Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360
- 379)
TUESDAY 3 FEBRUARY 1998
MR PAUL
CAVADINO, PROFESSOR
ANDREW RUTHERFORD
AND MR
ROB ALLEN
Mr Linton
360. I want to ask about re-conviction rates
and good practice. Before that, I have one further question on
the statistics that you presented in your evidence. I want to
be devil's advocate here if I may for a second to find out what
your reaction is. Your evidence shows that the prison population
has gone up by 42 per cent since 1993. That is shown by Home Office
statistics. Their statistics also show—and I think it is
elsewhere in the report—that the crime rate has gone down
by a few percentage points since then, I think it is eight points.
What would you say is the relationship between those two facts?
It could be judges sending more people down despite the fact that
fewer crimes are being committed, or it could be fewer crimes
being committed because judges are sending more people down, or
it could be that there is absolutely no causative link between
the two. What is your opinion and is there any hard evidence to
show whether there is a causative link?
(Mr Allen) First I think that the much vaunted fall
in crime over the last few years has been a fall in recorded
crime. The British Crime Survey shows that while there may have
been a real fall it is less substantial than the fall in recorded
crime, for whatever reason. The numbers of people appearing before
the courts has not increased, I think I am right in saying, over
this period. Courts have become very much more severe, both in
relation to the percentage of people appearing before them that
they send to prison, both in the Crown court and in the magistrates
court, and in the length of sentences that they impose. That does
not apparently result from their dealing with graver crimes or
more serious offenders. There is no evidence that that is an explanation.
There does seem to have been a change in relation to the way courts
have behaved: they have behaved more harshly. You asked the question
about the relationship between the increase in prison population
and the fall, albeit a smaller fall, in the recorded figures that
there may have been. As we have already said, these things are
very complicated. There has been a great deal of interest in crime
prevention and community safety over the last few years and the
present Government are building on that in the Crime and Disorder
Bill. It is quite possible, and certainly NACRO has been involved
in some of these schemes through its "Safer Cities"
programmes and so on, that these kinds of initiative have as much
if not greater impact upon the crime rate than changes in the
rate of imprisonment.
361. Coming on to the re-conviction rate,
we have seen all the figures in your evidence and other evidence
which show us that the re-conviction rate for community penalties
is 57 per cent and for imprisonment 53 per cent. Do you accept
that community sentences overall are no more successful at reducing
re-conviction than prison is?
(Mr Allen) I think Mr Cavadino will want to come in
on this, but these are global figures. As we said, what is much
more encouraging is that there are certain types of community
sentence, the more intensive, focused programmes, which try both
to affect the way people think and behave, which are only a small
percentage of the overall probation orders or community penalties
and do not necessarily show up. That aggregate figure masks some
variations, as indeed I expect it would on the prisons side, that
some prisons perhaps have a better rate of re-conviction for people
discharged than others.
362. The other side of that coin surely
is that if some forms of community penalty are actually quite
successful, there must be other forms that have a very high re-conviction
rate, in other words are almost ineffective.
(Mr Cavadino) The basic point that we have made here
in our memorandum and indeed when I was speaking earlier is that
the differences between re-conviction rates of non-custodial and
custodial sentences are slight and that we therefore need to concentrate
our efforts on shifting resources within each of those sentences
towards the kinds of approaches that the evidence shows are the
most likely to reduce re-offending. Clearly you are right in suggesting
that if some approaches are more successful than the average,
other approaches must be less successful than the average. What
is clear is that only a minority of offenders who for example
are put under community supervision by the courts receive the
kinds of programmes which the evidence shows work best. That is
something which needs to be addressed and which the Probation
Inspectorate is currently addressing and to which we need to give
strong backing in order to get the maximum cost effectiveness
out of community punishment.
363. Do you think that looking at these
things purely from the point of view of re-conviction rates is
the right way to go about it or should one take into account statistics
other than re-conviction rates, for instance the number moving
into jobs or something like that?
