accept Diullio’s argument. Being fully signed up to the neoliberal ideal, they are quite happy with the way a dog-eat-dog social system works. But the neoliberal move from traditional forms of capital, community and politics to a globalised economy built on unstable labour markets and consumerism that has been the backdrop that many of them have grown up against is not an individual project, but a social one that has moved the social out of the picture.

If prisons are failing, like a lot of our social institutions, then we need to stop thinking of that failure as a failure of individuals, and think again about the bigger social picture.

James Treadwell is a criminologist at Birmingham City University

Quick, Look Over There!

What an extraordinary period in politics we're living through just now. One minute all schools have to become academies, then they don't. The long-planned Tory emasculation of the BBC was about to be brought to fruition, only to be hurriedly reversed on the orders of 10 Downing Street. A massive fight with the junior doctors that led to unprecedented strikes showed the government to be utterly intransigent and determined to impose its will, only to suddenly agree to talks and a 'deal'. 

Then we had the Queens Speech, supposedly setting out the government's legislative programme and it turns out to be the non-event of the decade containing as it does uncontentious and inconsequential crap about a 'space station' and driver-less cars. All this of course in order to clear the decks for the referendum, cover the prime ministers arse and try and improve his legacy in the event of a vote for Brexit on June 23rd. Yet again no mention of a Bill of Rights, thus confirming that the government is in a state of total paralysis as the Tories scrap amongst themselves in an increasingly unedifying and acrimonious act of fratricide over Europe.  

Although it's pretty clear that the government has been extremely busy doing absolutely nothing for months now, obviously they need to pretend that's not the case, hence the cunning plan for urgent prison reform was cooked-up some time ago. We had the prime minister kick things off with that astonishing speech and outburst of concern for a subject he'd previously shown little interest in and subsequently followed by a relentless MoJ-inspired flow of horror stories regarding the state of crisis developing in our prisons. This latter policy reached its zenith with the BBC being granted unprecedented access to HMP Wansdworth this week where we could all witness on live TV just how bad things are getting.  

Now lets just ponder for a moment the degree of media manipulation that's going on here. Prisons are secretive places and the MoJ spends a great deal of time and effort tightly controlling any information about what's going on behind the walls. It's normally done in the name of 'security' but in reality it's as much about politics as anything else. Make no mistake about it, prisons have been in crisis for some time and the situation was pretty much orchestrated by Grayling and the previous Tory/coalition government. Remember 'Fair and Sustainable' and 'Benchmarking' that sought to cut prison officers and their conditions? There was a mass exodus of experienced staff - a bit like probation staff - the only difference being that prison officers went with enhanced retirement packages. 

Grayling spent his entire tenure at the MoJ denying there was any 'crisis' in the prison system and successfully refused all access by journalists and even Frances Crook of the Howard League. Despite the denials, both seconded and visiting probation staff started reporting on this blog how they were beginning to feel unsafe due to reduced staffing levels and were describing how prisoners were having to miss education and programmes because there was no one to escort them. It was Grayling's pernicious policies in relation to books, parcels, clothing, Earned Privileges etc that all helped to stoke-up the current situation.    

We now have a situation where it suits the government to have a distraction and smokescreen, so the MoJ has put the previous policy of denial into complete reverse. In order to make the case for urgent reform, suddenly there's frank admissions everywhere that things are really bad. On the BBC Andrew Marr show last week, Michael Gove was asked about the astonishingly frank statement by the new Chief Inspector of Prisons that some establishments were 'not fit for purpose'. His answer was 'yes'. 

But contrast this with Grayling and his car crash of an interview with John Humphrys on the BBC Today programme on the eve of the Queen's Speech. Amongst other things, he denied there was a problem with prison over-crowding; that there'd ever been a book ban; that the problem was 'legal highs' and that Gove's prison reforms were merely building on his own successful reforms of probation with 55,000 released prisoners now getting support. It prompted this comment on twitter from a barrister:-

"God Chris Grayling is odious. A foul, mendacious, self-serving, amoral, intellectually-bereft embodiment of all wrong with politics"

So, politics has dictated that the time is right for a big show at trying to sort out a crisis in our prisons, largely brought about by the very same Tories in power now and their cost-cutting policies. The answer lies in 'Reform Prisons' and turning them into 'profit centres' with governors supposedly having control over everything, or as much as the MoJ and Noms can be persuaded to cede to them. Gove has promised it won't lead to 'privatisation', but of course we all know the companies struggling to make any money out of the probation CRC contracts are in the wings lobbying to offer their 'innovative' solutions to the prison system. 

Will it work? No of course not because it won't reduce the numbers going to prison. It's basically a political stunt - a distraction. Here's Richard Garside writing on the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies website:-  

Reform prisons a tragic distraction

Given the parlous state of prisons across England and Wales, a reform-minded Justice Minister like Michael Gove has ample opportunity to make his mark. The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Peter Clarke, told the BBC earlier this week that some prisons were 'not fit for purpose' and were failing to keep prisoners safe. The BBC revealed that the emergency services were called out more than 26,600 times – or every 20 minutes on average – to incidents in UK prisons last year. A House of Commons Justice Committee report, also out this week, found there had been 100 suicides in prison in the twelve months to March 2016, up from 79 the previous year. To put this in perspective, there were 37 suicides in prison in 1988; 16 in 1978. Assaults and self-harm in prisons are also on the rise.

