Thursday 17 August 2017

More on Prison Reform

With seemingly everyone accepting there is a crisis in our prison system that requires urgent attention, there is a recurring use of the term 'rehabilitation'. Sadly there is no similar acceptance of a crisis in the 'reformed' probation service which has always had 'rehabilitation' as a core aim. Therefore, worthy though it might be, I fail to see how a new report and initiative from the RSA can possibly get anywhere unless the disaster of TR is fully acknowledged and dealt with. This on the RSA website:-

PRISON REFORM: JAM TOMORROW? 


"It must come sometimes to 'jam today'," Alice objected.

When it comes to reforming the prisons of England and Wales, it can feel as if we have walked through the looking glass and what we found there are false starts. Like Alice who encounters the White Queen of Wonderland explaining the rule about jam: it is always on offer but for yesterday and tomorrow, not today.

When our very own Majesty’s speech in May 2016 led on prison reform there seemed reasons to be hopeful. Paul Tye, a member of the RSA’s Future Prison Project Advisory Group and a former prisoner wrote in its wake:

“Having served at Her Majesty’s pleasure on more than one occasion in the past, watching the Queen put prison reform at the centre of her speech, and listening to prison officers and prisoners talking about the dangers they face and the need for change, bizarrely gave me hope that we are recognising the depth of change needed… We are at the tipping point.”
Over a year later and it can feel as if we are still teetering on that axis but that the balance is not yet tipping in the right direction. David Lidington is the third person to hold the post of Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice since the RSA began the Future Prison Project in early 2016. Like his immediate predecessors, Michael Gove and Liz Truss, he acknowledges that there are deep-seated challenges that successive governments have failed to tackle.

Just a month in to office, Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons’ latest annual report would have come across the new Secretary of State’s desk. It concludes that prison reform would not succeed unless the violence and prevalence of drugs in jail are addressed and prisoners are unlocked for more of the working day. Earlier this month, the President of the Prison Governors’ Association expressed her grave concern about the state of the service. Meanwhile, despite Michael Gove and Liz Truss having secured funding for an additional 2,500 frontline staff, the prison service is struggling to recruit and train frontline staff fast enough to compensate for those officers leaving.

The final report of the RSA’s Future Prison Project outlined the potential for wholesale prison reform, addressing some of the wider failures of the justice system. It recommended increasing governor autonomy, local commissioning and greater devolution, supported by a leaner, clearer, central accountability framework and a new duty to reduce risk through rehabilitation. Our proposals informed what was the emerging government’s prison safety and reform agenda, and the November 2016 White Paper and we welcomed the 2016 Prisons and Courts Bill as potentially an historical shift in thinking about the purpose of prisons and how they are run. However, legislative reform was for another year: the Bill fell prior to the general election and was scrapped soon after. 

Rehabilitation tomorrow?

So, is it time to admit defeat and acknowledge that deeper prison reform focused around rehabilitation is for ‘tomorrow’? That today, what we all need to do is to ‘simply’ focus on the need for bread and butter: increasing stability, safety and resources?

This fails to recognise that the UK’s prison system, even when better resourced, has never distinguished itself in providing the right environments, opportunities and support in custody and in the community for rehabilitation to occur. That does not mean there are not fantastic governors, officers and prisoners working together with sensitivity and some success. There are plenty. But the risk is that if we abandon belief in deeper reform, seeing this as a distraction rather than something that has to happen alongside getting the basics right, we risk embedding the fatalism that many in the service already feel.

And as Matthew Taylor, the RSA’s Chief Executive has argued, when any institution becomes dominated by a culture of fatalism, blame and opposition can become the norm and culture becomes very hard to shift. Counter-intuitively, progress seems to rely on reaching for a higher purpose. The RSA has argued for some time, that putting a commitment to rehabilitation – alongside the right level of resources and reducing the overall prison population – at the core of our prison system is the best way to tackle risk, reduce reoffending and protect communities.