(Mr Cavadino) Re-conviction rates have to remain at
the centre of the measurement simply because we have not got another
measurement which shows how much re-offending takes place. We
know that re-conviction tells you how many people are caught rather
than necessarily how many have re-offended, and that is true of
both custody and community sentences, but we do not have another
measure. That is what this is all about, trying to prevent people
from re-offending. That has to be a central feature of gauging
effectiveness. It does also make sense to judge effectiveness
partly on other measures which we know are related to the likelihood
of offending in the future. For example, if you have got a programme
working with young offenders which reduces the level of offending
and also the level of truancy, which we know is often bound up
with offending, it is reasonable to take that into account as
something which is promising for the prospects of re-offending
in the future. If we are working with older offenders we need
for instance not only to look at re-conviction rates, although
that must remain central, but also at whether they are helped
to overcome problems of alcohol abuse and drug abuse which may
have been connected with their offending. If there are clearly
offending related criteria which we can look at, we should add
those in, but re-conviction has to remain central.
364. Coming on to the solution rather than
the problem, looking at the different kinds of community punishments
that work, are the examples of good practice effectively disseminated?
Should there be a national curriculum so to speak to enable sentencers
to get better access to the evidence and to be able to make better
judgements in individual cases of what is going to work best?
(Mr Allen) We very much support the notion of a national
curriculum. I think it can achieve two things. One is that it
can achieve a spread across the country. One of the interesting
things is that crown courts and magistrates across the country
do make rather different use of custodial and non-custodial sentences.
There is substantial variation between similar courts in the extent
to which they send people to prison or not, and that in part is
likely to reflect the availability or not of community based programmes
which might act as a credible alternative. There is a need to
achieve a proper spread, and almost in the sense of the national
curriculum in schools, an entitlement to all the elements. The
other thing is about the quality of the programmes and Mr Cavadino
has talked about the fact that there is a wide range. As you yourself
pointed out, the implication is that there are some programmes
which are less successful, so it is about raising the standards
and ensuring that there is a good range of good quality programmes
including probation day centres; community service placements
for all groups, including for example women, who sometimes miss
out on those kinds of things; the very best of these behavioural
cognitive intensive programmes; specialist programmes for people
who have been convicted of certain kinds of crimes: motor car
crimes, sex offences perhaps; there are some quite successful
specific targeted programmes: the drunken drivers and those sorts
of things. We think that that should be a requirement of probation
services, together with a requirement to form a range of partnerships
with other local agencies who can play a part. It is not all down
to the probation service. As I said earlier, having a range of
other sorts of employment, but also in relation to drug and alcohol
treatment, those kinds of specialist treatments are obviously
necessary if that is what lies behind the offending behaviour.
365. What about restorative justice? Do
you think that has more of a part to play than it so far has had?
(Mr Allen) It is early days. We are very excited about
the prospects of restorative justice. As you will know, the Home
Secretary's proposals in relation to youth justice envisage a
new order, a reparation order. He is interested in the longer
term, in making restorative justice the guiding principle of the
youth court and there are a number of schemes that the Thames
Valley Police have set up, there are some in Hampshire and Kent
and so on. We need to see how effective they are. Experience from
overseas suggests that they can play a central part. In New Zealand
the system for dealing with young offenders is a restorative justice
system based on what is called "family group conferencing"
and that applies across the board. Rather than a court based system,
the system is about trying to get the victim and the offender
to agree a way in which the offender can make amends and compensate
for what they have done, and also to try to find things that need
to be done to stop that offender getting into trouble in the future.
For adults there are a number of other schemes. The mediation
programme in Leeds is one of the best that the probation service
run. In Northamptonshire they have been doing this sort of work.
Clearly it is not going to apply across the board, and one of
the cardinal principles is that if we are talking about a pure
form in which victims meet the offender then it very much has
to be a voluntary process and there must be no sense in which
the victim is pressured into getting involved in that sort of
one-on-one situation. There is a suggestion that many victims
who do go through that process are very much more satisfied with
that than comparable victims who go through the criminal justice
system. Going back to the question of other criteria of success,
I think victim satisfaction is one of them. I do not think that
that necessarily has been shown to be met by greater punishment.
366. You mentioned in your evidence, Mr
Allen, that the reparation element should be more direct than
indirect. Do you mean by that that it should be working out just
with the victims of their crimes?
