House of Commons - Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach?

Crime reduction policies: a co-ordinated approach? - Justice Committee Contents

5 Revisiting a justice reinvestment approach?

121. One of the central conclusions of the Committee's report on justice reinvestment was that effective crime reduction policies should enable reduced spending on the prison system and make it possible to achieve better return on investment in efforts to reduce crime and re-offending over several spending cycles.[245] The Committee proposed that the Government should therefore develop incentives for longer-term planning nationally, regionally and locally. The Committee believed that there needed to be a direct financial incentive for local agencies to spend money in ways which would reduce prison numbers, and that this incentive would not exist as long as the costs of imprisonment were borne at national level. The key question that they sought to answer was how best to facilitate this. They advocated a whole systems approach, which applies the best available research evidence to determine the most appropriate allocation of resources between prisons, and probation, and measures outside the criminal justice system to address the causes and social origins of crime. They argued that organisation and funding should explicitly recognise the correlation between offending and social exclusion in the places where crime most occurs, using geographical mapping to target resources. They suggested making a business case to the Treasury for spending a significant part of resources which were earmarked for new prison building on the creation of a central justice reinvestment fund. Over the longer term they recommended exploring the devolution of custodial budgets to local level. The then Government's response asserted that "the Government cannot set a clear direction to reduce the use of custody as an end in itself" which would be "simplistic and does not take account of the complexity of the issues at stake"; they also believed that the Committee overestimated "the benefits which might accrue from moving towards a justice reinvestment-style approach"^.[246]

122. We consider here whether there is evidence to support the benefits of adopting justice reinvestment approaches as espoused by our predecessor and we consider the extent to which the Government's Transforming Rehabilitation reforms and wider crime reduction measures constitute such an approach. First we examine how the application of justice reinvestment has been developing in the US, where the concept was first developed.

Developments in the implementation of justice reinvestment approaches in the US

123. Half of US states have now implemented justice reinvestment approaches, often with bipartisan backing.[247] Some of these initiatives have been supported by the US Department of Justice, which has recently increased its financial commitment towards them. In July 2013, we visited Houston and Austin in Texas, one of the first states to adopt the approach, to speak to the proponents of reform and see some of the programmes that have been adopted.

Texas case study
Texas has long been regarded as a state with some of the "toughest" criminal justice policies in the US. In 2007, its prison population was projected to grow by more than 14,000 people over a five-year period, costing taxpayers an additional $523 million for the construction and operation of new prison facilities. With bipartisan leadership, policymakers identified and enacted alternative strategies in an attempt both to increase public safety and avert the projected growth in the prison population at a net saving to the state as they would cost only $240m. These included investing in: parole and probation policies; expanding the capacity of community-based treatment programmes and residential drug and alcohol treatment facilities; expanding drug courts and other specialist courts to place offenders who committed minor crimes in treatment programmes; and expanding the nurse-family partnerships programme (an evidence-based, community maternal health initiative, referred to in the UK as family nurse partnerships, that serves low-income women pregnant with their first child) using savings generated by reductions in prison expenditure with a view to improving outcomes for low-income children and families. At the same time funding was authorised for the construction of three new prisons which could proceed only if the new policies and programs were not effective. This has not been necessary. Furthermore, one prison has since been closed and the legislature has authorised the closure of two more. Texas now has the lowest crime rate since 1968.

124. During our visit we spoke with the architects of the reforms and visited several of the various alternative programmes that had been adopted. In Harris County, Houston, one of the largest counties in the US, and the area that reportedly contributed the most prisoners to the state prison population, we met representatives from the nurse-family partnership programme, which has been running in Texas for 5 years and is mostly state-funded; and the Success through addiction recovery (STAR) court, which provides weekly judicial oversight over a programme of treatment for non-violent, repeat drug offenders. In Austin, we visited the downtown community court which takes as a problem solving, rehabilitative approach to sentencing public order offences, many of which are committed by a small number of defendants who cycle through the criminal justice system at a high cost to all community services; the Kyle Substance Abuse Felony Punishment facility, which provides prison-based drug therapy, followed by mandatory aftercare. We also met representatives from: the Texas Department of Criminal Justice which manages offenders in state prisons, jails and private correctional facilities and provides funding and some oversight of probation supervision; the Council on at Risk Youth, which works with young people who have been suspended from or removed from schools to divert them away from later entry into the criminal justice system; the Council for State Governments Justice Center, which conducted much of the data analysis to identify the likely efficacy of the alternative approaches adopted; and two think tanks, the Texas Public Policy Foundation which generates conservative ideas on criminal justice and manages the Right on Crime project, and the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, which seeks to promote smart justice policies for non-violent, non-sexually based offences.