Articulating and delivering this ambition without any new statutory instrument to drive change through the system, while also tackling those acute challenges identified by the HM Inspectorate of Prisons and others, will be extremely difficult. Many people are fed up, scared, tired and have lost faith in change. But the new Secretary of State is right in stressing the need for continuing with the prison reform agenda, while also tackling some of the problems facing the probation service. The speed of travel and the depth of progress will depend on the extent to which service leaders, staff, prisoners and the partners they work with are enabled to realise the potential of reform and are empowered to practically respond.

And this is where the New Futures Network (NFN) could play an important role both in driving reform and bringing new players and resources into play. As part of our engagement with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and prison service in 2016, the RSA recommended the creation of a new body to support prison leaders to respond to reform, with an emphasis on education and employment, and on local leadership. Ministers asked for the design stage of such a body to be independent of Whitehall, to encourage broad and deep engagement, genuine innovation, and positive challenge to the status quo. We have now published our conclusions.

We conclude that the MoJ, initially at least, should sponsor the New Futures Network but that it have a degree of independence delivered by a non-political Chair with authority and expertise in either criminal justice or business leadership, and from outside Whitehall. This proposal has been discussed with officials at the MoJ, has been welcomed by Ministers as part of the government’s wider safety and reform strategy and will be considered alongside the MoJ’s employment strategy due to be published later this year.

In developing our proposal the RSA engaged with over 100 people working within prisons and probation and beyond, from the private, public and charity sector. Despite the challenges above, the government can take some credit for enabling an environment for many existing new organisations linking prisons, probation and employers to emerge (for example Tempus Novo, The Exceptionals, Offploy, Prosper 4 and Code 4000). Throughout we had conversations with governors, prisoners, officers, employers, charities, businesses and social enterprises. While all bought different perspectives, what was striking was the consensus around key issues: the need for central government and the prison service hierarchy to lead better and enable and trust its governors more; an appetite for commissioning that allows for greater local freedoms to develop sustainable partnerships and impact measures while drawing on the experience of others; and the desire for prison leaders to be able to spend more time looking outwards to communities and downwards to staff and prisoners when it came to ideas, innovation and delivery of rehabilitative approaches.

Yes, there was also some cynicism about the musical chairs of Ministerial change. Yes, there are deep questions about staff capacity but there was also an overwhelming consensus that reform needs to be driven locally, by governors and their communities, and that we need to act now to strengthen the culture and operational capacity for prisons to be able to become places for rehabilitation and progress.

Download the New Futures Network proposal submitted to the MoJ (PDF, 671KB)

The New Futures Network (NFN) team comprised Rachel O’Brien, who leads the RSA’s prisons work, Pamela Dow, former MoJ Director of Strategy, and RSA researcher Jack Robson. We are grateful to the Garfield Weston Foundation, the Tudor Trust, and the RSA for funding this work.

7 comments:

  1. The RSA keeps on throwing new balls into the arena. To paraphrase Mr Brown, however worthy the ideas may be I suspect its vanity crowd-funding by nobs, for nobs (or in the case of Gove, knobs):

    "In February 2016, the Prime Minister announced a government drive to boost rehabilitation and to reduce the number of people returning to prison after having served short sentences. Michael Gove has fast emerged as a radical and reforming Minister of Justice; his proposals to create ‘Reform Prisons’ where governors have autonomy over how they run their establishments will build on the work of the education sector and the development of academy schools.

    One of the questions still to be asked is: Who runs prisons? Most prisons across the world are run by the state. In some countries, notably Britain and the USA, some establishments have been contracted out to the private sector: prisons for profit. No jurisdiction to date has explored a third way: not for profit prisons. That is prisons not run by the public or private sector but by the communities prisons are there to serve. The Future Prison project will explore this model, drawing on the good practice of some academy schools and NHS Trusts.

    It will build on previous work done by the RSA including the Learning Prison, Transitions and Building A Rehabilitation Culture. It involves working with Transitions Spaces, a new community interest company that resulted from these studies. In particular it will:

    Scope a model for a not-for-profit prison that places rehabilitation and social inclusion at the centre, while seeking ways in which the community might manage the facility and all it entails.

    Identify a legislative, financial and managerial framework for such a model to flourish and be sustained.