The Ministry of Justice had hoped 'that prison safety would stabilise', the Conservative Chair of the Committee Bob Neill, said. 'In reality it has deteriorated further and continues to do so. This is a matter of great concern and improvement is urgently needed... This cannot wait'. So there is more than enough for Michael Gove to do to sort out the system-wide problems in prison. Which is why today's announcement of six 'reform prisons' is such a tragic distraction from the big challenges of prison reform.

The proposition that reform-minded prison governors should have greater autonomy from what can be experienced as a stifling head office bureaucracy has a superficial appeal. But behind this lurks a multitude of problems. The six reform prisons amount to a mere five percent of the current total of 121 prisons. If the reform prisons are successful on their own terms, the result will be half a dozen oases of progress, lost in a desert of deeply dysfunctional institutions.

The reform prisons proposal is by no stretch of the imagination a serious response to the deep problems affecting the prison system. It is an eye-catching, small-scale experiment that will form the backdrop for shiny ministerial photo-opportunities while doing nothing to address the underlying malaise. That said, every effort will be made to drive through the reform prison model, at the expense of the wider estate. As today's press release makes clear, the planned nine new-build prisons will also operate on a reform prison model.

The reform prisons are therefore something of a 'proof of concept' experiment, and the shape of things to come across the prison estate. The proposals for greater governor autonomy also raise major questions. Consider this, from today's press release:

'These prisons will give unprecedented freedoms to prison governors, including financial and legal freedoms, such as how the prison budget is spent and whether to opt-out of national contracts; and operational freedoms over education, the prison regime, family visits, and partnerships to provide prison work and rehabilitation services.'

What does it mean for a governor to have 'operational freedoms' over education, or over family visits? Will it be Ipads and advanced IT skills training, or rote learning and spelling tests? Will it lead to greater family contact, less contact, or 'innovative' approaches that replace human contact with a video conference? Innovation and greater discretion at an individual institution level, in the absence of national standards and a coherent, estate-wide approach, can easily collapse into the merely idiosyncratic.

Reform prisons, the press release states, will also be established as 'independent legal entities with the power to enter into contracts; generate and retain income; and establish their own boards.' The idea that prisons should be income-generating entities is hardly a new one. Private prisons have for some years been part of the prison system. But the implication that reform prisons should operate as competitive, risk-taking outfits, pursuing exciting business opportunities to make up for a shortfall in Central government funding is profoundly wrongheaded.

What should the basis of a coherent programme of prison reform? First, and of critical importance, we need a sustained effort to reduce the currently high prison population. This was a point made only last week by Bob Neill, the former Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, and the former Chief Inspector of Prisons, Lord Ramsbotham. Indeed, Bob Neill told the BBC that 'we should be looking to start reducing the prison population straight away'.

Michael Gove has recently emphasised that the government does not intend to use an 'artificial target' to manage down the prison population. We should be clear that the population has been artificially managed up, over a number of years, by successive administrations. The level of imprisonment in this, and any other country, is in good part a political choice. If we imprisoned today at the rate we imprisoned in the mid-1980s, when Mrs Thatcher was in Downing Street, there would be at least 30,000 fewer people in prison.

The prison system also badly needs institutional stability and action to ground prison regimes in decency and respect: for staff, prisoners, families and visitors. The awful recent case of Shalane Blackwood, who died in prison last year from a burst duodenal ulcer, following neglect by prison staff, is just one example of how far the prison system is from this goal.

So there is much to do on prison reform, to deliver a legacy that any Justice Minister could rightly be proud of. It would also be a hard job to pull off, and a politically controversial programme of reform. The Prime Minister and current Justice Secretary no doubt understand this well. Which is perhaps why they prefer to play at being prison reformers, rather than doing the hard work involved in being prison reformers.      

Latest From Napo 106

Here's an extract from the latest blog post from Napo's General Secretary:-

E3 - what happens next?

A week ago we issued news of the agreement that we had reached with NOMS on how the planned implementation of E3 is to be carried out. I am grateful for the feedback that a number of you have sent which, largely, appreciates the work that we have undertaken in the areas of no compulsory redundancy, pay protection and future job placement. Amongst this there have been questions along the lines of 'why has Napo agreed to all of the aspects of E3? The answer is that we have not; and as I attempt to explain below your union is leading the charge against some aspects of the programme that we seriously doubt will work in the way intended if at all.

Napo have collectively been involved in three distinct pieces of work relating to E3. In our mailing to members we reported on the important negotiations resulting in protections for any members who might be adversely affected by E3 despite our considerable efforts to prevent this.

At the same time as securing those agreements we have been vigorously challenging the outcome of the E3 job evaluation process for Victim Liaison Officers and Approved Premises staff. It is our view that this process was flawed and important elements of some roles were missed out or misinterpreted leading to anomalous outcomes. Members from those groups have provided invaluable support in helping us gather the relevant evidence to robustly challenge the earlier exercise. We will be following this up with NOMS before new panels are convened over the course of late June and early July.

The other strand of E3 work is the consultation on the proposed operating model. To clarify the process, this was issued to the trade unions at the same time as all staff in the NPS at the start of a period of consultation. That consultation closed recently and now we await further discussion with the employers in light of our excellent response which I have linked below. Our aim is to secure amendments and clarifications to the proposed model through further consultation and negotiation.

Members can be assured that we have and will continue to discuss the specific issues that have been and are still being raised through through branches. The attached document is the core of our response to the consultation, this has been distilled from all of the information brought to us by members as well as input from your elected Officers. The discussions around implementation of E3 will continue, through our established structures and members should feed any concerns to their branches so that we can take these up in either in the regular consultation with senior NOMS management or via the negotiating process.

