Examination of Witnesses (Questions 460
- 471)
TUESDAY 18 NOVEMBER 2008
AMELIA COOKSON,
FRANCES CROOK
AND CLIVE
MARTIN
Q460 Alun Michael: But the easy bit
is to identify that impact and responsibility. What I would be
interested in is what sort of incentives and accountabilities
would work to encourage and incentivise the contribution of those
agencies?
Clive Martin: I was thinking about
that when you asked that question earlier. It would take a clever
accountant, consultant or someone to work this out, but it seemed
feasible to me to think of a resettlement package budget or value
that came with an offender and went to the local authority that
took ownership of that offender. That local authority then has
the resource to spend it in some ways on rehabilitation. At the
moment one has local authorities owning or not owning people depending
on where they lived before they went to prison and all sorts of
things. That is quite irrelevant to most offenders' lives. A lot
of offenders cannot tell you where they lived three years before
they went into prison and so on. I cannot honestly say I know
how you can do it, but I think the resources follow the offender
rather than an agency that is theoretically responsible for the
individual or not. The ones who seem most appropriate at the moment
are the local authorities.
Frances Crook: There is a difference
between prisoners and offenders. People who come out of prison
following long sentences may need special services because you
have to undo the damage done by that time away. They will have
lost any connection with the local area and will not be able to
get a job. The very fact that they have been in prison means that
damage has been caused for which someone must take some responsibility.
But offenders are not one group of people; they are people who
have done something and by labelling them "offenders"
you do a lot of damage. The first step out of behaving in a criminal
way is not to be labelled as an offender. I do not believe that
local authorities or other services should deliver specialist
services to people because they have committed a crime; they should
get the same services and have access to them as everybody else.
They should have access to mental health services, drug services,
housing or whatever it is they need, except that prisoners need
specialist services. One matter about which I am very concerned
is that when talking about justice reinvestment too much of it
concentrates on the individual. I believe that the whole point
about justice reinvestment is that it gives whole communities
a stake in this money. If you close prisons that will release
money to give to the very people we are talking about not because
they are offenders but because they are homeless, drug addicts
or need mental health services. The whole community would benefit
from that reinvestment of huge amounts of public money which at
the moment is spent on prisons. Instead of saying that each of
these individuals is an offender, which is what the system does
at the moment, and delivering a service whether or not it is needed,
what you would have is investment in the community so that everybody
would benefit from it, whether or not someone had committed a
crime. Housing, social services, healthcare, roads, transport
and everything would be improved. It is the community that benefits.
Q461 Chairman: Is there not a danger
in that approach that all the butter will be spread extremely
thinly across a wide range of community needs and deprive you
of the opportunity to identify groups which are likely to drift
into offending such as children in families which are disrupted
or where there is violence, and additional effort to target such
families is seen at least by some in this field as necessary to
prevent people getting into crime? If you simply say to the community
that it should improve its housing and mental health treatment,
desirable though that is, the level of imprisonment necessary
to make sure that all the most vulnerable or likely groups are
dealt with will be far in excess of the money that can be released
for this purpose?
Frances Crook: But would it not
be wonderful if you could put lots of money into local social
services so they could deal with problem families and give support?
Therefore, there would be parenting courses and investment in
SureStart.
Q462 Chairman: My point is that all
these things are desirable, but are you saying that we cannot
target?
Frances Crook: That is targeted
but it benefits the whole community; it is both at the same time
and so is a double whammy. One hopes that there would be a reduction
in crime and perhaps not some of the tragedies that we have seen
recently.
Amelia Cookson: There is a perfect
example of that. Recently we have been talking to Westminster
about a new programme just launched called Family Recovery. That
is precisely what you are talking about. It is a non-specialist
service; it is not for criminals or a specific group in society
but is very targeted and focused.
Q463 Alun Michael: We are becoming
very confused and talking about two different things at the same
time. First, you talk about investment in things. There are long-term
investments that may pay off a benefit a long way down the line.
