Memorandum submitted by the Local Government
Association and Clinks
INTRODUCTION
1. The Local Government Association and
Clinks thank the Justice Committee for the opportunity to submit
comment to this vitally important inquiry. With the prison population
reaching 82,000 in February 2008, it is imperative to consider
alternative systems to address the failings of the current sentencing
and imprisonment system.
BACKGROUND
2. The Local Government Association (LGA)
exists to promote better local government. We work with and for
our member authorities to realise a shared vision of local government
that enables local people to shape a distinctive and better future
for their locality and its communities. We aim to put local councils
at the heart of the drive to improve public services and to work
with government to ensure that the policy, legislative and financial
context in which they operate, supports that objective.
3. The LGA produced the report Going Straight[5]
in 2005 which argued that criminal justice agencies alone were
unable to provide or guarantee the effective resettlement of prisoners
and that local authorities have a major role to play in reducing
re-offending.
4. Clinks is a membership body that supports
and develops the work that voluntary organisations (NGOs) undertake
within the Criminal Justice system in England and Wales. We believe
that a strong voluntary sector is crucial to reducing offending
and building safer communities.
5. Clinks advocates for the development
and implementation of national strategies to support voluntary
sector activity and is a member of the National Offender Management
Board and the Coalition on Social and Criminal Justice.
6. In November 2006, the LGA and Clinks,
as members of the Coalition on Social and Criminal Justice which
includes Crime Concern, the International Centre for Prison Studies,
the Probation Boards' Association, the Prince's Trust and the
Prison Reform Trust, published Neighbourhood by Neighbourhood:
local action to reduce re-offending[6]
which stated that local partnerships and local knowledge is the
way to manage offenders successfully.
7. The LGA is also working with the Howard
League and councils to pilot new and innovative approaches to
youth justice, demonstrating the benefits to be gained from a
greater use of community-based interventions and a lesser reliance
on custody as a response to young people who offend.
What are the real cost implications and consequences
of the Carter Report's recommendations in the medium and long
term, in particular in relation to the proposed new Sentencing
Commission and prison building programme?
8. The LGA, Clinks and the ICPS believe
that the current strategic direction of the criminal justice system
requires a radical re-orientation away from a reliance on custodial
sentencing as a response to offending behaviour. This is based
on a number of factors including cost, effectiveness, and wider
social benefit.
9. While maintaining our general dissatisfaction
with the Government's sentencing and imprisonment polices and
grave concern about the large numbers of people who are now incarcerated
within prisons in England and Wales; we do support the modernisation
aspects of the proposed prison building programme.
10. The proposed building programme presents
an opportunity to take a strategic overview of how prisons should
be managed and implement improvements that enhance the welfare
and rehabilitation of offenders while reducing the economic and
social costs of incarceration.
11. A critical outcome of the proposed modernisation
of the prison estate must be ensure that prisoners are always
remanded in humane conditions and within facilities that allow
the effective delivery of rehabilitative programmes. However,
this will only be achieved if there is a parallel policy which
reverses the current upward trend in the prison population and
puts in place a programme of decommissioning the older Victorian
establishments which are clearly unsuitable for delivery of effective
prison regimes. Otherwise, we will have in the future a continuing
overcrowded prison estate characterised with many prisoners continuing
to be housed in inappropriate conditions.
12. An equally important outcome of the
building programme must be the reduction of suicides within prison
through the redesign of existing facilities to improve prisoner
safety from self-harm. The increase of prison suicides in 2007,
which has been linked by some to overcrowded conditions, saw a
reversal of a two-year trend where suicides had decreased.
13. We support the establishment of a Sentencing
Commission in order to bring consistency, control and efficiency
to adult sentencing. A strategic approach to sentencing will allow
greater control over budgets that will enable departments to plan
more efficiently and achieve significant savings. These savings
should then be directed to proactively address the drivers of
offending and re-offending behaviour much more effectively than
currently.
How cost-effective are prisons?
14. The recent publication by the Matrix
Knowledge Group, The Economic Case For and Against Prison[7]
assessed the cost benefits of prisons and alternatives and found
that by utilising a range of community based interventions, the
interventions not only produced savings to the tax payer in terms
of incarceration costs but also savings from the creation of fewer
victims due to lower re-offending rates.
15. For sentences where a community sentence
is inappropriate, the Matrix research compared "prison only"
regimes (no training or treatment) with enhanced prison regimes
(which include some form of training or treatment). The findings
demonstrated that despite being more expensive to operate, enhanced
prisons deliver higher overall savings per adult offender and
were more effective at reducing re-offending (ie creating fewer
victims) than prisons with no training programmes. This finding
supports the importance of reducing the prison population to a
level where constructive regimes can be delivered effectively.