Obviously, there are still many elements of the E3 operating model that raise concerns for members and nobody here is able to say that we have all the answers to them given the magnitude of the E3 operational change programme. As you would expect we are prioritising these in terms of potential threats to your terms and conditions as well as the key professional issues that are before us. This is a significant piece of work and the situation is rapidly changing, so remember to get in touch with your branch with any concerns and look out for more updates as the talks progress. Officers and Officials cannot visit every single workplace but if Branches can organise specific gatherings of members we will do our best to be there.

Storm brewing over Short Format reports

If proof were needed that all is not bottomed out in E3 then the ongoing dialogue about who should undertake PSR's and what they ought to contain is right up there.

A meeting between Napo and the Magistrates Association yesterday revealed that the MOJ missive for all non-High Risk PSR's to be undertaken as short format reports has hardly filled the judiciary with confidence.

Our submission to the E3 consultation makes it patently clear that there are already concerns among experienced Court OMs that their views on the type of PSR required for the particular circumstances are being overridden by the drive to achieve unrealistic targets.

During the E3 discussions we have tried to maintain a line which says that the same protections should be offered to PSOs working in Court as those working in Community Supervision Teams, and that staff should only undertake assessments on cases which are reserved to POs in the tiering model if they are appropriately qualified and remunerated as a PO.

We have also made it clear that PSO's and PO's must only undertake work that they are trained to do and that what the department is trying to do to save costs is simply unsafe. This is an issue that we have already flagged up with the Secretary of State in advance of our meeting with him next month and it has featured highly during our continual engagement with senior NOMS management.

Guest Blog 56

On the "Prison Works" and Courts Bill

So prison reform is on the agenda and The Queen has spoken. The rhetoric is on the use of imprisonment in the creation of "Reform Prisons", driving a revolution in education, training, healthcare and security for prisoners. Have they already forgotten the problems with overcrowding, staffing, resources and privatisation, and what about the alternatives to custody? The Probation Service wasn't mentioned either despite its 100+ years rehabilitating and supporting released prisoners and offenders serving community sentences. There was no praising the work of Probation Officers, no expansion of the use of community sentences and no announcement of the reversal of the Chris Grayling's failed "rehabilitation revolution" and the associated Offender Management (Probation Privatisation) Act.

It's a regressive approach that this government intends to improve the life chances of the most disadvantaged individuals in the country by continuing to send them to prison. The Queen, the politicians, the NOMS non-effectives, how many of "them" have been inside a prison? I mean serving time as a prisoner, or maybe having a parent, partner, sibling or child serve time? I had this pleasure via Her Majesty once upon a time, long before I even dreamed of becoming a Probation Officer. It doesn't really matter what the crime or sentence was, the outcome was spending too long in a juvenile hellhole full of people I never wanted to meet. Fellow justice professionals would have heard similar stories a hundred times and more. The moral of the story is usually the same, that prison doesn't work.

This is my story

Scratched into the wall of the Crown Court cell was "yea as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, because I am the most evil bastard in the valley". I knew right then I was in trouble and before I could let loose the tears building up another convicted unfortunate appeared and passed me a lit joint. During the ride to prison in the tiny sweat-box compartment we stopped off at a holding centre full of at least 50-100 other prisoners. I remember trying not to notice the few poor souls being manipulated, robbed and beaten up. At least it wasn't happening to me.

I'd never seen a prison before. The induction was a conveyor belt, the search and shower intrusive and the clothes didn't fit. The cell was clean enough, although some of the cells that followed were filthy, infested and had mixes of naive, sophisticated, overbearing, depressed, addicted and absolutely crazy, inhabitants to call cell-mates. Everyone believed they were innocent, some even became good friends. We talked, reasoned, debated, I read letters for some prisoners, usually the travellers who were all called 'Paddy', and shared my phone-cards, usually with foreign nationals who didn't have much and were mostly called 'Yardie'. The officers weren't bad but I quickly learnt which ones to avoid. I remember my first personal officer started a few days after I arrived and was forever telling me "we started our time together". We didn't because he wasn't doing time, he went home at the end of the day.

The first night was the worst but after a few days, maybe weeks, I found my mojo and got on with it. There was the bad porridge in the morning and the rabbit food on weekends, but I had money sent in to buy extras. I didn't use or get addicted to hard drugs, but I did smoke a lot of tobacco which took years to quit. I didn't get raped in the showers (or greenhouse if there was one) as my mum feared I would after watching Scum, but I did get beaten black and blue on one occasion. I can tell you that getting hit in the face with a PP9 battery wrapped in a pillowcase really hurts. If you're wondering, no it wasn't possible to block it while being rushed by the violent version of Laurel and Hardy. It's hard to avoid fighting in there, there's so much testosterone and aggression floating around it doesn't take much to make anybody lash out. It was commonplace to witness fights, bullying, assaults, self harm, mental illness, drug use and every now and then you'd hear of a suicide, murder or escape. Most of the time it was okay though, you got by. There was no TV's, phones or Playstation's in cells back then, time dragged and despite my books, cards and press-ups it was still very boring.

I learnt not to trust, borrow or seek or accept help or favours from prisoners or officers, and this follows you into the outside. During the first few weeks I reacquainted with those I'd known on the outside and others I was meeting for the first time. Fast forward a few months and the gym training, arrogance and frustration had set in and after a few trips to the block I was shipped up North with a few others. The prison was newer and cleaner, but the regime was harsh and the officers were bastards to begin with. My first few months were spent on the top landing where most of the cells had broken glass in the windows. Blankets and plastic bags blocked the draught but it was still freezing in winter. I tried to keep my head down, got to know the officers who turned out to be mostly okay, avoided conflict, provocation and retaliation except on the sports pitch, and got to my release date.

