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

• n 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

• ffenders, older prisoners, crime reduction policies (which included an examination
• f 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

• ffenders 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

• f 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

• n a sustainable footing over the longer term by shifting resources away from

incarceration to rehabilitation, provided the concept was tested before being rolled

• ut 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

• f 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 alternatives 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-

• ffending. 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,

for example, through the adoption of problem-solving approaches. We saw that in

• peration in Texas and in Stockport. If decisions taken by the Government tend

towards creation of a large prison population, commensurate resources for the prison system will have be found, so that people do not end up leaving prison less able to play a productive role in society than when they entered custody. We are in danger of greatly eroding the capacity of prison to rehabilitate, limited as it is. The recent decline in safety in prisons demonstrated through all the key internal and external indicators, the projected ongoing rise in the prison population, the certainty that the NOMS budget will not grow sufficiently to accommodate this is a disaster course and an irresponsible approach to the use of taxpayers’ money. Challenge for the next Government My Committee includes four parties and brings together different views, for example,

• n the role of the private sector. If we as a Committee have been able to reconcile quite

pronounced differences of political principle and ideology between members through an approach which is based firmly on consideration of the evidence submitted to us in order to create a “safe space” in which to foster rational and fundamental debate

• n justice policy, the same should be possible for Parliament and parties to do so even

in a general election. The task of having the right kind of debate needs to be observed by future governments, by political parties, and by our successors on the Justice Select Committee.

That is the challenge for politicians but there is also a challenge for the reformers: to carry the debate to the large section of public opinion which assume that reformers don’t take criminality seriously enough. We know that, presented with the facts of individual cases, the public tends to suggest shorter prison sentences than the

• judiciary. But if you ask someone whether an offence aggravated by serious violence

should get a longer prison sentence, they will say yes because length of custody is the

• nly way we generally recognise of indicating that this crime was more serious.

The violence may actually show that what is really needed is treatment for alcohol or drug misuse, but the fact that length of custody is used to measure seriousness of response leads to money being wrongly spent. Penal reform is not about treating crime less seriously, it’s about achieving real behavioural change. So there’s your challenge: address public concern, build on victim’s desire to prevent others suffering.