Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400
- 419)
TUESDAY 3 FEBRUARY 1998
MR PAUL
CAVADINO, PROFESSOR
ANDREW RUTHERFORD
AND MR
ROB ALLEN
Mr Malins
400. I thought you did say that and the
record will show.
(Mr Cavadino) If I did say that I did not mean it.
401. My suggestion is, first, that a very
low proportion of breaches are actually taken to court and, secondly,
of those that are taken to court, a very low proportion result
in custodial sentences. Would you disagree?
(Mr Cavadino) On the first question, which is the
proportion of those who breach who are taken to court, I would
disagree. The national standards lay down that on the third failure
to turn up or failure in some other way, the offender must be
taken back to court.
402. I am talking about the first and second
failures.
(Mr Cavadino) The first or second failure can be dealt
with at the discretion of the probation officer, either by a warning
of the consequences if there are further failures to comply or
by taking the offender straight back to court if it is considered
sufficiently serious. The standards do say that on the third occasion,
if the offender has not been taken back to court before, he must
be taken back to court at that stage, and that national standard
is normally applied. So we may agree on the facts about the matter,
although we phrase it in different ways. On the question of what
happens when the offender is taken back to court, the proportionate
use of immediate custody for breaching the order varies from one
sentence to another, but on the figures which the Home Office
published for 1996, they appear to be of the order of, for example,
38 per cent. for a combination order and 31 per cent. for a probation
order. So it is a substantial number but not the majority.
Mr Winnick
403. Do you think it would help the perception
of your own organisations if you gave more emphasis to the need
for emphasising that probation orders, combination orders and
other forms of non-custodial sentences should be rigorously observed?
Have you ever come out and said so?
(Mr Cavadino) Yes, we have said so frequently. We
support the work, for example, of the Probation Inspectorate.
In the course of its inspections it draws attention to situations,
if it finds them, in which it considers that the follow-up and
enforcement of breach procedures laid down in the national standards
are not being applied sufficiently rigorously. It is very important
that they should be applied rigorously, both for public credibility
but also so that the sentence itself can do its job of steering
the offender away from crime or applying appropriate sanctions
if the offender does not comply and is not steered away from crime.
404. I ask that question because there is
this feeling, which has been touched on by some of my colleagues,
that the non-custodial sentence is really a soft option that does
not make much difference to the offender; he or she—usually
it is a he—has plenty of time to commit other offences because
the person is not in prison. How do you think this can be dealt
with to reassure the public that not giving a prison sentence
is not a soft option and the offender, who has undoubtedly committed
some offences for which he is receiving a non-custodial sentence,
will be properly and rigorously dealt with by the Probation Service?
(Mr Allen) In some respects the introduction of the
combination order at the beginning of the 1990s, which combines
probation, which had traditionally emphasised more trying to rehabilitate
the offender, with community service, which is actually paying
back, doing unpaid work for a number of hours up to 100, is an
attempt to combine those two elements of what is involved in community
supervision, and it is a very popular order with the courts because
courts like to see both that the underlying problems and difficulties
that an offender has that are leading him to get into trouble
are being addressed, but they also have to pay back for what they
have done to the community, and I think that is the direction
which has driven the Probation Service in recent years.
405. Could I finally ask the three witnesses
before us, do you have any contact with victims? In the Howard
League, for example, do you ever meet the victims of those who
have committed offences, and the same applies, unless it is in
your day-to-day job, which I would not know, but otherwise what
contact as organisations do you have with those who are the victims
of criminality?
(Professor Rutherford) The Howard League were instrumental
some years ago in this whole idea of compensation for victims
order. That came from the League many years ago and so on and
so forth.
406. You pioneered that concept?
(Professor Rutherford) The Howard League, Margery
Fry at the time, was the first person to put that idea forward
and there has been a recognition that victims are a crucial part
of it. I suppose most people in this room have been victims, as
have many members of the Howard League staff been victims, of
various sorts of crimes. It is not that there is an ignorance
of victims. This is why these things are complex. The distinction
between offender and victim is not always easy to draw. You are
dealing here with personal relationships very often. If you are
looking at violence within the home, which is an issue that the
League has been concerned about, there are problems of recognising
that the crime event is a complex thing. What you are trying to
do is to reduce the harm being done to people and sometimes the
relationship between the offender and the victim is something
that has to be worked on and so on and so forth. All I am trying
to say is that what is important in this approach to alternatives
to imprisonment is not to lose—I hate to keep coming back
to the American thing; I love the United States but I am worried
about the direction it is going in. What is happening in America
is that they are removing the human face from all this and the
simplistic American model has been developed.
Mr Cranston
407. But I do not think any one of us here
is arguing for that model.
(Professor Rutherford) No, I am not suggesting you
are for a moment but I think there is a danger of drifting in
that direction.
Chairman
408. I am worried about the direction in
which we are going, too, because every time we appear to have
got off that subject we come back to it.
(Mr Allen) Could I say on the question of victims,
the Committee may be interested to know that NACRO was involved
in setting up the first victim support scheme in Bristol in the
early 1970s and as an organisation we have always retained very
close and strong links, sharing accommodation, for example, and
we do work closely on initiatives. It is a totally false trail
to try and suggest that somehow we are the offenders organisation
and Victim Support are the victims organisation, partly for the
reasons that Andrew gave, that in practice there are many people
who commit offences who are also victims of crime and vice-versa,
but also we are both organisations who are interested in creating
a safer society and a great deal of NACRO's work is very much
about crime prevention and particularly focusing on trying to
prevent youngsters getting into trouble in the first place, and
Victim Support are all in favour of that.