Throughout my time there wasn't any interventions or services available. They assessed me as too smart for education and it's only afterwards someone told me I should have answered all the question incorrectly. I went to a few art classes but there were too many craft knives around for my liking and nobody actually did any art. I was okay spending my time on the wing playing darts, pool and table tennis, I'm still quite good. I gained enhanced, got a job as a cleaner and then on the servery and held it to my release date. When the date came I put on my now slightly smaller clothes stored from when I arrived and walked out the gate, and it was over.

Prison doesn't work

So what was the point, apart from to lock me up and imprint an unforgettable prison number into my brain? I had already decided pre-sentence I wouldn't become involved in a crime ever again, and I didn't, so being imprisoned didn't help or change me. I honestly can't identify a single thing from being in prison that helped me, except that it made me a stronger person in the long term, physically and mentally. Weekend prisons, reform prisons, tagging, it would have made no difference, apart from learning how to scrub a floor quite well and learnt a few tips for keeping sinks and toilets clean, prolonging battery life, redirecting electricity from lights, lighting a wick, finding alternatives for Blu-Tac and blocking a swinging PP9. Other than this I think I was released no better than when I went in, possibly worse as I had learned to live in a hostile environment so bad that a term of National Service would have been better. I think I felt a bit like Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption on release, lost and out of place, but without the friend to give me a new start. The community didn't particularly accept or provide and I didn't expect it to. It was down to me and I struggled for the next few years to keep my head above water, and opportunities disappear and mud tends to stick when you've got a criminal record. I was one of the lucky ones because I had a home, I got into training course, then college and later onto university, and I had good people around me. Over time I learned to believe in myself and to not dwell on the past because I couldn't change it.

I see parts of my journey in every person I meet in the course of my work. Most prisoners I ask what would keep them from reoffending describe what they need post-release rather than pre-release. Most that have not been to prison simply describe not going to prison. The prison reforms I've read about today I do not welcome. Prison does not work, "reform prisons" or otherwise, and makes people worse. There is no rehabilitation or reform in locking up wayward, damaged and sometimes deranged people in the cesspits of the justice system. To further spend resources to attempt to improve what is already long broken is a waste, especially when there are better alternatives. I say this from personal and professional experience, and because the evidence against prisons outweighs the evidence for it because punishments do not work.

Probation purgatory

"The [probation] service – which for a century was the envy of other countries because of its rehabilitative success, but whose ethos now begins with punishment – was better off when it was an operational service with its own professional head. It is time that this ill-thought through venture was ended or, not only will there be more similar cases [Sonnex], but there will be no one left in the probation service to manage them." (David Ramsbotham, 2009.)

We need to stop following the 'American experiment' because America's view has long been that locking up people for as long as possible is the answer to crime prevention. We've increasingly used a similar method for the past 50 years and it's not worked for us either. It's about time we stop this perverse preoccupation with prisons, programmes, privatisation and "public protection" and instead develop a system of rehabilitation, re-entry and resettlement that only needs to reserve a handful of well resourced prisons for the grave offenders and the critical few.

There is much scope for improving services to those serving custodial and community sentences with the right help and support from probation officers, social workers, prison officers, support workers mentors and more. The evidence is that community sentences are cheaper and can better reduce reoffending, and this is where a progressive government would spend our money and ensure that access to housing, training, employment, health, addiction and counselling services are available, all under the banner of advising, assisting, befriending and supervision. We can successfully do this and a progressive government would be forging progressive policy and legislation, and investing in the probation service who can provide all of the above and put strategies in place to ensure the quality of training, practice and professionalism is upheld.

Final thought

If the obsession with prison and punishment is put on hold it would be so easy to devise a new strategy to crime prevention and rehabilitation, a new approach using justice professionals, sentencers, teachers, academics, local councillors, community leaders, business leaders, ex-offenders and others for reoffending to be reduced. Instead the political non-effectives at the Ministry of Justice rule the roost and current whitewashing of the probation service from history continues. I doubt we will witness the necessary realignment of probation with social work training and values, or the end of the private control of prisons and probation, or that we see a progressive justice policy with probation officers and rehabilitation professionals at the helm

Probation Officer
15 years to retire

Latest From Probation Institute

I notice Paul Senior, Chair of the Probation Institute, has today published the following blog post:- 

Time to get involved

I gave a lecture last week in which I talked of the ‘the politics of ignorance and despair undermining the Probation Institute and (I hinted) it could go out of business’. In the recent publication of the British Journal of Community Justice (14.1) Professor Emerita Anne Worrall posed a similar question: ‘Standing back and ‘seeing how it goes’ will result in the PI failing. The danger is that too many people will only realize that it might have been worth getting involved when it is too late to do so’ (Worrall, 2016)

New organisations which survive change rapidly at the outset and seek to listen to its constituency to do so. The PI has now completed its set up phase over a two year period, has listened, has developed and changed and in April launched its Business Plan for 2016-17 (see http://probation-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Business-Plan-2016-17-Final.pdf ). This represents a restatement of what we have achieved in those first two difficult years but crucially represents a reassessment of who we are, what we do and how we will do it. Unfortunately amongst some commentators there remains a residual resentment of issues which have an history or at least a mythology but one in which we feel we have moved on. This blog is the last time we seek to address some of these concerns.