(Mr Allen) What we are suggesting is that efforts
should be made to try and explore the possibilities of direct
reparation for victims wherever possible. There is a danger that
the reparation order could turn into simply a sort of junior version
of the community service order. That would be more straightforward
for agencies to introduce for youngsters. We are saying there
is an opportunity here to assess the possibility of mediation
and direct reparation to the victim and there is a sort of halfway
house in which offenders can do work and earn money which they
then pay directly to the victim. There are a number of schemes
up and down the country which have started to do that.
Mr Winnick
367. Name one.
(Mr Allen) In Hackney, run by the Social Services
Department. I think I sent the Clerk details when we suggested
some places the Committee might like to visit.
Mr Linton
368. Would you accept that direct reparation
to the victim is not necessarily always enough? There were two
particularly brutal murders in my constituency at the weekend
and it is probable that both victim and culprits were members
of rival biker gangs and the point is not just the murders they
have committed on one another but the terror they inflict on a
community by going round apparently armed with weapons such as
axes and knives. There I do not think anybody would feel that
simply reparation to the victim's family, important though it
will be to their relatives, will meet the point that we are trying
to get at.
(Mr Allen) I would agree that in very serious cases
like that there is clearly a need for another response, although
I would say that some kind of reparation and attempted reconciliation
between the parties where there has been conflict, whether it
is through gang problems or long standing difficulties between
members of the community, some sort of attempt to get people to
live together without damaging each other on a regular basis is
actually the only way forward. If you ignore that and simply rely
on retribution and punishment that is provided through the criminal
justice system, the danger is that it escalates and carries on.
It needs to be part of a much broader package in those kinds of
cases.
369. You also talk about supervised attendance
orders. What kind of offenders would they be intended for?
(Mr Allen) Our original interest in this came when
we were considering the question of fine defaulters. In Scotland
the supervised attendance order is available if you like as a
fine on time, so rather than pay a fine if you are in impoverished
circumstances, you pay by attending a supervised attendance order
for a number of hours and during that time hopefully learn some
kind of skill in relation to budgeting, a sort of social skills
programme although on a rather less intensive basis necessarily
than the kinds of schemes we have been talking about. Thus far
we see those for the relatively low tariff, less serious end of
the offending scale, but perhaps for people who persistently commit
offences of a lower level of seriousness. Clearly there are probation
day centres which provide very much more intensive programmes,
such as Sherborne House. I do not know if it has been suggested
you might visit there.
Mr Winnick
370. Where is that?
(Mr Allen) Sherborne House is the Inner London Probation
Service probation centre in Camberwell, I think, and it provides
a much more intensive programme than we are suggesting through
the supervised attendance order. We suggest further that that
might in a sense subsume or replace the attendance centre order
which is one of the community penalties that is currently available
for young persons up to the age of 21. I think it is fair to say
they vary in quality in terms of the sorts of regimes and activities
they provide and in our view they could do with some sort of re-vamp
along the lines of what we have been talking about.
(Professor Rutherford) May I add a point to that,
Chairman? The Howard League attaches particular importance to
this idea because it does build on some of the excellent collaborative
work between the police and the probation service that has been
getting under way in various parts of the country, for example
in Kent. The attendance centre has become rather disused in recent
years by the courts, down to 5,000 or 6,000 a year. The League
strongly believes that there is a need for a lower level penalty
that might to some extent respond to the dramatic drop in the
use of the fine over recent years. There is a danger of the collapse
of the fine leading to penalties being put at a much higher level
than is appropriate as a response. This idea of the supervised
attendance order I think would fill that gap. When one looks at
the Crime and Disorder Bill one is struck by the proliferation
of new orders that that Bill contains, of a whole variety of sorts,
both civil and criminal, which is going to greatly confuse and
complicate the penal scenery I think. We have some very good things
already in place which are much envied by other countries, such
as the community service order, such as the attendance centre.
It is just that the attendance centre now needs to be given a
boost. Certainly the Howard League would urge the Committee to
build upon what we have got and try to think of ways of making
those penalties work more effectively rather than going down this
route of simply adding to the proliferation, which is one of the
features of the Bill that is now before Parliament.
Chairman
371. There is one practical question as
regards community service. Is there a sufficient amount of work
available to fill the programme? Where do you get your projects
from?