(Mr Cavadino) From the standpoint of the Penal Affairs
Consortium, which, as you know, co-ordinates a number of other
organisations, we include some victim organisations within our
membership. Others, because they do not take a detailed policy
stance on the issues we are interested in, are not full members
but we liaise with them closely. We regard the care and support
of victims as one of the three things, the other two being prevention
of crime and work to prevent re-offending through the way offenders
are dealt with, the three things which need to be done alongside
each other in order to reduce the harm and distress which are
caused by criminal activity.
Mr Winnick: That is a very helpful answer. Thank
you very much.
Chairman
409. Coming to young offenders now, do we
all agree that intervening at a young age gives you a better chance
of influencing the way in which people behave?
(Professor Rutherford) If I can come in first on that,
I think it depends what you mean by intervention. The Home Secretary
has invented this phrase—
410. We are going to come to what we mean
by it, but do we agree in principle?
(Professor Rutherford) It depends what you mean by
intervention.
411. Do we agree that certain core youth
offenders are dragging down whole communities? Indeed, some of
us who have worked in the poor areas of the country see it daily
with our own eyes. Do we agree with that?
(Mr Cavadino) I think we do agree that if young people
can be dealt with by effective diversion programmes before they
start to offend repeatedly, if they can be dealt with by effective
bail support programmes and by speeding up the process rather
than by—
412. We will come to diversion but what
I want to concentrate on are these core youth offenders who are,
I believe, rightly or wrongly, dragging down whole communities.
I can virtually name some of them in my constituency. To engage
their attention you have to hold them in secure accommodation,
do you not?
(Mr Cavadino) Some young people have to be held in
secure accommodation, either because of the seriousness or the
persistence of their offending.
413. Because some of them believe, rightly
or wrongly, that they are immune from sanctions partly because
of their age, and the police have that idea, too. They tell victims
very often, "Sorry, nothing we can do until he becomes 16"?
(Professor Rutherford) Yes, I think this point about
intervention is important. It will not necessarily follow that
if you have a list from Northumbria Police or anybody else of
these ten demon youngsters, and assuming you had the powers there,
are operating within a society that believes in the rule of law,
that you can actually prove and so on and so forth, the procedures
are followed, you then remove these ten youngsters to some secure
place—it will not necessarily follow, as I think everybody
in this room would appreciate, that the problem actually goes
with them, that is to say, the problem is usually wider than what
is represented by these ten youngsters. That is not an argument
for not dealing with those ten youngsters.
414. I am sure that is right, but where
we know there is a serious problem, regardless of age, we should
deal with it with all the means at our disposal, should we not?
(Professor Rutherford) Yes, but the danger is getting
seduced into the idea that you pick off a handful of families
or a handful of youngsters in any community and you have somehow
dealt with the issue. The evidence does not support that that
is likely to be the result.
415. One of the problems is that these core
youngsters become role models for others who are not likely to
offend if shown another way forward, and that unless you address
yourself to the core offenders, whatever their age—and some
of them are very young, I acknowledge that—you are never
going to make an impact. That is the point I am putting to you.
(Professor Rutherford) You certainly have to address
yourself to the problem that they present and that may be dependent
on what they have been convicted of and so on. It may be that
secure accommodation is the required response but I think the
danger is that in terms of policy one gets seduced into the idea
that it is a question of a small number of identifiable youngsters
who can be picked off and removed and you have somehow dealt with
the issue. It is the seductive fallacy, I think, of going down
that road.
416. One of the things we have done with
the youngest of these types of offenders in the past is put them
in the hands of social services who have put them into children's
homes alongside other children who are not offenders at all but
are there because their family has broken down for one reason
or another, with the result that they then cause mayhem in such
places. Do you agree with that?
(Professor Rutherford) That may have been an approach.
Certainly it is not one that I think would be a particularly productive
approach. This is why alternatives to prison are so important.
You have to consider what the alternative is by placing them in
a penal institution. I do not know how much opportunity you will
have, as well as looking at programmes in the community, of just
getting a sample of what goes on in the average young offender
institution because that would be quite a salutary experience.
417. We can talk about the regime inside
and, indeed, we can negotiate about the regime inside once we
have engaged their attention, but if we cannot engage their attention
then we are never going to be able to get as far as the regime,
are we, if they are escaping every week?
(Mr Allen) There are a lot of interventions that can
attempt to engage these youngsters very much earlier on and as
to the idea that agencies can work together to identify those
who have the characteristics of being at risk of becoming the
kind of youngsters that you are describing maybe from quite an
early age, the last Government produced some proposals for agencies
to work together in what were, unfortunately in our view, called
child crime teams. We would not call it that. The current Government's
proposals for youth offending teams suggest—and it is out
for consultation still—that they should have a role in identifying
and preventing youngsters, setting up programmes aimed at the
specific youngsters, often known by name to the agencies, interventions
with them and their families which are designed to keep them on
the straight and narrow, succeeding at school, off drugs, off
solvent abuse and all the rest of it, which, if neglected, can
lead to the kind of youngsters you have described.
418. We will come to all that in a minute,
and I acknowledge its place. I am trying to stick with these core
offenders, who I do believe exist, although I appreciate it will
not be as simplistic as some would allege. I thought we agreed
some years ago that there were to be secure training centres for
such children, regardless of age. Do we have them?
(Mr Cavadino) There are two separate forms of secure
provision which have developed. One is local authority secure
accommodation where, since 1992, an additional 170 places have
been provided.
419. But they exist already, do they?
(Mr Cavadino) 160 of the additional places have been
provided and the other ten are coming on stream later this year.
That is local authority secure accommodation. The second proposal
which the last Government made was to set up five secure training
centres, the first of which is due to open in April. The secure
training order, therefore, is not yet in force and is due to come
into force on 17 April. The Crime and Disorder Bill will introduce
a new detention and training order to replace the secure training
order and the sentence of detention in a young offender institution.
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