Firstly a clear statement in the Plan is the rejection of the idea of corporate membership. It was not the right way to go and so we have moved to a concept of partnership. Yet even this has been criticised. Partnership is a concept which allows all partners to pursue their own agendas as we do ours. It does not imply agreement on all issues. In fact given the volatility of the field of probation at the moment this would be unlikely. Yet it must be right to have a relationship with the organisations and bodies which we can hope to influence over the future of the profession of probation. So we will work with NOMS, MoJ, NPS, CRCs, No Offence, Magistrates Association, Napo, Unison, UserVoice, Unlock, the HMI Inspectorate and maybe even the Howard League in order to get our message across. Recently we ran a Consultation event on the new probation officer training and helped ensure that there is one award for the NPS and CRC to avoid accusations of second class citizenship for those within CRCs. The PO qualification remains at the heart of our register, somehow misconstrued by some intent on causing mischief. But, we want to ensure that other qualifications get due recognition both at a beginning level for other grades but also to work towards our aspiration to encourage advanced practice, a clear marker of a vibrant professional presence.

We have listed what we have been doing over the first two years in the Plan and, given the size of the organisation, we have achieved a great deal. All the infrastructure is in place and we are now focusing on developing key messages, see our Position Papers. (see http://probation-institute.org/position-papers/ ) There are more in the pipeline and we are now developing our professional networks. You can join a single network without being a member so if you have a specialist interest please sign up for one of our existing networks – Women in Justice, Veterans, Electronic Monitoring, Professional Development, – or suggest new ones. We want to hear your voice.

The PI grew out of an initiative from the PCA, Napo, Unison and PA. The financial support that PCA supplied was significant in enabling us to develop the infrastructure. But we now have a diverse Board and a Representative Council which reflects much wider interests including higher education, practitioners, union links and voluntary organisations. Our executive membership is evolving along with the organisation, there is only so long that we can be held accountable for that past. Voluntary effort is at the heart of how we function, you want us to do other things then get involved!

This must include our vibrant and diverse group of Fellows. Of course, it includes managers who have a long track record in probation and we are glad that some have applied but the grouping is much wider than that including practitioners, trainers and key probation academics and the voluntary sector. It is not a closed shop and anyone can apply. Some Fellows are working hard to support the PI and we are grateful for such help.

We are acutely aware that our membership numbers have been affected by the plight of staff who are demoralised or worse have been forced to leave probation behind. There is a real personal tragedy in the events of the last two years and we all know it could have been avoided. Nevertheless we have to look forward and try and ensure that the high quality and evidence-based standards of the recent past are maintained despite the cutbacks, the redundancies, the re-modelling, the deprofessionalization and the negativism which abounds. You will see in our Plan we have set out a positive agenda and want everyone who cares about the profession to resist and persist in maintaining commitment to a positive future, however dark it might feel right now.

One key aspect is our desire to create and develop a Centre of Excellence. Our Research Committee is working on this and we have appointed a high-profile Academic Advisory Panel to support this work. We have inherited the Graham Smith Awards which showcase practitioner research and the next round will be announced soon. Our first annual practitioner conference is on June 8th, in conjunction with No Offence and at Sheffield Hallam University. It has a terrific line-up already nearing capacity attendance. Book your place before it’s too late.

If we don’t heed the warnings of fellow travellers like Anne Worrall we will derail the one organisation whose single-minded agenda seeks to maintain the professionalism of probation and community rehabilitation organisations and the profession itself. Shout at us, debate with us, challenge us but do so in a shared spirit of seeking to provide a way forward, not simply to snipe at long gone issues, part myth, part fantasy. This does not help the Institute going forward, read our Business Plan, see what we are actually doing, join if you wish and get involved.

Paul Senior

--oo0oo--

Can I please urge people to read the full PI Business Plan before leaping to comment, but at the very least it might be helpful if I quote the following:-

2 Background

The Probation Institute was set up in 2014 on the initiative of its founding organisations: NAPO, Unison, the Probation Chiefs’ Association and the Probation Association. A Steering Group including representatives of these four organisations had been set up the previous year. 

The rationale for the creation of the Institute was the lack of an independent body that represented the profession as a whole. This contrasts with other professions such as in medicine, nursing, teaching and social work. The lack of a coherent continuing professional development (CPD) structure and code of ethics were two manifestations of the absence of a recognised professional body. 

This rationale was strengthened by the government’s “Transforming Rehabilitation” reforms which have created a mixed market of Probation and criminal justice providers. Community Rehabilitation Companies are in private ownership and have supply chains that include both private and third sector providers. The National Probation Service comprises about 30% of the sector and remains in public ownership whilst commissioning services from private and third sector providers. This diversity of provision strengthens the case for a professional body spanning the whole sector. Such a body has benefits for all parties and provides underpinning for the system. 

The setting up of the Institute was resourced by donations from the Probation Chiefs’ Association and the Probation Association together with a grant from the Ministry of Justice. The latter followed submission of a business case to the MoJ and meetings between Steering Group members and the Minister for Prisons and Probation, Jeremy Wright. The minister was adamant that the funding was to assist in the setting up of the Probation Institute which needed both to be seen and be independent. 

The aspirations set out in that business case were as follows: 

• Providing professional leadership, enhancing the professional status of the sector 
• Publishing a code of ethics which provides an underpinning for the development of practice 
• Being a centre of excellence which provides an independent view of what constitutes good practice 
• Contributing to the setting of competence levels with the profession Providing a professional register that records levels of qualification and continuing professional development 
• Enabling providers to demonstrate that they adhere to common standards of practice with a firm evidence base. 

