I would like to reflect on how the Justice Committee has approached - PDF document

Speech by Rt Hon Sir Alan Beith MP, Chair of the Justice Committee, to the Criminal Justice Alliance 10 March 2015 Raising the level of debate on criminal justice policy I would like to reflect on how the Justice Committee has approached its deliberations on criminal justice policy, draw your attention to some of the conclusions we have drawn, and highlight some important lessons for the next Government, which I hope will adopt a rational evidence-based attitude to any new agenda for criminal justice reform. The Justice Committee’s approach to criminal justice policy Our membership is a broad church, representing four political parties. We reflect a wide range of views which means that, while it is not always easy to reach consensus, when we do so it strengthens the case for Government to pay attention. In the last Parliament, just before the 2010 election we published a major report on Justice Reinvestment. The central and defining strand of our work on policy has involved a continuing dialogue with the Ministry and the National Offender Management Service on the Government’s prisons and probation policy. The Committee has undertaken major inquiries into the Probation Service, women offenders, older prisoners, crime reduction policies (which included an examination of the Government’s Transforming Rehabilitation programme as it unfolded), and into prisons planning and policy. We have consistently advocated initiatives which go beyond a reliance on custody as the default answer and instead aim more squarely at

reducing offending and re-offending levels, and so enhancing public safety by such measures as –  putting in place appropriate community-based services to prevent potential offenders from entering the criminal justice system and to divert them from offending behaviour;  creating a well-resourced, credible, nationally-available but locally-responsive system of community sentences;  establishing a financially sustainable and effective sentencing framework that can deploy community sentences on an evidential basis. The landscape of probation services has changed fundamentally over the course of this Parliament, but in our view many of the principles which we set out in our 2011 Report on the role of the Probation Service remain valid criteria against which to assess reforms which have subsequently been proposed and introduced by the Government. We argued then that there needed to be a better and more seamless approach to offender management, with local commissioning and closer integration of prison and probation services to meet the needs of individual offenders. On the controversial question of payment by results, which has become the cornerstone of the future delivery of probation services under the Transforming Rehabilitation programme, we considered that it could provide a mechanism for putting the system on a sustainable footing over the longer term by shifting resources away from incarceration to rehabilitation, provided the concept was tested before being rolled out nationally.

Although we had differing views about the role of the private and voluntary sectors in probation we very much supported the aims of providing rehabilitative services to short-sentenced prisoners and of joining up the provision of those services before and after a prisoner’s release. At the same time we set out a series of safeguards we expected the Ministry of Justice to adopt during procurement and beyond. We sought to ensure that these were adhered to as the competition proceeded through ongoing correspondence with Ministers and officials. One of the main limitations of the model adopted by the Ministry under the Government’s approach to payment by results under the Transforming Rehabilitation programme for adult offenders is that, because of the need to fund supervision and to incentivise providers, savings are paid to them over a 10-year period, rather than being reinvested in early intervention, or in criminal justice initiatives further upstream in those who may ultimately be of high cost to the public purse. In our view the climate of austerity which has prevailed during this Parliament has made the case for adoption of a justice reinvestment approach more compelling. Periods of austerity can provide an opportunity to make radical policy change. Not having done so in relation to penal policy has been a wasted opportunity for reform. Where have the Treasury been? When we visited Texas in July 2013 as part of our crime reduction policies inquiry, we investigated the intriguing political consensus which has been forged there, with Republicans and Democrats agreeing that the

taxpayers’ dollar was being wasted on imprisoning offenders with drug problems who could be better dealt with by community-based programmes. In a surprising development for Texas’s longstanding reputation as one of the more draconian US states, that bipartisan consensus recognises that default incarceration of offenders is both expensive and ineffective in reducing offending rates compared with other policy approaches. A recent poll in Texas demonstrates that this approach also commands public support. The need for rational debate We need a political and media debate which gets away from arguments about which party is harder or softer on crime, and emphasises the prudent use of taxpayers’ money to optimise public safety. The use of custody is a very substantial commitment of public funds which needs to be justified by its effectiveness in punishment, public safety and reduction in reoffending. We have argued that a prison system which effectively rehabilitated a smaller number of offenders, while other offenders were rehabilitated through robust community sentences, had the potential to bring about a bigger reduction in crime. In relation to women offenders, for example, we called for a gradual reconfiguration of the female custodial estate, with women who have committed serious offences being held in smaller custodial units, and a greater use of alternati ves to custodial sentencing, including the improvement of women’s community centres. Neither the previous nor the present Government have been willing to accept the logic of that approach even as a medium-term aim.

We have sought too to provide a counterbalance to inaccurate media stereotypes that characterise non- custodial sentences as easy options, where the offender has ‘walked free’. As we noted in our probation report, making sentences more punitive does not mean that they will necessarily be effective in protecting the public by reducing re- offending. We have stressed this point repeatedly, including on draft sentencing guidelines published by the Sentencing Council, in respect of which we are statutory consultees. We are concerned that guidelines can contribute to ‘sentence inflation.’ Because some offences have aggravating features that need to be recognised by additional time in custody, and given that there are rarely any recommended reductions in sentencing guidelines, the overall effect of guideline revision may be to increase the total amount of custody resulting from the process. Tough community sentences can be more challenging for the offender; indeed, when we took evidence from ex-offenders, several told us that they committed offences in order to be sent back to prison than have to serve challenging community sentences. A genuinely cross-government approach In addition, the criminal justice system is only one part of the system through which taxpayers’ money is spent to keep people safe from crime. We welcome the Troubled Families programme which will be extended to 400,000 more families between 2015 and 2020. We welcome the fact that the Government is determined to provide supervision for offenders who have served less than 12 months. But Government still view crime reduction too much through the prism of Home Office and Ministry of Justice areas of responsibility, and do not take a broad enough perspective, especially

in terms of adopting early intervention and preventative policies in the areas of mental health, drug and alcohol treatment, which could do much to prevent people entering the criminal justice system in the first place, as well as to support those already in it. The so-called whole system approach to prevent women and girls from offending is an example of this, with the Ministerial drive remaining in the Ministry of Justice rather than transferring to the Department for Communities and Local Government, as we recommended. There is a strong financial case for examining across Government where taxpayers’ money can most effectively be spent in cutting crime. This ought to be a serious question for the Treasury. For example, if we compare the investment in drug and alcohol treatment, mental health schemes and early intervention activity to some of the annual costs of inaction it looks difficult to justify. We need to get away from the practice of treating prison as a “free good”. When someone is given a community sentence there is no certainty that resources will be found to provide what the court intends, but if they receive a custodial sentence a van will be waiting outside the court to take them to prison. It is imperative that the next Government recognises explicitly that the size of the prison population is to some extent determined by conscious political and policy choices and by a political climate, rather than simply a product of sentencing decisions. We also believe that courts should not be seen as purely instrumental institutions involved solely in processing and resolving cases; that misses an opportunity for encouraging greater innovation,