Justice and Home Affairs Committee
Cutting crime: better community sentences

1st Report of Session 2023-24 - published 28 December 2023 - HL Paper 27

Contents

Summary

Conclusions and recommendations

Chapter 1: Introduction

About community sentences

Box 1: The five aims of sentencing

Box 2: List of requirements that can be attached to a community order

About our inquiry

Chapter 2: A key sentencing option

A bespoke sentence

An alternative to custody

Prison Capacity

An effective option to reduce reoffending

Box 3: Reoffending statistics

Good value for money

Intensive Supervision Courts

An underused measure

Decline in the use of community orders

Figure 1: Number of community orders issued every year

Figure 2: Sentences passed

A matter of confidence

Box 4: The ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ reforms

Chapter 3: Tailoring sentences to the individual

Scaling up the use of treatment requirements

Treatment needs

Referrals for treatment

Box 5: Statistics on the imposition of Community Sentence Treatment Requirements (CSTRs)

Availability of treatment

Mainstreaming wraparound support

The needs of female offenders

Lessons from women’s centres

Creating incentives

A “gap in the market”

Mentoring

Other measures

Chapter 4: Maximising impact

Borrowing best practices from youth justice

Key differences

Moving the threshold

Innovating to support young adults

Facilitating local delivery

A case for local delivery

Ongoing efforts towards more local delivery

Box 6: Devolution of justice powers to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority

Communication issues

Making the most out of partnerships

The 2021 commissioning process

The operation of current contracts

The next commissioning process

Chapter 5: Challenges faced by the Probation Service

Staffing issues

Table 1: Staffing levels (Full-Time Equivalent) for probation officers across the 12 regions of the Probation Service

Box 7: Attrition rates among probation staff

An identity crisis

Tension between ‘befriending’ and ‘supervising’

A “desiccated” role?

What role for court teams?

Flawed IT systems

Box 8: The specialised IT systems used in Probation casework

“A sense of crisis”

Pre-Sentence Reports

Box 9: Statistics on Pre-Sentence Reports (PSRs)

Figure 3: Pre-sentence reports

Appendix 1: List of Members and declarations of interest

Appendix 2: List of witnesses

Appendix 3: Call for evidence

Evidence is published online at https://committees.parliament.uk/work/7425/community-sentences/publications/ and available for inspection at the Parliamentary Archives (020 7219 3074).

Q in footnotes refers to a question in oral evidence.





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