16. The LGA and Clinks support many of the
recommendations of the Corston report[8]
which highlighted the specific needs of women within the CJS and
in particular, prison. However, the LGA and Clinks disagree with
the recommendation in the Carter Report to reconfigure surplus
men's prisons into facilities for women and youths. With regard
to women prisoners, we believe that smaller, community based facilities,
with strong local authority input, that enable women to be located
closer to their home communities, and support networks, greatly
assists with rehabilitation.
17. Our view on the treatment of young offenders
is similar in that we believe it is important to retain, close
links between young offenders and their home communities and support
networks. Community-based sentence is the best and most effective
response for all young offenders except those young offenders
who represent the most serious danger to communities (ie those
who commit violent offences)
18. The evidence tells us:
— For every 100,000 children in England
and Wales, about 23 are in custody. The equivalent figure in France
is six, in Spain two, and in Finland 0.2.
— Around 70% (£280 million) of
the Youth Justice Board's programmes budget is spent each year
on locking up children.
— Re-offending rates following custody
stand at 82%, rising to 96% for those with more than seven
convictions and the length of period spent locked up roughly doubled
between 1994 and 2004.
19. These headline findings make it clear
that for young offenders custody is not cost effective, and that
the £280 million spent on custody could deliver better outcomes
for communities and offenders if a much greater share of it was
diverted into community sentences.
20. Local authorities are delivering better
outcomes for young people through community-based, multi-agency
interventions in the lives of young people who are at risk of
or who are offending. It is our view that Government should be
bolder in its thinking around youth justice and should be setting
a policy and funding framework that enables councils to do more
of this work with more young people.
What impact could Justice Reinvestment make on
our penal policy?
21. Justice Reinvestment is an alternative
policy which has the potential to transform communities and vastly
improve the lives of individuals. Local authorities would be enthusiastic
to play a strong role in determining the future of their communities
through the direct funding of initiatives to reduce the socio-economic
drivers of crime. As stated in Going Straight, crime is
committed by local people, against local people within local communities;
Justice Reinvestment address these local concerns by devolving
resources to local authorities to invest in their communities.
22. Justice Reinvestment will allow local authorities
to develop proactive and efficient programmes as they will be
responsible for the budget and management of programmes that have
a direct effect on offending in their community.
23. To effectively drive these progressive
policies and embed crime reduction, particularly re-offending,
in local communities, there needs to be mechanism for redirecting
resources away from costly and ineffective custodial provision
and to community based interventions.
24. By using postcodes of offenders to identify
the communities where those offenders come from it consistently
reveals that the most prolific offenders live in areas of high
deprivation, which in turn "consume" a disproportionate
amount of penal resources. A "Justice Re-investment"
approach would "re-assign" the penal resources to local
communities to invest in improved housing, education, health provision
in order to remove the causal factors of offending behaviour.
25. For communities where "re-investment"
is implemented, accountability arrangements that calculate the
cost of re-offending to local communities should be put in place.
This ensures that a financial incentive is created to provide
additional encouragement for local communities to improve the
level of re-offending in their community. If re-offending decreases,
this would result in savings in the penal budget which the local
authority will be allowed to retain for further investment in
deprived communities. If re-offending did not reduce over a defined
period of time, the resources would be "reclaimed" by
charging those areas for the penal resources they used.
26. This approach requires sentencers to
be aware of the costs of their sentencing decisions that are borne
by local communities and adjust their sentencing regime accordingly,
to reflect the efficiency and effectiveness of community based
sentences. Currently, the costs of custodial sentencing at a local
level lie with central government and this "Justice Reinvestment"
would "re-balance" the social and economic cost of sentencing
while engaging local authorities in providing the solution.
How could resources which are currently invested
in the criminal justice system be invested more effectively both
within and outside the system eg in courts, probation, prisons
and communities? To what extent should additional resources be
redirected from the penal system into social, health and educational
provision?
Adult Offenders
27. The National Audit Office report into
The Supervision of Community Orders in England and Wales, states
in paragraph 3.29 that there was inconsistency in the provision
of community orders, in particular the provision of alcohol and
mental health treatment. While the NAO suggested that stronger
relationships are needed between the Probation Service and health
providers, we believe that local authorities and Third Sector
partners can play a leading role in coordinating these health
services.