125. During our visit we were particularly interested in the way in which a political consensus had been created around a new justice reinvestment approach. Jerry Madden, the former Republican Chair of the Corrections Committee, told us that when he became Chair he sought to build a coalition of people who knew about criminal justice, including Democrat State Senator Whitmire on the Finance Committee, and discussed how to break the cycle of offending, which was leading to a continuous need for more prison capacity. Using his engineering background, he thought about how to get around such a blockage: you either let people out (which was politically impossible) or you tried to slow down the numbers coming in. He characterised the previous politically polarised approach as either having to be soft on crime or stupid. He believed that the Texas legislature were now unlikely to retreat from the new political consensus as the rhetoric regarding saving money has been usurped by an understanding that it is the right approach in principle: it is not only cheaper but making the public safer and victims are receiving more restitution. Senator Whitmire believed that the changes were made possible in part because of a series of lucky breaks: it was easier for a Republican politician to make the decision not to build further prisons; he shared this view and was influential on the Finance Committee; Texas ran out of prison capacity; and the Sunset Committee, which reviews public sector agencies, decided to review the prison service in 2006, and concluded that it was very inefficient.

Developments in the implementation of justice reinvestment approaches in England and Wales

^126.Several of our witnesses were supportive of our predecessor's work on justice reinvestment and shared an ambition to see more widespread application of such principles to criminal justice reform.[248] The justice reinvestment pilots—which tested the application of a financial incentive to the reduction of demand—were therefore welcomed by many of our witnesses who wished to see the Government further considering the merits of such an approach.[249] Some regretted that they did not appear to be proposing to do so.[250]

127. According to the independent evaluation by Sheffield Hallam University, the Manchester and London justice reinvestment pilots, which ran until June 2013, delivered strong results in reducing demand and making associated savings which supports our predecessor Committee's assumption that this was likely to be the case.[251] The aim was to give participating local partnerships a financial incentive—representing half of the estimated savings to the Department—to reduce the overall demand on the criminal justice system by working together more effectively at the local level. In four boroughs in London, savings downstream meant just over £3 million could be ploughed back upstream, to spend on further initiatives to reduce reoffending. In Greater Manchester this amounted to just under £5 million.[252] A fifth London borough, Croydon received no payment having been unable to reduce demand. This area aside, reductions in demand over the two year period amounted to between 15 and 27% in the adult system, and between 42 and 55% in the youth justice system. It was a condition of the incentive payments that funding was reinvested in initiatives to reduce reoffending, rather than broader crime reduction projects.

Table 1: Results for year 2 of Local Justice Reinvestment pilot, and equivalent figures for Greater London and England & Wales

Change in demand Change in demand

Local area (adult) (youth) Payment due

(%) (%) (£000)

Greater Manchester* -14.9 -42.1 £4,986

Southwark -26.7 -50.0 £844

Lewisham -18.1 -53.1 £792

Hackney -20.1 n/a £659

Croydon -0.9 6.7 £0

Lambeth -17.7 -45.9 £737

Total LJR payment £8,019

England & Wales -10.5 -36.8

Greater London -13.4 -28.3

*Note that Greater Manchester is by far the largest of the local areas, which partly explains why it receives the largest payment

128. The full evaluation report of the pilots will be published later this year, but evaluators concluded after the first year that the projects were most successful when there was co-terminosity between local authorities and criminal justice agencies and where the pilots were able to integrate with other government initiatives, particularly whole place community budgets.[253] This was the case in Greater Manchester which we visited in February 2014.

