The justice minister, Chris Grayling, has used these figures to suggest a need to rush through plans to privatise most of the probation service in order to reduce re-offending rates. “The public are fed up with crooks doing their time and going straight back to crime, and so is the government,” Grayling said.
Yet all the signs are that Britain’s probation services are doing their jobs pretty well - and there is a large and long-standing body of evidence that prison itself makes criminals more likely to re-offend.
In 1990, a Conservative white paper concluded: “We know that prison ‘is an expensive way of making bad people worse’.” That report also argued that there should be a range of community-based sentences, which would be cheaper and more effective alternatives to prison.
But just as this report was being published, Douglas Hurd was replaced as home secretary by the more hardline Michael Howard - whose first major move was to throw the white paper away, and to announce to rapturous applause at the Conservative Party conference that “prison works”.
Howard was not an outlier; as crime and punishment has become a key political and social issue over the past 30 years, the old consensus – that prison should be used as a last resort and only for the most serious offences – has disappeared in favour of a harsher approach. Most tellingly, one of the key features of the New Labour political project was a determination never to be outflanked by the Conservatives on law and order.
Blair’s mantra of “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” summed up this shift in thinking, and a series of Labour home secretaries ushered in a range of measures such as Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) and changes to sentencing. The result has been a huge increase in the prison population at a time when crime rates have generally been in decline: while ONS figures show that crime rates are at their lowest since 2002-3, statistics from the International Centre for Prison Studies demonstrate the mounting number of inmates:
Click to enlarge
The Ministry of Justice statistic bulletin for Probation Trusts for the year to March 2013 shows a re-offending rate of 9.18%, based on a cohort size of 616,252. This is the lowest figure since 2008; the rate of re-offending in 2008-13 has remained fairly constant at around 9.8%.
Even then, the data is not so simple. Recidivism varies sharply with prisoner age and the length of prison terms: while 47% of adults are re-convicted within a year, this applies to 58% of those on shorter sentences, while for those under 18 the figure is an astonishing 78%.
The National Audit Office study Managing Offenders on Short Custodial Sentences calculated in 2010 that the re-offending by ex-offenders in 2007-08 cost the economy between £9.5 and £13 billion – the vast majority due to offenders who have served short sentences. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice’s 2013 re-offending statistics show that those on community sentences offended significantly less than those given custodial terms.
As the Ministry of Justice calculates that the average prison place costs £37,648 per year, around 12 times the price of the average probation or community service order, it is strange to see the apparently effective probation service blamed for problems which many would attribute to prisons themselves.
by Ian Cummins, Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Salford University
more here
Whilst 'Blair’s mantra of “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”' is not discussed in the article SOYMB would attribute most of the causes of crime to the divisive, inequitable system of capitalism which purports to represent the interests of all sections of the people. In its place we advocate a system, organised democratically by the people - not by self-interested leaders, of social cohesion attained through the process of direct involvement in decision making at all levels with the aim of creating societies that function for the benefit of all and not for profit.
JS
No comments:
Post a Comment