For example, Sure Start, the work with young families and so on,
is an investment that must be made upfront for benefits perhaps
20 years down the line. Second, the target is not just to work
with offenders, to take Frances Crook's comment; the point is
to reduce offending, because that reduces the impact on victims
in the community and all of the rest of it. Surely, that means
that in addition to looking at investment that may reap benefits
20 or 30 years down the line you have to do the intelligent things
that will make a difference in the short term to the offending
activity and therefore the disbenefit that occurs now. Can you
respond to that but look at the short term rather than the very
long term in terms of justice reinvestment? As a Committee we
are trying to look at ways in which we can stop spending on this
and spend it there and bring about a benefit.
Amelia Cookson: I suppose that
what I sought to indicate was that if there was a single pot of
money for the good of the entire community you could identify
a range of interventions, some that are for the 20 to 30-year
horizon and some for the six to 12-month horizon. Both could be
undifferentiated but also extremely targeted. You can break down
the barriers which means you can be much more creative about the
interventions you can make. One of the difficulties with the criminal
justice system at the moment is that it is incredibly segmented
and what local partnerships are now doing successfully is to break
down some of those barriers.
Q464 Alun Michael: Let us bring it
down to earth a little bit. There are costs of offending and re-offending
to local partners, local authorities, local businesses and so
on. Surely, that should have an impact on strategic planning to
reduce re-offending in local areas. Do you have evidence that
that actually works? I do not mean this impolitely, but I am after
the evidence not the theory.
Amelia Cookson: At the moment
the issue, which came up earlier, is where the investment is coming
from and who has the benefit of reducing re-offending. At the
moment the benefit of reducing prison places is not felt by local
communities and so the evidence is not being gathered and the
investment is not necessarily being made. What we are suggesting
is that you need to be able to measure the benefit of that investment
in the same place so you have a cycle of reinvestment. I do not
think that is currently being measured.
Q465 Alun Michael: A few weeks ago
we heard evidence from Professor Shepherd about reducing violent
offending in Cardiff, for example. That is a benefit to the Prison
Service because it mean the end result is that a number of people
do not have to be prosecuted and sent to prison for that activity,
but no reward comes back to the local partners as a result. What
I am getting at is whether you have practical examples of where
a shift of resources into targeting activity which results in
offending—let us not talk about offenders—has a direct
benefit?
Frances Crook: I do not think
anyone has started to do it on the scale that would provide the
kind of evidence for which you are looking. There is evidence
about the kind of investment in activities that we suggest does
reduce re-offending and prevents offending. We all know of schemes
round the country that have proved very successfully and that
investing in young people prevents them getting into trouble;
it keeps them in school and gives them education. There is lots
of evidence of that sort of work being extremely successful. What
you need to do is close Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubs, reinvest
the money in Tower Hamlets, Hackney and other inner city areas—or
Cardiff—so that people feel the benefit of that and see
whether or not it works. That would be a good experiment.
Q466 Alun Michael: Cardiff is a local
prison. If you had control of the resources and decided to refocus
national investment in prisons, probation and cross-departmental
resources, for example on health and education, with the specific
purpose of reducing offending how would you do it?
Clive Martin: I am tempted to
do it through local authorities which remain the bodies with the
chance of having the most holistic view of what needs to happen
in the community and how those resources are targeted. Our evidence
is that 44% of black men who access mental health systems do so
via the criminal justice system. For a local authority to have
that information locally and therefore to be able to redesign
their local mental health services so they are more appropriate
for those needs before those people become involved in the criminal
justice system would be a huge benefit, but at the moment they
do not have that intelligence and so it is not their problem.
I think it is a matter of consistently putting the resources in
the local authority. In evidence given earlier an interesting
question was raised about whether we had sufficient evidence to
reduce re-offending. We have quite a lot of evidence. For example,
in relation to families we have a huge amount of evidence.
Q467 Alun Michael: Before you run
off the surface, there is a tremendous amount of evidence but
come back to the example you give. In order to ensure that the
local authority and local health bodies refocus their activities
they do not need just information but a methodology?
Clive Martin: They do.