It was unclear at the time that the Steering Group was setting out their aspirations and composing the business case to MoJ, how the TR reforms would play out in practice. The reality, perhaps inevitably given the accelerated timetable for implementing the programme, has been complex and, one year after the sale of the 21 CRCs to their new owners, the system remains very much in a transitional stage. 

Lack of certainty about work volumes with consequent volatility of funding streams has been a complicating factor for CRCs and their supply chains. At the same time the National Probation Service is undergoing significant structural reform under the “E3” programme. 

This uncertainty and volatility has had a clear impact on some of the early planning assumptions made by the Steering Group. 

• Recruitment and retention of members has been much more of a challenge than anticipated. Reduction in staffing numbers, changes in roles and the sheer pace of change in the day to day roles have not created the ideal climate to focus on longer term aspirations about professional development and recognition, critically important though these remain to the future of probation. 
• Achieving sufficient visibility and getting the Institute’s voice heard amongst the noise in the system has been hard. 
• Whilst the Institute has established good working relationships with most of the new providers, it became clear that the concept of “corporate membership” was not one that was likely to be viable and has been replaced with a focus on partnerships.

Prison Reform 3

On the eve of the government's plans for prison reform, the Probation Institute publishes their thoughts in a position paper:-

Penal Reform 

Introduction 

The Prime Minister has stated that prison reform is a priority for his administration. He wishes to reduce reoffending rates of prisoners and has suggested that one of the means to achieve this may be to give prison governors more autonomy over their institutions. The Secretary of State for Justice has expressed similar ambitions and has set up reviews looking specifically at women’s imprisonment and the overrepresentation of minority ethnic people in the criminal justice system. 

The Probation Institute welcomes a renewed focus on penal reform. There were indications from the previous government of a move in this direction. The P.I. hopes that effective action will follow the more recent announcements. This position paper sets out what the P.I. considers the key issues that must be addressed if reforms are to have a material impact on reducing re-offending.

Key Points 

1. The Prison population is unsustainably high 

• By all recognised measures the volume of crime has been falling consistently for nearly two decades. This is the case, not just in England and Wales, but in most jurisdictions in the developed world. Yet during these two decades the prison population in England and Wales has more than doubled. Many of those imprisoned have not committed offences of violence and do not present a danger to others. Many have significant issues with addiction and/or poor mental health.

• Imprisoning people who are not a risk to others for relatively short periods of time is always likely to result in high re-offending rates. Factors that are most likely to facilitate desistance from offending are stable accommodation, stable employment, stable and positive relationships, access to local services that can address underlying issues such as addiction. All of these are adversely impacted by a custodial sentence. 

• Some of this adverse impact may be mitigated by regular day release and by provision of high quality programmes in prisons. This mitigation is likely to be limited however: the prison estate is not configured to allow the majority of prisoners to be day released or attend treatment programmes in the area to which they will be released. 

• Many prisons are currently overcrowded. Overcrowding makes the provision of effective services to serving prisoners extremely difficult and also impacts upon rational allocation policies at the heart of resettlement prisons. 

• Imprisoning fewer people – restricting imprisonment to those who present an ongoing risk to others – would facilitate provision of genuinely rehabilitative regimes. This suggests that any reform strategy must also include sentencing reform to ensure only those that need a prison sentence for public protection are prioritised and that community services support and manage more people in the community

2. Governor autonomy on its own is not enough to reduce reoffending rates 

• There has undoubtedly been an increase in central control driven partly by ministerial dictate and partly by NOMS bureaucracy. Many in-prison services are now centrally contracted. Relaxing this is likely to enable governors to operate more effective prisons and respond to the particular environment of their own prison. 

• In itself however, governor autonomy is not likely to have a dramatic impact because: 

• Population management of an overcrowded system has to be centrally or at least regionally controlled. As a result, governors will never have control over the type or number of inmates in their prisons. 

• Prison based services need to be informed by detailed knowledge of the local community into which their inmates will be released. It is difficult for governors and their staff to acquire this. 

• The shortcomings of tying performance on re-offending rates to prison based services has already been demonstrated by the Doncaster and Peterborough Payment by Results pilot. (MoJ, 2014a, 2014b)

• The disconnect between delivery of services within prison and in the community has been a longterm issue for the penal system. It has resulted in some prisoners having to undergo multiple referral processes to different organisations with little coherent oversight. Others have fallen through the cracks and needs have been left unaddressed.

• Commissioning of services “through the gate” is a cornerstone of the contracts let last year by the MoJ to the 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies. Whilst the early indications of effectiveness may be patchy, the principle of a “through the gate” service is critical to improving rehabilitation. Governor autonomy would need to be applied in a way that protected this principle. Attempts to reverse out of this element of the contract with CRCs would inevitably be fraught with difficulty and probably very expensive. 

3. Justice Reinvestment is required to achieve reductions in re-offending 

• Re-investing the resources currently deployed to manage an unnecessarily high prison population into better resourced and targeted community-based programmes and preventative measures is the over-arching strategy most likely to achieve sustained reductions in re-offending. The strategy is being pursued in other jurisdictions including U.S. states across the spectrum of political leadership. 

• Adequate resourcing for staff within prisons must be an immediate priority to support regimes which can deliver more effectively on its rehabilitative goals. 

• Re-offending rates of those supervised in the community are consistently lower than those for custody. The difference widens when applied to those serving sentences of 12 months and under. The differences are evident in groups with matching criminal histories. 

