Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
NATIONAL OFFENDER
MANAGEMENT SERVICE,
NATIONAL TREATMENT
AGENCY FOR
SUBSTANCE MISUSE
AND NATIONAL
PROBATION SERVICE
FOR ENGLAND
AND WALES
17 MAY 2004
Q60 Mr Steinberg: That includes the failures
as well, does it not?
Mr Narey: Yes, it does.
Q61 Mr Steinberg: So how many successful
Orders are there and how much does that cost?
Mr Narey: About one third of Orders
are completed successfully, they get to the end of the Order.
Q62 Mr Steinberg: So now we are talking
about £21,000, are we not?
Mr Narey: We are, but as I have
also explained, even for those orders which are not completed,
if someone is on an Order one of the graphs here shows that the
peak time for failure is four months. If someone has been on one
of these Orders for four months the severity of someone's offending
when they are paying for a daily heroin habit will make that cost
effective even if the Order is not completed.
Q63 Mr Steinberg: Tell me what you believe
to be a success story?
Mr Narey: Someone using fewer
drugs and committing crime less frequently.
Q64 Mr Steinberg: That is a success?
Mr Narey: I think that is a success.
Q65 Mr Steinberg: So somebody who is
on an Order, who is still thieving and who is still taking hard
drugs, because he is doing it less frequently, that is a success
is it?
Mr Narey: Not a complete success,
but yes, that is a success. If we have fewer victims of crime
and someone is taking fewer drugs, that is a success.
Q66 Mr Steinberg: My idea of a success
would be to take that person off the street, stopping him or her
committing offences, and lock them away until they are off drugs.
Mr Narey: I have 240 empty prison
places at the moment.
Q67 Mr Steinberg: It would be no more
expensive. It is £30,000 for a prison place and we have worked
out that it is £21,000 for a successful Order and in your
definition of success they are still committing crime and still
taking drugs. That is not a very big success to me.
Mr Narey: I am not suggesting
that it cannot be improved; it must be improved. I do not want
to dismiss the achievements which have been made in prisons in
recent years which are very significant. I know that even now,
although things are improving fast since a thing called the Criminal
Justice Interventions programme, for which Mr Hayes is responsible.
The reality is that most people who get clean from heroin in prison
spend their discharge grant on heroin the day they go back to
the communities from which they come. Keeping clean in prison
is one thing, keeping clean in communities is quite another.
Q68 Mr Steinberg: When I was reading
the Report I thought to myself that the Report seemed to indicate
that those who are the worst offenders and those who are frankly
taking the system for a ride are the ones who get all the benefits.
The genuine ones, who want to come off drugs, who are on methadone
and are not taking cocaine and who are not taking heroin, are
the ones who cannot get on, but the worst offenders are the ones
who get on. Surely it should be the ones who have an aim to improve,
have an aim to succeed; they should be the ones who are given
the help, not the ones who are not interested. In Durham it seems
to me that is the case, but if you read the Report, unless I am
getting mixed up, paragraphs 2.9 and 2.10, it seems Sussex took
the opposite view. They were saying that the priority should be
given to those who want to make progress. Is that not more sensible?
Mr Narey: I think what you are
saying is that people who do not comply, who do not help themselves
should go to jail and that is exactly what happens with this Order.
If someone does not comply, they are only allowed two failures.
After two failures they must be returned to court.[10]
The court may give them one chance, but ultimately if people do
not comply with this Order, they might have had four months on
this Order and then they get a prison sentence which is a fresh
sentence for that offence. The people who do not co-operate, who
do not take advantage of this, end up in jail. Some people, at
least one third or more eventually, do co-operate and we manage
to make some progress in terms of reducing the drug abuse and
drastically cutting their re-offending.
Q69 Mr Steinberg: The question I asked
before was that in the experience of the solicitors to whom I
was talking, people were breaking the Orders on a very regular
basis, but the Probation Service very often forgot to let the
courts know this was happening.
Mr Narey: I certainly do not believe
that—
Q70 Mr Steinberg: I am being facetious.
In fact when crimes were being committed they were turning a blind
eye.
Mr Narey: I do not think that
happens; certainly not in your constituency. You know your chief.
She is exceptionally able, very resolute. I think offenders in
Durham know exactly where they are in terms of breaching. If they
do not co-operate with this Order, ultimately they will find themselves
in jail.
Q71 Mr Steinberg: May I say that over
the last 17 years I have formed my view, not on individuals in
the Probation Service, but on the whole system and that I have
had two constituency offices in 17 years, both next to probation
offices. The disrespect the criminals have for the Probation Service
and the way they hold it in contempt clearly means something needs
to be done and the whole Probation Service needs to be transformed
or reformed or whatever.
Mr Narey: I have been responsible
for the Probation Service for 18 months and I am very impressed
with many of the people I have seen.
Q72 Mr Steinberg: I was not talking about
the people, I was talking about the system.
Mr Narey: There are several testimonials
in here from offenders, quotes from offenders saying how much
they have been helped through their problems by the Probation
Service.
Q73 Mr Steinberg: I have seen them coming
out of the doors and making a gesture all the time.