28. Regarding CJS resources that can be more
effectively employed; the resources spent to incarcerate people
for less than 12 months should be diverted to community-based
sentences. The LGA and Clinks believe that sentencing people to
prison for terms of less than 12 months is harmful to the community
and the individual and is extraordinarily ineffective in reducing
re-offending. Most offenders that receive short sentences are
offenders convicted of theft or handling stolen goods and motoring
offences such as driving whilst disqualified. Many offenders who
are sentenced to less than six months were sentenced to "other
offences", these include a range of crimes such as breaching
anti-social behaviour orders, drunkenness or minor public order
offences. Such sentences bring few benefits and damage offenders'
current and future job prospects, accommodation and family support.
29. There is also a risk that incarceration can
harden anti-social attitudes or introduce offenders to gangs,
drug addiction or potential accomplices. The LGA and Clinks advocate
the use of community based sentences as they are more effective
at rehabilitating offenders and provide an improved investment
return to the community. The publication Neighbourhood by Neighbourhood
stated that in 2004 the two-year re-offending rate was 67%,
while in comparison, the two-year re-offending rate for those
given a community sentence was 53%.
Young Offenders
30. It is clearly evident that offending
behaviour would often be better tackled by community based sentences
and programmes. Community sentences are not an easy option; most
are rigorous and intensive and require the offender to put something
back into their community, rather than just sitting out their
time in prison. There are robust programmes which under the supervision
of a youth offending support officer, combine restrictions on
a young person's lifestyle, with personal development work to
address the reasons behind offending behaviour.
31. Offending data in the 12 months before and
after the Intensive Supervision and Support Programme, the Youth
Justice Board's most intensive community programme and direct
alternative to custody for under 18 year olds, show a marked reduction
both in frequency and seriousness of offending. The frequency
of offending went down by 39% and seriousness by 13%.
32. A greater use of community sentences
for those low-risk offenders who are currently sentenced to custody
would reduce the record prison population, ease the pressures
of overcrowding, and allow the prison service the opportunity
to undertake proper work with those higher risk offenders who
for reasons of public protection do need to be in custody. It
is our view that rather than building more capacity in the secure
estate for young offenders, investment could be more effectively
used by local agencies delivering community sentences.
33. Additionally, where custody is deemed
appropriate, we suggest that the needs of the community and the
young person would be better met by Secure Children's Homes, where
a better balance between justice/public protection and reform/rehabilitation
can be met.
To what extent could existing structures and partnerships
be used to implement alternative policies? What are the barriers
to adopting alternative policies?
34. Identified barriers to adopting alternative
policies, or indeed the full implementation of existing policies,
are funding and the quality of the relationship between local
authorities and the statutory bodies. A soon to be published LGA
survey[9]
on local authorities and re-offending identified that amongst
the respondents, the most common barriers to reducing re-offending
were funding deficiencies (77%), a lack of clear responsibilities
between agencies (57%) and a lack of communication between agencies
(50%) while 41% of respondents identified funding as the largest
single barrier to reducing re-offending.
35. On youth justice specifically, the structures,
partnerships and understanding about appropriate community interventions
already exists. It is our recommendation that Government should
be bold in setting a policy and funding framework that enables
local partnerships to respond to young offenders in ways that
evidence shows is most effective, with custody remaining as an
option for only the most violent offenders.
What evidence exists concerning public opinion
on the allocation of scarce resources for criminal justice?
36. The Ipsos MORI "Closing the Gap"
research into crime and public perceptions deals with the issues
raised by this question. That research highlights some interesting
tensions in public opinion about the degree to which fear of crime
reflects the reality of crime rates, but also public opinion in
support of tougher sentences, while simultaneously acknowledging
that prison as a tool of reform does not succeed in most cases.
On the basis of this research, policy makers are faced with a
tough choice when looking at reforms to the criminal justice system.
37. Other research has confirmed that the more
information individuals have about the circumstances of particular
offenders, as well as information about the alternatives available
to dealing with offenders, the less likely they are to propose
a punitive response to offending behaviour.
CONCLUSION
The LGA and Clinks would like to commend the
Justice Committee for instigating this inquiry and encouraging
serious consideration around the principles of "Justice Reinvestment".
Successful implementation of "Justice Reinvestment"
will enable local government to have the authority, and fundamentally,
the resources to determine the future of their communities.
Malcolm Thomson
February 2008
5 Going Straight: reducing re-offending in local
communities Local Government Association 2005. Back
6
Neighbourhood by Neighbourhood: local action to reduce re-offending
The Coalition on Social and Criminal Justice November 2006. Back
7
The Economic Case For and Against Prison Matrix Knowledge
Group, November 2007. www.matrixknowledge.co.uk Back
8
The Corston Report: a review of women with particular vulnerabilities
in the criminal justice system Baroness Jean Corston Home
Office March 2007. Back
9
LGA survey (soon to be published) conducted in 2007 by BMRB. 176
local authorities participated in the survey. Back
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