• Reinvesting in community sanctions that are demonstrated to reduce re-offending is likely to bring re-offending rates down further, faster and more cost-effectively. Further research into effectiveness will always be welcome but in essence the evidence is clear about what kind of approaches are most likely to be effective with most people. (MoJ, 2013) Rather than searching for a “magic bullet” that will transform re-offending rates, consistent investment in what research already tells us works, and in the training and recruitment of staff to apply this, is likely to bring sustainable results. 

CONCLUSIONS 

• Prison reform, including governor autonomy and regimes focused on rehabilitation, can make a contribution to a wider strategy to reduce re-offending. Without this wider strategy however - one that reduces the numbers in prison and re-invests in the resources thus released in community-based sanctions and preventative measures – the effect is likely to be minimal and any reductions achieved unlikely to be sustainable. 

• The justice community has known for at least 20 years what the evidence says about what needs to be done. And yet policy that is in line with the evidence on reducing reoffending seems very difficult to implement. We would urge government to pay heed to the evidence and act accordingly.

--oo00oo--

From the BBC website:-

In the bill to be announced later, the governors of six jails will be given control over budgets, decide which rehabilitation and education services to use and be able to change the prison regime and the rules over family visits. The prisons will be able to enter into contracts and to generate and retain income, the government said, adding that governors would be held accountable by "a new regime of transparency". By the end of the year, 5,000 prisoners will be held in the first six "autonomous" prisons, which will be:

Wandsworth in south London
Holme House, Stockton-on-Tees
Ranby, Nottinghamshire
Coldingley, Woking
Kirklevington Grange, Cleveland
High Down, Sutton

Inspectors have warned that Ranby prison is at risk of being overwhelmed by the supply of so-called legal highs, and last month a prisoner was murdered at Coldingley.

The PM first outlined plans to give prison governors "complete control" over their prisons in February, saying it would reduce reoffending and allow prisoners to be treated as "potential assets to be harnessed". At the time, the Prison Reform Trust said the measures were "only part of the equation", while the Howard League for Penal Reform said measures were needed to tackle the "profligate use of prison".

Mr Cameron said: "For too long, we have left our prisons to fester. Not only does that reinforce the cycle of crime, increasing the bills of social failure that taxpayers must pick up. It writes off thousands of people. So today, we start the long overdue, long-needed change that our prisons need. No longer will they be warehouses for criminals; they will now be places where lives are changed."

The government will also publish a review of education in prisons and announce pilot areas chosen for satellite tracking of offenders. In February a contract to develop the system was cancelled after the government had already spent £21m on the project.

Guest Blog 55

Unlike Ian Gould (a recent post), or his account of Paul Senior’s lecture, I don’t see a special virtue in taking sides, and I wasn’t taken with Gramsci when we studied Marxism long ago. I think there is currently far too much ‘position-taking’ going on, especially but not only in instant online discussions. Instead I support The Forgiveness Project (first seen at Napo Conference in Scarborough in 2007), and the belief that “Truth has more than one face.”

But I’m not “indifferent” - my interest is simply in seeing Probation work done well; I don’t like seeing it done not well. Do I like the present TR arrangements? – No. (Were previous arrangements perfect? – No.) Are the arrangements going to be changed by this Government before 2020, or even by an alternative Government before or after 2020? – I can’t see it. So what is still achievable in terms of doing Probation work well in the meantime?

As Chief Inspector I did see, and reported, some excellent work being done under the various ‘old’ arrangements, and I saw some pretty shoddy stuff too. Now, under TR, I’ve little doubt that it’s tough for many practitioners, especially with nDelius and some doubtful management practices, but recent inspection reports show that good practice is certainly still being carried out some of the time. So although I wouldn’t have chosen the current arrangements (understatement!) I have some idea about how I would make it work well/better. I have written elsewhere about how to make this happen– see my website http://ambridges.wix.com/mysite - but for this blog I’ll just focus on the practitioner perspective, and on one element in particular this time, picking up on March’s discussion on this website about acceptable v unacceptable absences.

The key thing I would ask you as a practitioner to do is to focus on achieving three things (the Three Purposes of Probation), by asking yourself regularly with each case:

• “Am I holding this individual to the terms of the Court sentence or licence?” – that’s promoting compliance, and enforcing if and when needed, to Implement the Sentence 

• “Am I helping this person to become less likely to reoffend in future, and how will I evidence that?” – that’s using principally constructive interventions measurably to Reduce Likelihood of Reoffending 

• “Am I taking all reasonable action to protect others from harm from this individual?” – that’s using principally restrictive interventions to minimise the individual’s Risk of Harm to others – i.e. Manage Risk of Harm to others.

It’s essential to think of Implement the Sentence, Reduce LoR and Manage RoH as three separate but overlapping Purposes, like a three-way Venn diagram; therefore the three elements are both separate and overlapping. Some actions you take as a practitioner will help to achieve two or more of those purposes at the same time but, even so, each of the purposes exists in its own right.

The next and crucial key point is that as long as you are conscientiously working towards achieving (as far as you can) each of those three purposes, then how you go about doing that is up to you. Although almost all the sets of instructions / manuals / rules / protocols that have been devised over the last thirty years have been written with the very best of intentions, often at one time by groups of enthusiastic practitioners, they simply don’t work as a way of managing frontline practice by using detailed instructions. Instead, for the skilled practitioner, planning and carrying out how each of the purposes is going to be achieved, or at least progressed, is where the individual’s initiative comes into play – it’s the rewarding part of the job. Yes, to help you there has to be training, coaching, old-fashioned supervision, and even the occasional advisory (short) guidance document, but the decisions about how you do your work are yours provided they are clearly aimed at achieving the Three Purposes.