Mr Narey: They may do that occasionally
but they are also very, very tightly managed now and enforcement
by the Probation Service has been transformed. People who try
to mess around with the Probation Service and do not comply with
any community sentence find themselves back in court and many
of them go to jail.
Q74 Chairman: For what it is worth, Mr
Narey, your client group last week told us that there were more
drugs inside prison than outside prison. It does not say much
for your management of the prisons that we have to have these
Orders in the first place, does it?
Mr Narey: To quote someone else,
they would say that would they not? It is just not the case that
there are more drugs inside prison than outside prison, I promise
you. We use the same random testing process which is used for
those arrested in police stations. As quoted in this Report, of
those arrested in police stations 60% or so have been taking heroin.
We randomly test between 5% and 10% of the population every week
in prisons and the figure is about 3%. Drugs are available in
every prison, but not in the sort of quantities to sustain addiction,
which is tragically one reason why both in Scotland and more recently
in England significant numbers of people discharged from prison
kill themselves by overdosing because they do not realise they
can no longer cope with the sort of doses of heroin they were
taking before they were locked up.
Q75 Mr Williams: Obviously if we can
save people from addiction we want to try to do it at not excessive
cost to the community. I gather from the National Audit Office
that the South Bank University carried out an analysis in three
pilot areas for the Home Office on re-conviction rates. According
to what they tell us, offenders who seem to respond early on during
their course actually tended to have a high re-conviction rate
of about 80% after about two years, but those who managed to get
right through the process had a reconviction rate of 53%. Clearly
that is a significant bonus for completion. I recognise it is
early days and we cannot expect you to have too much information,
but what analysis has been done of the characteristics of the
people who do survive in so far as this might help you select
the people who are going to be most usefully put on the Orders
in the first place?
Mr Narey: I cannot give you a
very simple answer. The nature of these programmes is that people
may fail them very frequently. There are some signs that we are
beginning to get better at selecting individuals and the one reason
why I believe we will improve the completion rate is that we know
much more about individuals coming to court. For example, we now
have arrest referral schemes, where individuals are given the
choice of taking drug treatment on arrest or having that count
against them in getting bail. We are getting much more information
from people when they first come into court, so we have more information
available to us to help us to assess the likelihood of somebody
complying with this Order. I do not know whether that answers
your question.
Q76 Mr Williams: There are two elements
which need assessment, are there not? There is the characteristic
of a regime, which is throwing up the most beneficial results
and then there are the characteristics of the client group which
is most susceptible to benefit. What I am trying to establish
is whether systematic analysis is going on to carry out these
different evaluations.
Mr Murphy: We are operating on
all those fronts, because the Order is a relatively new phenomenon.
There are bits about the regime which we need to attend to, as
you rightly mention, and we learn as we go along. You will have
seen that the Report itself reflects how the very fixed nature
of it with its 20 hours contact time does not always meet the
needs of all the different people who get onto it and some more
flexibility in that would assist. We have some information already
about the nature of people who go through treatment successfully.
One of the points the Report makes is about how rather older young
offenders are more likely to engage with treatment than younger
people. As that evidence base develops, as we are able to track
through who we are keeping at three months, six months and 12
months, who is reaching the end of the Order, that will then loop
back into practice to enable us to do better assessments early
on to make sure we are clearer about which offenders are more
likely to succeed through the Order. It also attends to some of
the issues which Mr Jenkins and Mr Steinberg raised earlier on.
Q77 Mr Williams: But there is systematic
collection of information going on and analysis going on, so if
in four years' time you come back to this Committee, you would
be able perhaps to say the analysis over the years since we started
is now long enough for you to be able to identify these regime
characteristics and these individual characteristics.
Mr Murphy: Yes. We have probably
the most sophisticated offender assessment system in the world
called OASys, which is gathering information at the start and
through Orders and at the end. As this Order is still relatively
new and as OASys has only spread out relatively recently, we will
reap a very rich harvest of information from that.
Q78 Mr Williams: Can you give us a note
on that? I am sure I should have read something about it in here.
I am not sure whether it is covered in the Report. Could you give
us an up-to-date note on that?
Mr Murphy: Yes.[11]
Mr Narey: Certainly.[12]
Q79 Mr Williams: Looking at Figure 19
on page 29, there is a very clear indication that the third to
sixth months are the highest failure rates. Over 50% of failures
occur in that period. Again I recognise that you have had limited
time for fieldwork, but are you able to identify why those particular
periods are so disastrous in terms of drop-out?
Mr Murphy: The likelihood is that
the reality hits for a lot of people at around that stage. The
original motivation may wane, the pressures we have heard about
in relation to other aspects of people's lives and indeed pressure
from peers may prove difficult to resist. The important thing
we hold onto is the fact that this is getting people into treatment,
many of them for the very first time. We know that they will only
get through their drug addiction by coming back a number of times
and it is valuable to start that process. I agree it does not
attend to the problems of crime they are committing right now,
but it will in the fullness of time prove to be the first episode
and it may take three or four goes.
10 Note by witness: Two unacceptable failures
eg missed appointments within any 12 month period. Back
11
Ev 15 Back
12
Ev 15 Back
| 