Greater Manchester Justice Reinvestment case study
Greater Manchester has one of the highest levels of offending and reoffending in the country, representing a high cost to victims, communities and the economy due to the resulting drain on public services. The crime reduction agenda was therefore set in the context of a desire to reform public services with a view to generating growth: it currently draws £5bn more from the country's economy than it contributes. Under the pilot a range of metrics were used to measure reduction in demand across the criminal justice system, including short-prison sentences, court and community orders. The payment mechanism required no risk transfer to local partners. Nevertheless, it had been challenging to balance cost-reduction with "doing the right thing" as demand reduction could lead to perverse behaviour. The metrics were susceptible to spikes, such as followed the summer riots, and general sentencing trends.[254] The sentencing trend in Greater Manchester had been upward, so the reductions in demand were achieved against the flow.

The justice reinvestment pilot ran alongside a community budget pilot, with the "transforming justice" agenda being identified as one of 4 key workstreams, alongside Troubled Families, Health and Social Care and Early Years. This work aimed to reduce reoffending, numbers of victims and demand across criminal justice agencies, health, housing and local authorities, through the generation of evidence-based new delivery models for point of arrest, point of sentence and point of release. The work included: upscaling effective projects such as Intensive Community Orders and the North West Resettlement Consortium for young offenders being released from prison; the design of a whole-system approach for women offenders; and increasing the use of police custody triage. Reductions in convictions were also driven to some extent by the use of restorative justice, which also offered benefits to victims, and engaging the public.[255]
One challenge of the model was that cashable benefits require cashable savings which are difficult to achieve, particularly with regard to short-term custodial sentences. In addition, those left in the system tend to have more entrenched behaviours and problems, requiring a greater intensity of resources; any savings made would need to address this, as well as fund preventative work. Although the pilot had ceased the work continued underpinned by investment agreements. A Justice and Rehabilitation Executive Board has been established, chaired by the Police and Crime Commissioner, to drive strategic reform to continue to link Public Service Reform with the implementation of Transforming Rehabilitation, and to co-commission services. The Board has shared expectations of would-be new providers of probation.

TRANSFORMING REHABILITATION AND JUSTICE REINVESTMENT

129. In the 2010 Breaking the Cycle consultation paper, in which the Ministry signalled its intention to pay probation providers by results in reducing reoffending, it was suggested that such a payment mechanism would make "the concept of justice reinvestment real by allowing providers to invest money in the activity that will prevent offending rather than spending money on dealing with the consequences."[256] We proposed in our 2011 report on the probation service which considered these proposals that a fully integrated local model should be adopted for commissioning prisons and probation places. The Government subsequently took the decision to integrate the commissioning of rehabilitative services across prisons and probation under its Transforming Rehabilitation reforms on a national basis. This differs from what we envisaged in some important respects and we consider here whether their approach would therefore preclude justice reinvestment being pursued.

130. Rob Allen, who was a specialist adviser to our predecessor Committee on its justice reinvestment inquiry, observed that there are three key elements which all need to be present in genuine justice reinvestment: i) an overarching and explicit policy goal of reducing the numbers of people being prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned; ii) a method of financing criminal justice institutions and processes which incentivises the transfer of resources away from prison places and into community based measures for rehabilitating offenders and preventing crime; and iii) devolution of responsibility for criminal justice to a more local level where a range of relevant organisations can devise the most appropriate approaches to reducing crime, incorporating the views of people most affected by it.[257] Fox et al have characterised justice reinvestment approaches as a continuum, with purer social justice models at one end, and criminal justice centred approaches at the other.[258] We consider in the remainder of this chapter the extent to which the Government's reforms preclude or support a journey towards a system underpinned by justice reinvestment principles.