    Over the next 10 months, the project will combine research, including fieldwork within prisons, to explore the leadership and governance changes needed to support greater localism. It will include work on:

    Leadership, autonomy and devolution;

    Employment and education;

    Risk management;

    Workforce development;

    Health and vulnerabilities, and

    The role of peers as assets.

    The Future Prison will seek to encourage the government to put the right legislative framework in place, as well as influence wider thinking within the Ministry of Justice, the National Offender Management Service, the prison service local statutory and voluntary services and potential future prison partners.

    Our starting point is that giving some governors autonomy to make decisions over how they spend their budgets makes sense. However, a considerable amount of crime is local in its impact and nature. People in prison are members of the community passing through, some very quickly. It is incumbent on communities to seek to take greater responsibility for prisons and the complex process of punishment and rehabilitation. At times of financial austerity it makes sense for prisons to be part of an integrated solution rather than to stand, as the prime minister put it ‘out of sight and out of mind’. The government is seeking bold solutions and asking questions of wider society to solve the prisons crisis. The Future Prison aims to address some of these questions and more.

    The RSA and Transitions Spaces are grateful to James Timpson, Lady Edwina Grosvenor and Hugh Lenon who have co-funded this project."

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  2. More 'Third Way' politics. Not-for-profit prisons modelled on school academies -yet there is no compelling evidence that these outperform state schools. But they have lots of fancy charts and glib terminology, so I am sure they will do well.

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  3. Penal reform is not just a justice issue. It's a social issue.
    Unless the powers that be start to consider prison reforms in context and in conjunction with wider social reforms then it's always going to be sticking plaster politics.
    Half the people in prison shouldn't be there. They're there because they have mental health problems, addiction problems, there homeless or are suffering from any number of government failed policies.
    Prison has become not just a place where people are sent for punishment,but an institution to hide social issues and failed policy.
    Prisons are part of society and need to be considered as such, and not just thought of as some kind of annexe.
    I get tired of the MoJ spouting the rethoric of recruiting 2500 new staff as if that's the answer to the prison crisis. There were 75 of those positions filled in the last 12mths. If you deduct those that were sacked or prosecuted for smuggling or inappropriate relationships, those that have gone overseas, those that have retired, those that have just thrown the towel in, and the number on long term sick leave, then that 75 becomes a minus number.
    2500 is also only half of the number that's been got rid of anyway. But what if 10000 more prison officers were found tomorrow? It may mean there's better security, less violence and prisoners would be out of their cells more. But that just makes things more comfortable for everyone. More prisoners could access education and colour in pictures of pepper pig, but they'd still be discharged with their £46 and the same social issues (if not more of them) that they had on entering the system.
    Prison reform needs to be considered in the round and in context with social reform. If its not, then the problems might change over time, but prison will still remain societies failure.

    'Getafix

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    Replies
    1. Maybe David Lidlington thinks the same Getafix, maybe he's a secret reader of this blog.

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-40937260

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    2. The number of front-line prison officers in England and Wales is up from 18,090 in 2016 to 18,755 this year, Ministry of Justice figures show. In future, trainees from a new scheme will help boost the numbers of graduates in the profession.

      On E Wing at Coldingley prison, in Surrey, a group is being shown how to carry out one of the most basic tasks for a prison officer - though it is also one of the most important.

      "Good afternoon, how are you doing today? We're doing a cell search. Do you have any weapons, religious items, legal paperwork?" The wing holds more than 500 of the most serious offenders in England and Wales, and the graduate recruits are being supervised as they look for weapons, drugs and mobile phones.

      They are the first intake of graduates on a prison officer training programme modelled on the Teach First scheme for schools. "This is somebody's house, show it respect," says the trainer.

      More than 50 trainees were selected from 600 applicants. One of them, Sophie, said she had never imagined herself as a prison officer. She recently left university with a first-class degree in psychology and wants to build a career in criminal justice, helping turn lives around.

      Despite the record levels of assaults on staff and recent prison disturbances, she sees working as a prison officer as an ideal first step. "My mum was worried and concerned, my dad happy, excited, because I'm excited and happy," she says. "They haven't got many concerns, when I raise a concern, when it's scary, they're like, 'What did you expect?'"