(Professor Rutherford) That is probably a question
that ACOP, your witnesses two weeks ago, are in a better position
to answer than we are. The Howard League has always been a strong
supporter of the community service orders from the beginning.
We recently published a paper urging again that it is something
that needs to be given an additional boost. My sense is—and
my colleagues might want to come in on this—that innovative
probation departments are still finding that they are able to
come up with quite a lot of useful projects in their areas. That
has not been the problem. The problem has been more in terms of
what proportion of their resources as a probation department are
they able to put into this sort of activity. The evidence that
you heard two weeks ago of the projected cut in real expenditure
available to the probation departments over the next five years
obviously carries a worrying message to probation in terms of
the future of community service. My sense is that it is more in
terms of actual resources available to the probation service rather
than the problem of suitable projects that probationers might
carry out.
372. You think there is no shortage of suitable
projects?
(Professor Rutherford) I have not heard that as being
one of the problems of community service.
373. The other question that occurred to
me was one that Mr Winnick asked you at the beginning, about the
organisations that comprise your consortium. Do any of them represent
the interests of victims, for example Victim Support?
(Mr Cavadino) We have the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. Victim
Support, because it does not take policy stances on issues like
sentencing, has felt that it could not be a member of the consortium
because it does not express views on issues like sentencing and
the punishment of offenders. However, we have liaised with Victim
Support when we have been issuing papers about the interests of
victims. We published for example a joint manifesto for penal
reform which included proposals to improve the position of victims
and we checked those out with Victim Support before we published
the manifesto and the final proposals we made to improve the position
of victims were in line with their views.
Mr Allan
374. At the outset are we all agreed that
the prime responsibility in terms of deciding penal policy is
the protection of the public? I hope that is not an issue of dispute:
that public protection must be the overriding concern.
(Mr Cavadino) Yes, public protection meaning the reducing
of re-offending.
375. One of the critical problems we have
on that in terms of the community sentences is that for example
we had evidence from Professor Ken Pease last week that 28 per
cent of those who are on a community sentence, during the same
period of time as somebody else is held in custody will re-offend.
In other words, when we are giving people community sentences
we statistically are doing it in full knowledge that further offences
will be carried out which by definition could not have been carried
out if they had been incarcerated. Do you accept that as a major
problem in community sentencing?
(Mr Cavadino) It is obviously true that some people
who are given community sentences will re-offend in the course
of the community sentence where, had they been held in custody
at that time, they could not have committed an offence in the
community. If we are looking for what reduces re-offending as
a general approach, then we clearly need to do two things. I do
not think it is a particularly sensible response to that fact
simply to look at that in isolation. We need to look for longer
term prospects for reducing re-offending. We need first of all
to adopt the sorts of measures we have been proposing to increase
the effectiveness of community supervision with a view to reducing
that 28 per cent. Secondly, we need to ensure that we are doing
that in order to reduce the longer term prospects of re-conviction
and that applies both to those under community supervision and
to those coming out of prison. If we responded to that argument
simply by saying, "Well, community sentences have got disappointingly
high re-offending rates including some offences committed during
that period when that person could have been contained; prison
has disappointingly high re-conviction rates which apply after
somebody comes out of prison; therefore, the answer to that is
to abandon the disappointing results of community sentences and
put a lot more people into prison."
376. That was the argument which was put
forward.
(Mr Cavadino) That would not be a very sensible response.
It seems to me a much more sensible response to that overall situation
is to work to improve the effectiveness of community supervision
in the ways we have suggested. If we could do that, for some people
who are now under community supervision but also for some of the
less serious offenders who would otherwise now go to jail, that
would make it easier for the prison service to develop the sort
of regimes, based on similar principles, that can reduce re-offending
on release. They will have no chance of doing so if we put even
more people into prison and overstretch them further.
377. The whole credibility of community
sentencing is called into question every time we get an instance—and
there are many instances that we hear of through the media—of
somebody who continues to offend whilst under a community sentence.
I can understand that the sentencer in particular, having just
seen one of those splashed across the headlines of a paper, has
a problem in terms of handing down a sentence which may lead their
judgement to be called into question. I am interested in whether
you feel improvements could be made in terms of deciding who gets
community service and who is incarcerated, or do you feel the
balance at the moment is about right?