FREEING RESOURCES TO INVEST IN CRIME PREVENTION

131. The Prisons Minister Jeremy Wright told us that while there was potential to reduce demand on the system through the reduction of reoffending, the potential savings that might be accrued as a result had not been included in the consideration of the affordability of the reforms.[259] At one stage it appeared that savings from the benchmarking programme in public sector prisons would be 'reinvested' to fund the Transforming Rehabilitation reform programme, but these have now been subsumed into overall efficiency savings. As we noted in our interim report, there is no estimate of how much the Ministry would additionally need to save to afford the cost of implementing its programme, including the structural reform required, or how quickly savings will be realised to fund the extension of twelve month's post-release statutory support to all prisoners.[260]

132. Mr Allen believed that the Government had missed an opportunity to reduce the size of the prison population and reinvest savings into the community along the lines recommended in the Committee's report:

261

133. The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies similarly saw considerable scope for a reduction in criminal justice spending, if this reduction is complemented by a comparable reduction in the size and scope of the criminal justice agencies affected. They suggested that the question of the rates of harm and victimisation in society and the question of the size and scope of the criminal justice system need to be separated, reflecting the research evidence cited above which indicates that levels of victimisation are related to underlying social arrangements, rather than the interventions of criminal justice agencies.[262] As the Centre for Justice Innovation observed, courts are the key decision maker in the justice system, whose decisions determine resources:

263

Nevertheless, according to Phillip Bowen, one of the reasons why Governments do not commit to reducing the prison population is that the financial incentive on the Treasury is relatively weak in terms of the proportion of budgets spent on imprisonment, compared to some US states, for example.[264]

134. Some crime reduction initiatives have taken what could be described as a justice reinvestment approach in enabling national funding to be targeted to meet local needs. Under the gangs, troubled families, and violence against women and girls programmes central government has provided guidance and direction, with local areas free to utilise the national expertise and resources available to meet their own needs. Additionally, in relation to the civil justice system, the Government has made an explicit commitment to use courts as the last resort on the grounds both of their costs and of the limits in their effectiveness.[265] We heard other examples of decisions by central government that could have lent themselves to the application of justice reinvestment principles. For example, funding for victims services has been devolved to PCCs on a per capita basis, rather than on a more targeted basis in relation to the corresponding level of crime or victimisation.[266] Responding to public concern that cautioning is not being applied in the right cases, the Government commissioned a review of out of court disposals.[267] A broader review could have examined also the cost-base of the system, i.e. whether the right types of offences are being tackled in the most cost-effective and just way. Some witnesses expressed concerns that the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms could, perversely, lead to an increase in the use of short custodial sentences because they will also provide a route to supervision and rehabilitation.[268]

135. Accountability for reducing crime and reoffending cannot be limited to the Ministry of Justice and Home Office. The creation of the kind of support framework that will get to the heart of the deep-seated challenges of reducing crime, and reducing levels of victimisation accordingly, remains a long way from being realised. If we are to lower significantly the risk of harm and victimisation from crime, then more fundamental changes to the governance and funding of preventative initiatives are required, which would require strong national leadership, and a redirection of resources away from the criminal justice system. It is unclear whether the Ministry and the Treasury undertook an exercise to consider the case for spending some of the resources earmarked for new prison building on the development of justice reinvestment approaches, as advocated by our predecessor. We would like the Treasury and the Ministry of Justice to clarify this in the Government's response to this report. The Treasury should seriously question whether taxpayers' money is used in ways most likely to reduce future crime and victimisation, including evaluating that spent on custodial sentencing, and develop a longer-term strategy for the use of resources in this manner.

THE NATURE OF THE FINANCIAL INCENTIVE

136. The payment by results model adopted by the Ministry is to be applied to each single provider, or consortium of providers, which will be rewarded financially for reducing reoffending. The payment by results element will initially represent a small part of the payment, and this proportion will rise incrementally over time. Mr Wright said that a "sensible provider" would have sufficient incentive to work with other agencies, for example, to resolve a heroin addiction or serious alcohol problem.[269] As we discussed in our interim report, his confidence was not universally shared, and there is a risk that the "by results" element will not be sufficiently weighty to incentivise investment in reducing reoffending.[270] For example, one of our witnesses, Richard Johnson was sceptical that the model adopted would deliver a broader social impact, due to the primary focus of the reforms being the reduction of costs through competition. He proposed that a broader impact would require funding to be attached directly to an individual, rather than to probation, prisons, police, health, employment and housing.[271] A4E similarly proposed that new providers of rehabilitative services should have access to a pooled budget spanning a range of Government departments so that they could 'design-in' the requirement for co-operation by ensuring that the risks and rewards associated with tackling reoffending were shared.[272]

137. In the programme's current incarnation, the Government intends that PCCs and other local commissioners will be able to pay rehabilitation providers to deliver additional services, although it has indicated that it remains "open" to PCCs taking on a greater commissioning role for community providers of probation in the future.[273]

FUTURE DEVOLUTION OF CUSTODIAL RESOURCES TO LOCAL COMMUNITIES?

