4 THE SITUATION TO DATE: CONCLUSIONS
119. The principle of rehabilitation has been established
at the heart of government penal policy. Rule 3 of the Prison
Rules 1999 obliges the Prison Service to ensure that "the
purpose of the training and treatment of convicted prisoners shall
be to encourage and assist them to lead a good and useful life";[96]
and the Criminal Justice Act 2003 includes the "reform and
rehabilitation of prisoners" among the statutory purposes
of sentencing. [97]
120. The Government has defined one of its main objectives
in rehabilitating offenders as being to reduce re-offending. The
'Strategic Plan for Criminal Justice 2004-08', published in July
2004, undertakes that "smarter sentences will punish the
offender and protect the public but will also help criminals to
stop offending, including through intensive drug treatment".[98]
The latest figures, released in December 2004, show improvements
in the re-offending rate, and the Home Office claims it is on
course to reducing re-offending by 5% by 2008, and by 10% by the
end of the decade.[99]
The Prison Service has stated that "reducing re-offending
by released prisoners is central to reducing crime and is therefore
part of the Prison Service's core business of protecting the public"
and states that "key interventions under the headings Offending
Behaviour Programmes, Drug Rehabilitation Programmes, Basic Skills
provision and Prisoners into Employment are leading the push towards
the challenging target".[100]
121. As we have seen, in recent years this focus
on reducing re-offending has been combined with publication of
a series of official reports relevant to different aspects of
rehabilitation. The Halliday report in 2001 drew attention to
the damage done by the rise in prison population and high levels
of overcrowding to the prison system's capacity to rehabilitate
offenders, and recommended a new sentencing framework to tackle
these problems. The Social Exclusion Unit report in 2002 identified
the scale and costs of re-offending, and the correlation between
high recidivism rates and social exclusion. The Prison Industries
Review in 2003 produced a series of recommendations aimed at providing
prisoners with purposeful out-of-cell activity at the same time
as improving their future employment prospects. The Carter Report
in 2003 endorsed the importance of rehabilitation as part of a
wider strategy for dealing with offenders; it recommended more
credible and consistent sentencing, and the creating of a merged
Prison and Probation Service which would take responsibility for
end-to-end management of the offender throughout his sentence.
Finally, the Reducing Re-offending National Action Plan
published in July 2004 is an initial attempt at setting out an
outline national rehabilitation strategy.
122. Taken together, these reports provide a relatively
coherent high-level policy strategy for the offender regime. Since
their publication, the Government has taken a number of practical
initiatives aimed at implementing aspects of that strategy. These
include the merger of the Prison and Probation Services to form
the National Offender Management Service, the introduction of
new sentencing powers under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 (most
of which will come into operation in April 2005); and the creation
of the Sentencing Guidelines Council to provide a systematic overhaul
of sentencing guidelines.
123. As a consequence of the recent reports and
government initiatives, the basic framework is now largely in
place to make possible the more effective rehabilitation of offenders.
Nonetheless, the evidence we have taken in our inquiry reveals
that much remains to be done: there is concern about how some
of the recent initiatives (such as the introduction of NOMS) are
being implemented; and despite the welcome recent decrease in
re-offending rates, the scale of the problem is massive—it
remains the case that nearly three in five prisoners are reconvicted
within two years of leaving prison. As we have seen, the Government's
optimistic assessment that by 2009 the prison population will
neatly match prison capacity rests on some questionable assumptions.
It is not clear that the combined effect of sentencing reforms
and the prison-building programme will be to relieve overcrowding,
as the Government projections assume. Meanwhile the current high
level of the prison population creates a constant 'churn' of prisoners
through the system, and high levels of transfers between prisons,
which makes it much more difficult to provide effective rehabilitative
interventions. In this as in other respects, overcrowding is having
a significant impact on the management of prisons.
124. The Social Exclusion Unit report in 2002
pointed out that the best way of reducing re-offending is to ensure
that prisoners on their release have the ability to get into work
and a home to go to. In the remainder of this report, we investigate
the current levels of provision of training, education and employment
opportunities within prison, and of resettlement arrangements
after release.
96 The Prison Rules 1999 (S.I. (1999) No. 728), consolidated
September 2002 Back
97
CJ Act 2003, Explanatory Notes Back
98
Office for Criminal Justice Reform, Cutting Crime, Delivering
Justice: A Strategic Plan for Criminal Justice 2004-08 (Cm 6288)
(July 2004), p 10 Back
99
Home Office press release no. 379/2004, issued on 2 December 2004 Back
100
Ev 117 Back
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