(Incidentally, if you simply don’t agree with the aim of achieving the Three Purposes, and are not prepared to work towards them then I don’t think you can work in this service – for me it would be the bottom line of what you are being paid a salary for, whether in the public or privatised part of the service.)

Obviously there’s lots to be said about what it means to achieve the Likelihood and Risk purposes – some is already on my website – but here I will on this occasion focus on Implementing the Sentence. It struck me when reading the discussion of Acceptable and Unacceptable absences in March that the object of the whole exercise was missing. [For new readers, an officer wrote in and said that that s/he wanted to mark a third absence in a month by a current case as Unacceptable but s/he didn’t want to breach – the manager told him/her to change the absence to Acceptable.] Yes the employer had a target to achieve – to breach on second/third unacceptable absence - but the practitioner(s) didn’t own it. There wasn’t a shared understanding between employer and employee about what this piece of practice should be aiming to achieve.

My first instinctive thought at the time was one shared by one of the other contributors: surely if an absence is ‘potentially breachable’ it’s Unacceptable, and if you don’t think you should breach then by definition it must be Acceptable? But of course, as with most things in Probation practice, on reflection it’s a bit more complicated than that. I can think of at least two theoretical scenarios in which one might quite properly mark an absence Unacceptable, and then might make a separate and yet quite reasonable decision to refrain from breach action. One is the classic case of the second Unacceptable absence being in the last week of the Order/Licence, and the other is if, after the unacceptable absence, the person concerned is rushed into hospital. There may be others, but nevertheless they should be very rare, because a system of prompt breach action when required means that the service can carry out that initial breach action before the complicating factor has arisen. (Yes I know that in practice it’s a complete pain to do, especially with the current nDelius.)

However, in this particular case on this blog, it wasn’t one of those types of instances. The practitioner had phoned the person, and on that basis decided that the individual was still ‘in contact’, and that s/he therefore didn’t want to take action on the third unacceptable absence in a month. There was some online discussion about whether s/he should have chased up the person under supervision in this way, and in this and in other respects this seemed to me a not unusual case that was causing so much heat.

So let’s step back from the sets of instructions and targets and review this in the context of a Purpose to Implement the Sentence – a purpose in its own right. If the person was serving custody, the prison would be required to keep him/her locked up; if on community service, work a set number of hours (quite complicated itself at times, so we won’t go there this time); and if under supervision they should keep appointments as required. In bare terms the task for the practitioner is to set appointments for the person under supervision, behave in a way to promote compliance by the person with the appointments, and to take enforcement action if compliance is not achieved.

Most people who have never been a probation practitioner, or forgotten the experience, don’t realise just how messy this simple-sounding process can get. Unlike prison, where the constraint is directly physical (until you get to open conditions), although probation is now a sentence it is a conditional sentence: the offender is ‘subject to rules’ and a return to Court or custody is the sanction for breaking the rules. This still sounds fairly simple, but with many cases messy reality can make it really difficult for the practitioner to manage, and sets of instructions and ‘process targets’ have ultimately not helped. For me the key question, for this Purpose, is “Is this person serving their sentence?” It’s a qualitative question, requiring a series of qualitative judgements, and in each instance my main stipulation would be not to issue a whole set of instructions but to advise, “Please don’t be silly about it, as you ask yourself: Would a reasonably sane member of the public find my actions credible?” when answering each of the following questions:

1) “Have you set enough appointments?” – (This is in order to achieve the Compliance purpose; you might set additional appointments for other purposes such as to manage Risk of Harm to others.) Personally, I can’t see how any case where the Order or Licence is active could credibly be ‘serving their sentence’ if they don’t have at least one appointment every month as an absolute minimum.

2) “Has the person under supervision complied with each appointment?” - I can think of hundreds of scenarios which can complicate this: arriving late (how late?), coming early and then not waiting, coming on the wrong day, ringing up saying “I forgot, shall I come in now?” etc. As now, you are making judgements about whether a failed or mucked-about appointment is Acceptable or Unacceptable.

3) “If the person is starting to ‘slip’, what action can you take to promote compliance?” It has to be appropriate to the case – your judgement. With some, going to their home might be experienced as helpful and caring; with others, that you are a complete ‘soft touch’. Even if an absence is acceptable (and especially if unacceptable), why not set an additional appointment to make up for the one they missed? Some will become more responsive when this is done; others will for whatever reason push you further.

4) “Has the person now slipped into ‘not serving their sentence’?” Look at the pattern by this individual: Think of 100 Daily Mirror readers – members of the public who are not inherently hostile to public services - and in your head ask them the question (for example): Is a person who has without reasonable excuse failed three appointments in a month serving their sentence of the Court? Answer: Probably Not.

5) “If they’re not ‘serving their sentence’, why wouldn’t you take breach action?” The instances of this would be very rare indeed. The sanction (for Orders) is the taking them back to Court – in principle at least the Court’s action is a separate matter, so an electronic tag with Order to continue might be suitable in some cases.

I’ve documented my general approach to managing Probation practice in more detail elsewhere, and it stems from my practice as Chief of Berkshire 1998-2001. It wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea I know, and when something similar was introduced in New Zealand at my behest in 2010 one of the ‘costs’ for practitioners was that they found they needed to make fuller entries on the case records in order to ‘account for their decisions and actions’. I should have foreseen that more quickly, but I don’t retreat now from the position of wanting to offer practitioners much more discretion about how they achieve the Three Purposes – and be accountable for that – while offering no discretion about what I believe they should be trying to achieve.

Andrew Bridges