138. Several of our witnesses believed that there needs to be a direct financial incentive for local agencies to spend money in ways that will reduce the prison population.[274] The fact that funding for rehabilitative services would not be available to use in this way was a matter of some regret. For example, Councillor Joanna Spicer, vice-chair of the Safer and Stronger Communities Board of the Local Government Association, said:

275

Our evidence suggests that this can be achieved to some extent without such incentives. Between them local authorities and police and crime commissioners now have much of the mandate and resources for crime reduction, with the exception of the prisons and probation budget, and could be encouraged to adopt justice reinvestment approaches on the mutual understanding that any savings would be ploughed back into preventive initiatives. As we noted above, the devolution of community safety budgets to PCCs has provided some scope for them to commission early intervention schemes.[276] For example, in recognition of the value of work that might be more beneficial to other agencies than the police, the PCC for South Wales has created a partnership fund.[277] Roz Hamilton, then Chief Executive of Greater Manchester Probation Trust, told us that she had used our predecessor's report on justice reinvestment as the "defining concept" for the delivery of probation services; she now seeks to develop only integrated, evidence-based, services.

139. On the other hand, reliance on goodwill alone might not prove sustainable.[278] Several witnesses argued that success in reducing crime and reoffending is undermined by the absence of a structure of incentives across Government, designed to encourage agencies and bodies outside the justice system to help and support those people who are in it, or at risk of getting into it.[279] The idea of devolving resources to enable local areas to assume greater responsibility for crime reduction remained attractive, the premise being that if the same authority that is responsible for crime prevention is also responsible for some part of prison costs, they would be more likely to focus on prevention and cheaper, community-based alternatives.[280] Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the now potentially defunct model used in the pilots, no clear approach has emerged for doing so, particularly one that would fit with the direction of travel of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. As is evident from Mr Michael's comment that financial incentives are "very often in the "too difficult" box", finding an appropriate incentive, in which there is certainty about the behavioural implications, is complex.[281] Dr Alison Frater spoke of the importance of ensuring that financial frameworks can facilitate the agreement of priorities for investment as well as fund them. In the case of Public Health England, for example, the resource is not in cash, rather in kind.[282] During our inquiry on youth justice we heard about the promising results of the Youth Justice Board's work towards devolving the youth remand budget to local authorities. Local authorities now pay the Board for remand provision. The reduction of the use of custody is one of three explicit aims of youth offending teams, alongside the need to reduce reoffending and reducing first-time entrants to the system. The Criminal Justice Alliance (CJA) suggested that a starting point for the adult system would be for local authorities and/or police and crime commissioners to assume greater budgetary responsibility for short-term prison places and remand prison places, for example, women on remand.[283] Nevertheless, there are questions over whether PCCs have the democratic mandate, expertise, or even the desire to broaden their remit. Some of the partnership models stemming from the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms might have the potential to develop such a mechanism, in particular those that comprise partnerships including local authorities and probation mutuals.

140. One inherent difficulty of the application of justice reinvestment in England and Wales, which was apparent in Greater Manches ter, is that potential savings were not immediately cashable.[284] The same appears to be true of the Transforming Rehabilitation programme the contracts for which are to be let over a period of 10 years to enable providers to realise the savings required to develop better rehabilitative services.

