Interviewees often described a sense of loss, talking about the experience of being forced to transfer to the CRC as a bereavement or divorce. Many staff were extremely angry and upset at being forced out of the public sector whose values they explicitly espoused. There was also a strong sense of loss from long-time colleagues who were being transferred to the National Probation Service.
£2.3 billion was cut from police budgets in the five years since 2010/11 – a cut of between 12% and 23% for individual police forces. These figures are from the recent (4 June 2015) National Audit Office report: “Financial sustainability of police forces in England and Wales”. NAO reports are invaluable, in my opinion, because the organisation has no political axe to grind and merely examines costs and performance as fairly as possible.
Christoper McDonald, a former IPP prisoner , provided the audience with insight into the reality of life on the inside, far away from the court room. ‘For about two years I stayed in a cell that was no longer than my arm span, with two to three other people in a cell,’ he explained. ‘Later on in my sentence I was represented by Lubia [Begum-Rob, joint managing solicitor at PAS], who told me I do have rights, and we could start to challenge some of the decisions. More needs to be done to inform prisoners of what they are entitled to,’ he said.
There has been little progress in improving the response of the police, probation and Crown Prosecution services to disability hate crime. That is the core finding of a recent (21 May 2015) joint inspection report. The report, officially titled “Joint review disability hate crime follow-up”, was designed to see how these three key agencies (although of course probation is now split into the National Probation Service and 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies) had responded to a critical joint inspection in March 2013. That earlier report set out seven recommendations which is the focus of this review.
The election of a Conservative government means that PCCs are here to stay (Labour would have abolished them), and there is much to learn from how the first generation of PCCs have approached these challenging partnership issues, and used their role to help improve responses in their area. Given the current state of crisis in the police, probation and prison services, the leadership of PCCs may turn out to be critical and there is real value in this briefing series which points the way forward, instead of merely identifying problems.
The prison takes away many choices and coaching give some fundamental ones back, along with hope. Not the blind hope that the whole world will miraculously change, but that they can change themselves and parts of the world around them. Some explicitly choose to become survivors not victims.
The official conclusion of the JDL analysis is that: “individuals who received support provided by Women’s Centres throughout England experienced a reduction in re‐ offending of between 1 and 9 percentage points.” This is a very positive finding and it is to be hoped that the JDL repeats this analysis in the near future with a much bigger cohort and more sophisticated matching method.
These are outstanding outcomes and demonstrate the importance of a recovery-oriented treatment approach as a long term solution to tackling drug-related crime; interestingly, reconviction rates for RAPt graduates go down further in the second year post-release. Unfortunately, less than 2% of the prison population who currently need this sort of intensive intervention is receiving it. It remains to be seen if Michael Gove, the new Justice Secretary, can improve on that figure.
The value of this report is that it does not waste time and space rehearsing the depressing level of inequality within the criminal justice system, with which everyone is familiar.
Instead, it focuses on practical ways forward grounded in the real life work of a number of pioneering voluntary sector organisations.
The core component of the model is an individualised care plan with team members (four nurses and an administrator who also does recovery work) delivering or co-ordinating whatever a service user needs. The account of the team’s work says there is no typical service but lists a range of working methods as described by a number of interviewees:
Guest bloggers came from a wide range of viewpoints including several organisations with a particular criminal justice focus including prison reform, employment for women offenders, restorative justice etc. This, thankfully, made for very different priorities with limited repetition. Nevertheless, four key themes emerged from this spectrum of views.
Bradley found that mental health and substance misuse services in prisons did not work well together and that this situation did not improve in the five years between his two reports. RAPt’s experience is that only the minority of inmates with acute mental health problems currently receive treatment in prison, with the majority having to cope with their problems in a hostile prison environment without dedicated support.