Q468 Alun Michael: What is your suggestion
as to how we achieve that?
Clive Martin: The methodology
is that the way the contract works locally is to target more specifically
people who are at risk and identify early those with mental health
problems, for example. At the moment that is quite difficult to
do. The point about families was not a different point; it was
about local authorities working with families at risk to take
preventative measures before those people got into trouble. At
the moment one has a structure of family centres but they are
not necessarily targeted on those at the risk of offending. Therefore,
it is a way in which local authorities can refocus and think more
about re-offending in that way.
Frances Crook: I agree with that
but I also believe that whole communities must benefit for them
to see that they are an advantage. At the moment communities do
not benefit from prisons. If you are to reorganise and restructure,
release money and get public support for quite a radical idea
local people have to see that they will get something out of it
too. Whilst it is absolutely right that you should point services
at particular people who are likely to be or are being troublesome
you must also benefit the whole community because at the moment
there is no public confidence in the criminal justice system.
Nobody sees it; it is all being retracted and taken away from
local communities. You have to give justice and resources back
to local communities. It has to be done through local authorities
because they are efficient and they have public confidence, certainly
more than that enjoyed by the criminal justice system, and in
that way you can get a targeted system through referral units,
social services and housing projects but also the whole community
will benefit, and it would encourage confidence.
Q469 Alun Michael: In terms of confidence,
I hate to question what you have just said but you raise the issue
of local public confidence in what people see. The one thing that
inspires a degree of public confidence is when one or a couple
of prolific offenders in an area are removed for a period of time
and a degree of peace and security descends.
Clive Martin: There are some interesting
schemes. For example, the circles of support and accountability
projects that are volunteer-led manage highly dangerous sex offenders
in the community. Those are also incredibly successful projects
where communities have dealt very positively with dangerous people
who return to the community. It is a very localised, solutions-focused
initiative. Changing that mentality to one where communities feel
they are able to deal with their own crime and be rewarded for
that is something we can only encourage. The mechanisms still
need a lot of work. For example, the budgetary responsibility
of the criminal justice boards works only with the criminal justice
agencies, that is, the police and Prison Service, and do not include
the health authority and local education authority. In our view
they should.
Q470 Dr Palmer: Is there not a conflict
between two desirable objectives: localism and justice reinvestment?
If effectively you leave it to local authorities you will get
very varied decisions some of which will reflect differences in
the local area and some of which will simply reflect differences
of opinion. You may find that some local authorities decide that
what they need are more prisons. Are you comfortable with the
concept that basically you leave it to local bodies to decide
these things even if you feel the evidence shows there is a better
way?
Amelia Cookson: I think it is
absolutely critical that we allow that kind of diversity, because
one of the concerns of the public about diversity is that it is
random. If you have diversity through a democratic mechanism it
is chosen. It may not be something with which we agree but we
do not live there. If we do then our vote counts for something
but if we are not in the majority our decision does not take the
day. That is one of the fundamentals of our society. When we enable
that kind of decision, about what is a controversial area and
an issue of public confidence, it may be with some scepticism
about whether the public have got to grips with the impacts of
the opinions that they promulgate, but if we put it back into
a democratic context we can start to fix some of those issues.
Q471 Dr Palmer: Are you worried by
what the Commission for English Prisons Today has called postcode
justice? If, say, East Sussex decides that it does not want to
spend money on reform but prisons whereas Hackney wants a lot
more emphasis on drug rehabilitation you get totally different
outcomes?
Clive Martin: You may do, but
the key is that Sussex is also responsible for the consequences
of imprisonment and resettlement. We present prisons consistently
as a no-cost option and we can do it no matter what. I accept
that in the case of Sussex you will get a variation that may be
unintended, but communities will see the consequences to them
not just of the imprisonment of the individual but to the family
and everyone else and then resettlement. In order to take that
into account you want to ensure that you send to prison only those
who absolutely need imprisonment. I think that could work.
Chairman: We much appreciate the written
material we have received from you and your thought-provoking
contribution this afternoon. Thank you very much.
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