(Professor Rutherford) You cannot eliminate all risk.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the Pease recommendation as I
understand your summary of it is that you do not have any alternatives
to prison; you simply regard prison as the safest way of dealing
with people. People are not going to commit crimes in the community
while they are in prison, and you would go down the road of some
societies which largely do rely on prison as the option.
Mr Cranston:I do not think that is exactly true.
The argument he put was that there should be suspended sentences
and then if people do commit offences they then go to prison.
Mr Allan
378. There is one other critical point.
He said that within the current prison population you could have
a significant impact on crime by effectively swapping some of
those that are currently on community sentences for some of those
who are currently incarcerated, which was quite a significant
point. I think there is a public perception that repeat offenders
are being given community sentences and we were told that people
are given four or five community sentences on the trot and every
time they are offending whilst on that community sentence. Their
offending behaviour had never stopped at any point until they
were eventually incarcerated. I was wondering how far you think
we could go down that route of, if you like, swapping some on
the community service for some of those in prison.
(Mr Cavadino) The basic question you are raising is
about the information available to courts at the time of sentencing
in order to select what for the individual offender would be the
best way of reducing re-offending, which is a much more reasonable
approach than would be a response which just put a lot more people
in prison. That is where among other things the quality of pre-sentence
reports prepared for the courts is crucial. A lot of work was
done in the early 1990s to try to improve the quality of pre-sentence
reports as compared with the previous social inquiry reports and
in particular to try to focus the information in them very much
on the offence, the reasons for the offending and what could effectively
be done to reduce the likelihood of re-offending as well as on
issues such as risk to the public in the future. Risk meant two
different kinds of risk. It meant first of all the risk that the
person, if he or she did re-offend, would commit a very serious
offence. Secondly, it meant that even if it was not necessarily
a very serious offence, what was the likelihood of the person
re-offending? That was work done in the early 1990s which had
a considerable effect in improving the quality of the information
which the courts got, but pre-sentence reports do vary and it
is vitally important to work continuously to improve the quality
of the relevant information that the courts get. If the information
that is emerging about what works can be spread and become part
of the consciousness of those working in the criminal justice
system much more widely, much of that evidence is about matching
particular types of offender to particular types of approach that
are likely to reduce their chances of re-offending in the future.
That I think would help that process of selecting appropriate
sentencing.
379. Exactly that was put to us by ACOP,
that they would be happy to recommend a period of imprisonment
if they thought that was the only solution for an offender, and
yet it was suggested to us by colleagues who work in the criminal
justice system that they had never seen pre-sentence reports that
said, "The only thing to do is to put this person in prison".
(Mr Cavadino) What quite often happens is that a report
does not make a proposal for something else if they have reached
the conclusion that a prison sentence is inevitable. The purpose
of the pre-sentence report is to give the court relevant information
to its decision and it is also to give the court what is termed
a proposal, which in other words is an option which they could
use if they decided to use a community sentence of some kind.
The report writer is saying, "If you decide to use a community
sentence"—and the court may decide not to for other
reasons, such as the seriousness of the offence and the need for
punishment—"this is the most suitable option".
I think that is sometimes misunderstood as being a recommendation
in the sense of saying, "This is what you ought to do."
It is supposed to be an option which the courts can choose if
they decide not to use custody. The positive recommendation for
custody is obviously not quite the same thing. The option which
the courts are given of a possible suitable community supervision
programme cannot be presented to the court if the probation officer
preparing the report decides that imprisonment is desirable or
inevitable, and it may well be that they end the report simply
by saying that they cannot propose a suitable community sentence
option.
(Mr Allen) The research that has been done on persistent
juvenile offenders—and you will remember that four or five
years ago when this Committee was looking at the question of juvenile
offenders there was a lot of concern about this and it gave rise
to the then Government's secure training order—was that
it is actually quite difficult, although it sounds in principle
easy, to identify those youngsters who are going to go on to become
the persistent offenders. In a sense you only know you have got
a persistent offender when you have got a persistent offender.
As to this idea of incapacitation as a way of selecting, I agree
very much there is a need for pre-sentence reports which give
the courts the information they need. Professor Rutherford is
right: one is never going to be able to find that in an exact
way.
|