141. The sustainable allocation of resources also relies on effective data capture and sharing across organisations to understand what agencies are doing and the benefit derived from it.[285] Our predecessor Committee observed that a considerable amount of management information about offenders was held locally by prisons, probation areas and other providers which, if captured centrally, would provide a wealth of material to support the case for cross-departmental reform. As we noted in chapter four, the savings that could be made from moving away from a crisis management approach are considerable, yet there continue to be difficulties in bringing these data together to facilitate the kinds of front-loaded investment decisions taken in US states, for example. If financial modelling in other jurisdictions can take into account these issues, it should be possible in England and Wales.

142. In several areas of Government, and in civil justice, the Government has used the need to make significant cuts to re-evaluate how and where money is spent. The Government has shied away from doing so in the criminal justice system, and this is in contrast to the approach that has been taken in over half of US states which have concluded that any real effort to contain spending on corrections must have as its centrepiece a plan to limit the growth of, and ultimately reduce, the prison population. In this respect the Government may have missed an opportunity to have looked at criminal justice reform from a broader systems perspective. We believe justice reinvestment approaches continue to have resonance because the ongoing pressures on all local budgets means it will be critical for local partnerships to further align and coordinate their resources in order to achieve better crime reduction outcomes and better value for money. Nevertheless, there remains no clear model for taking forward in England and Wales. In the absence of a central Government stimulus, the best prospect of its possibility continuing to be pursued appears to be a bottom-up approach. The justice reinvestment pilots demonstrate that there is potential to incentivise local partnerships to make their spending both more efficient and more effective in reducing demand on the system over a relatively short period of time. The tactic adopted in Greater Manchester, linking crime reduction to the promotion of economic growth, offers an attractive driver for local partnerships to apply a community budgeting approach. This might be possible without direct financial incentives through tacit agreement between partners, including local authorities and police and crime commissioners.

143. In justice reinvestment terms, one of the limitations of the model adopted by the Ministry is that where it is successful these savings are to be paid out in profits to providers over a period of 10 years, rather than reinvested into early intervention, or criminal justice initiatives further upstream. In contrast, the justice reinvestment and community budget pilots directly facilitated local intervention earlier and further upstream in those who may ultimately be of high cost to the public purse. Through such models there is a partnership commitment between participating agencies that savings are reinvested, no matter where the benefits accrue. Whatever the relative merits of either model it is important that the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms do not frustrate partnership approaches to reducing crime and that any such impact is counteracted. Providers need to be incentivised to reinvest part of any cost savings that might be achieved into further reoffending reduction initiatives, and to consolidate the partnership commitment to reducing crime more broadly.

144. Our witnesses highlighted the value of a cross-departmental approach to crime reduction, but exposed limitations in the current de facto lead residing in the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. This results in an imbalanced focus on enforcement and crisis management, rather than prevention and early intervention. One consequence of this is that there appears to be limited prospect of making cross-cutting savings by examining the system as a whole under current governance arrangements. The Government should keep under review the potential benefits of making an explicit political commitment to reducing the unnecessary use of imprisonment in favour of releasing resources for early intervention, and community-based approaches to reducing crime. The rapid reductions in imprisonment that have occurred in the youth justice estate illustrate the potential of the approach and the Government should give serious consideration in its response to this report to the lessons from this initiative that can be applied to the wider system.

A note on political rhetoric

145. Our previous Committee considered in detail the interaction between political rhetoric, public opinion and the media, which influence Governments' commitment to reducing the prison population.[286] They proposed that means must be found for encouraging and informing sensible, thoughtful and rational public debate and policy development on the appropriate balance and focus of resources and the use of imprisonment. While some attempt has been made to do this, it has proved challenging in practice as the example of the early guilty plea discussed in chapter three illustrates. Nacro, among others, was of the view that there continued to be a 'hard versus soft' policy debate surrounding the use of imprisonment and community sentences as crime prevention measures.[287] The Prison Reform Trust agreed stating: "Politicians are wary of anything that could lay them open to accusations of going soft on crime. It is not unusual to find sensible, humane policies presented in an 'acid wrap' of punitive language by whichever party is in power."[288]