      The graduates are in their final few weeks of intensive training before embarking on a two-year stint as front-line prison officers. Justice Secretary, David Lidington told the BBC he hoped the scheme would bring fresh ideas to a service that was too much of a "closed world". He said he would like to ease the pressure on the service by safely reducing the prison population. "I want to see the prisoner numbers come down, and we need to see less crime and less reoffending and prison better at stopping people from reoffending after they've been released," Mr Lidington said.

      "If you look at the population figures for prisons, the big driver for the increase in the prison population has been people serving long sentences, four years or more, and particularly the rise in the number of people convicted of sexual offences. "The number of people sent for short terms in prison has actually been coming down in recent years. So, I don't think you can simply set an arbitrary figure, but we do need to make sure that our judges and magistrates have confidence in the community sentences - the alternatives to prison."

      The new scheme, Unlocked Graduates, aims to professionalise the prison service and give front-line experience to some of Britain's brightest graduates. But the big challenge for prisons, including Coldingley, is to ensure staff stay in the service. Starting salaries for prison officers in England and Wales are £20,000-£29,000 and set by an independent body. Some staff leave to earn the same or more in jobs that are less stressful and dangerous.

      Mr Lidington acknowledged more could be done to support officers and make them feel valued. He hopes the new scheme will help bring stability to the prison service - but it has started small and there is a long way to go.

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    3. Unlocked Graduates chief executive Natasha Porter said a key aim was to identify future prison governors and leaders in other fields.

      "We want people leading prisons who have done our programme. We want people staring criminal justice charities who have done our programme," said Ms Porter. "But we also want MPs who have done our programme, I want a secretary of state for justice, I want a prime minister who has done our programme. If you have spent two years walking the landing working in a prison, you can deal with any type of client, you can deal with any difficult situation that any job throws at you."

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  4. Even before the Tories cut a huge amount of the prisons budget there were substantial issues in prisons that weren't being addressed.

    The RSA claims there are many excellent governors. Yet I spent time in four prisons over a three year period and can attest that every single governor at any grade was a total idiot who hadn't got a clue and was universally hated and derided by the staff working under them. Clearly who is appointed as a prison governor needs to be seriously looked at because the quality is definitely lacking. As are the brains.

    The prison officers were a mixed bag that ranged from excellent to those who made you wonder how they managed to tie their shoelaces of a morning to those who were smuggling all sorts of contraband in and having sex with inmates. Then Grayling got rid of all the decent experienced officers and what was left simply wasn't fit for purpose.

    Until you fix the problems of useless governors with their heads up their arses and crooked incompetent staff all the reforms in the world simply won't work because there will be little interest in bringing them in or making them work.

    In terms of a focus on rehabilitation, education and work there is a real need for a good hard look at things in this area. You need to ditch all those OB courses that simply do not work and replace them with individually tailored therapy/counselling sessions etc. Yes it will be initially more expensive but it's about the only way to address reoffending properly and will save £££ in the long run.

    Education needs to range from the basics up to funded degree level courses in a wide range of subjects that are actually usable qualifications on the outside recognised by employers as most of what passes for education at the moment are useless mickey mouse courses not worth the paper they are written on.

    Work in prisons needs to always lead to a recognisable qualification and needs to be more than cooking in the kitchen or cleaning up the wings or doing a spot of gardening. It needs to be real purposeful work that will lead to proper employment on the outside.

    The prison population needs to be reduced drastically. People need to be assessed for mental health issues prior to their day in court and diverted away from the CJS if found to have mental health issues to suitable treatment. Likewise with substance abuse issues. Anyone prosecuted for a non violent crime should receive a non custodial sentence unless it's say a serious fraud with a lot of vulnerable victims and is a repeat offence.

    This current drive to recruit 2500 staff simply will not work. They won't stay because the pay is crap and the working conditions are awful.

    And the government needs to do something as a matter of urgency about all the IPP's over tariff from a humanity point of view. At the very least convert them all to determinate sentences so people have an end date.

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