Tags are keywords. I put tags on every post to help you find the content you want. Tags may be people (Dominic Raab, say), organisations (The Howard League, PRT), themes (women offenders, homelessness) or specific items (heroin, racial disparity, ROTL). If you’re looking to research a particular issue, they can be invaluable.
I want a public sector provider that sits at the heart of the process. I can’t turn the clock back but I can make sure that one part of the system takes overall responsibility. It’s got to be the public sector because I can’t see that justice and transparency are served by any other sector playing the role.
NOMS just published its latest workforce information summary report which records the number of staff working for Community Rehabilitation Companies at 31 December 2014. Overall there are about 150 fewer full time equivalent staff working for the 21 CRCs (who were at the time still part of the public sector); an overall reduction of 1.84%.
This then creates the problem of a provider who is ‘too big to fail’. If a provider under-performs, the government may not be able to remove them due to the difficulty of replacing lost capacity, undermining the threat of sanctions written into contracts.
The Ministry of Justice has become increasingly committed to Restorative Justice over recent years. There was considerable emphasis on RJ in the recently completed Transforming Rehabilitation process with new providers urged to include restorative work and the police use of community resolutions is to be expanded.
10 “business requirements and principles” for an effective future probation service, deliberately constructed with a focus on service delivery from Joe Kuipers provided the inspiration for this post
So what do we make of these results? To me they represent a mixed picture, there’s no denying that reoffending has been reduced. However, we would normally expect a high level of performance from such a high profile pilot where the partners had chosen to participate and indeed championed and driven the initiative from the outset. On the other hand, there has been significant learning about how best to co-ordinate pre-and post-release activity, use mentors effectively and co-ordinate a multi-agency approach to preventing reoffending.
On 7 February, the MoJ issued an updated version of the Target Operating Model (TOM) for the new probation system. TOM2 is 74 pages long and gives a very detailed description of the current MoJ vision of how reducing reoffending will work from 2015 onwards.
The key words emphasised in the introduction are: Quality; Efficiency; Flexibility; Public Protection; Partnership and Standards.
The report asks how we reconcile the need for police services to be locally accountable while facing up to the fact that the current structure of 43 separate forces in England and Wales is no longer cost effective, nor equipped to meet the challenges of organised and cross-border crime.
This is a challenge which also faces the modern probation service.
The MoJ announced the names of the 30 organisations who passed the requirements of the PQQ stage of the Transforming Rehabilitation competition for new probation contracts just before Christmas (19 December 2013). It then asked these 30 bidders to confirm which of the 21 Contract Package Areas they wished to bid for by 22nd January this year.
Many witnesses who gave evidence to the Committee highlighted the inherent difficulties about the division of offender management between high risk and low-medium risk offenders, making the point that risk is dynamic and that there will need to be excellent communication across the two bodies to manage effectively those offenders whose risk levels rise and fall.
Charlie says there is potential for the resettlement prisons to be a major factor in helping prisoners maintain contact with families. However, she questions whether more offenders might end up in prison because of TR and is particularly concerned about the fate of long term prisoners – will they lose services and interventions to help fund the new resettlement work?
One of the driving forces of TR is the desire to improve reoffending rates and cut costs. The Committee was particularly interested to get a sound cost benefit analysis of the proposed changes. The Committee criticises the MoJ for being “less than forthcoming” with information about the costs of TR and highlights two key points…
