Justice Reinvestment

Central to the Manifesto’s vision is the establishment of a Community Justice Investment Fund (drawing on best practice in Texas) that reallocates funding from the prison building programme into a justice reinvestment programme. The manifesto also identifies several priority groups requiring tailored approaches. In addition to a key ask on women, it calls for greater recognition, support and involvement in rehabilitation and release planning for children and families affected by imprisonment.

It also highlights the need to tackle persistent racial disparities throughout the criminal justice system and to develop more appropriate pathways for the growing population of older people in prison.

Clinks says that the success of this approach will depend on coordinated action across government departments, long-term investment in community services, and a commitment to addressing the underlying social drivers of involvement in the criminal justice system.

Context

The Manifesto argues that our justice system faces systemic challenges which successive governments have attempted to fix through short-term, demand-management measures. The political will to implement the systemic reform required to build a more effective and humane justice system has been limited and impacted by frequent changes in justice leadership (there have been 16 Justice Secretaries in the 19 years since the post was first created in 2007). I would add that most criminal justice decisions are taken in direct response to media-generated concerns and normally prioritise party political needs rather than resolving long-standing problems.

The Manifesto acknowledges that the Sentencing Act, overall, is a positive contribution to wider reform of the system, particularly the measures that rebalance sentencing away from custody towards community alternatives.

However, it says that the Act’s success relies on the pursuit of a whole systems approach that doesn’t just limit the numbers of people going to prison, but addresses why so many people are going in the first instance, reforms the prison estate so that prisons are designed for rehabilitation, and overhauls support in the community so that increasingly complex need can be addressed and probation supported.

This requires the machinery of government to be working in sync, both within and across departments, to optimise a vision for reform and the voluntary sector’s role within that. 

The document argues that the voluntary sector’s role in a reformed system isn’t simply additional delivery capacity for an overstretched statutory system but that it brings specialist expertise, trusted relationships, community reach and much-needed continuity.

It is for this reason that Clilnks argues that the proposed shift away from custody and into communities needs to come with sustainable investment in the voluntary sector infrastructure to make this shift work.

Key Asks

In addition to the establishment of a Community Justice Investment Fund via a justice reinvestment programme. the Manifesto sets out another five key asks:

• LOCAL APPROACHES – Implement a truly local approach to probation governance, commissioning and partnership working.
• REDUCTION OF REMAND AND RECALL –  Significantly reduce the remand population and the number of recalls to prison including through a fast-track review of Custody Time Limits (CTLs) and the introduction of a decisionmaking framework for recalls.
• COMMUNITY PROVISION – Increase investment in community provision including through an expansion of community accommodation services, diversion schemes and guaranteed universal coverage of Community Sentence Treatment Requirements.
• STRENGTHENED RESETTLEMENT –  Establish an accessible resettlement pathway from custody into the community, including through the embedding of genuine earned progression into sentence planning.
• A WHOLE SYSTEM APPROACH FOR WOMEN – Implement a whole systems approach to women in contact within the criminal justice system.

Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here.