146. Public opinion would appear to support the more rational approach to crime reduction and criminal justice policies suggested by a justice reinvestment approach. Consecutive polls continue to indicate that concern about crime is reducing amongst the public, including as an election priority; that they do not see crime prevention as primarily the work of criminal justice related agencies; and that prison building is not a high priority when it comes to the best means of preventing crime.[289] Ben Page of Ipsos Mori highlighted the crux of the issue: "[People] like strong sentences and locking people up, but they genuinely don't seem to think it actually reduces crime. Obviously it is the punishment part of it that they like."[290] However, he believed that the current focus of public anxiety on immigration, the economy and the cost of living could provide political space to have a "more dispassionate argument" about crime reduction.[291] Professor Hough believed that this space would grow the more people become used to the idea that crime is not out of control.[292] Our discussions with the political proponents of justice reinvestment in Texas, both Republican and Democrat, highlighted the fact that they were able to develop a consensus about reducing imprisonment and developing more effective means of achieving public safety stimulated by a fiscal crisis.

147. The language used by politicians when talking about crime has to recognise the seriousness with which the public rightly treats crime, but they also need to bear in mind that if there is a gulf between hard line rhetoric and the practical policies they are they pursuing to cut crime, they can create unrealistic expectations, conceal the value of programmes that are more effective, influence sentencers inappropriately and demoralise or discourage those working to achieve rehabilitation and cut offending. The media also have a role to play in promoting a more rational debate on criminal justice and the way public money is used to enhance public safety.

148. In the four years since our predecessor Committee reported on the merits of justice reinvestment as a means of cutting crime, crime has been falling, a great deal of local partnership effort has gone into crime prevention and rehabilitation, radical and controversial changes have been made to the probation system with the intention of providing for supervision of short-sentenced prisoners, the prison population has remained high but relatively stable, some initiatives have been developed, such as the Troubled Families programme, to deal with sources of crime, and all parts of the criminal justice system have had to cope with significant spending cuts. What remains lacking is still, as our predecessor observed, a rigorous assessment of where taxpayers' money can most effectively be spent in cutting crime, and a government-wide approach which recognises that the criminal justice system is only one limited part of the system through which taxpayers' money is spent to keep people safe from crime.

245 Justice Committee, First Report of Session 2009-10, Cutting crime: the case for justice reinvestment, HC 94-I Back

246 Ministry of Justice, Government response to the Justice Committee's Report: Cutting crime: the case for justice reinvestment, Cm 7819, March 2010, p. 6 Back

247 The Pew Charitable Trusts Sentencing and Corrections Reforms in Justice Reinvestment States, July 2013 Back

248 Criminal Justice Alliance (PPC0006) Back

249 Ibid; Prison Reform Trust (PPC0013); Howard League for Penal Reform (PPC0016) Back

250 Howard League for Penal Reform (PPC0016); Q58 [Mr Michael] Back

251 Ministry of Justice, Ad Hoc Statistical Notice: Local Justice Reinvestment pilots: demand on the Criminal Justice System, year 2, 28 November 2013, See also Ministry of Justice, The development and Year One Implementation of the Local Justice Reinvestment Pilot, 2013 and Criminal Justice Alliance (PPC0006), citing IPPR, Redesigning Justice: Reducing crime through justice reinvestment, December 2011 Back

252 Ibid. Back

253 Ministry of Justice, The development and Year One Implementation of the Local Justice Reinvestment Pilot, 2013 Back

254 A decision was taken not to exclude those offences responsible for the summer riots spike. Back

255 Restorative is used in various ways: alongside Intensive Community Orders (re-offending after restorative justice fell to 12% between 2010 and 2012 for the intensive alternatives to custody programme); in Neighbourhood Justice Panels where the focus is on co-production i.e. police working with victims and communities and building social capital to respond to crime and anti-social behaviour (the lowest reoffending rate is 2.6%); to prevent young people from entering the criminal justice system (there has been a 30-40% reduction in entrants and evidence suggests entrance is prevented rather than simply being delayed); and increasingly at various stages of the sentencing process, including the emerging use of deferred sentencing to enable RJ to take place. Back

256 Ministry of Justice, Breaking the Cycle: Effective Punishment, Rehabilitation and Sentencing of Offenders, December 2010 p 38 Back