Policing
How good are we at solving crime?
In almost half (49%) of all offences recorded in 2014/15, the suspect was not identified and the case was closed.
24th September 2015
In almost half (49%) of all offences recorded in 2014/15, the suspect was not identified and the case was closed.
The growth of service users’ involvement in the design and delivery of drug and alcohol services has made a big contribution to the evolution of those services so that they are more user-friendly and more likely to result in significant positive change for the people who use them.
This finding gives hope to the value of Mr Gove’s review; if the quality and availability of prison education can be improved, it appears that there are large numbers of prisoners committed to making a positive change to their lives with education a keystone to that progress.
The review has been met with some scepticism among seasoned justice commentators such as Rob Allen who are surprised at the exclusions and wonder if the review is an excuse to finally go through with the abolition of the Youth Justice Board. The next few months will be a good test of Mr Gove’s pledge to build a new justice system based on the evidence.
The new Justice Secretary Michael Gove has made much of the need to have an ethical criminal justice system. One step hemight take would be to make the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman’s recommendations legally enforceable.
I’ve long been a fan of Andrew Brown’s monthly round of interesting facts about alcohol and other drugs which he has unearthed from a wide range of recent reports, statistical releases and the like.
I think the main challenges will be as much to with the practicalities of ensuring that there are enough staff to ensure that prisoners get to classes and providing the right incentives to get talented teachers to work in custodial settings.
Advocates of tagging typically advanced the cost effectiveness argument where they compare the cost of tagging – according to the Reform report somewhere between £8 to £16 per day for the new GPS tags – with the average cost of the prison place of approximately £73.
This is a timely report that reminds us all how much families are neglected in the criminal justice system. Unlike many other countries, approbation, and even youth justice, services tend to focus on the individual offender and often view interested family members as a necessary evil rather than affected others with an important role to contribute themselves.
Will the prospect of saving billions of pounds (if Pentonville prison were closed, selling off the land to developers would probably generate several hundred million pounds alone), tempt the Chancellor and Justice Secretary to shift justice policy in a very different direction?
Finally, five years since the first impact bond, we have yet to see whether impact bonds will lead to sustained impact on the lives of beneficiaries beyond the impact bond contract duration. The existing literature states that impact bonds could lead to sustained impact by demonstrating to government that a sector or intervention type is worth funding or by improving the quality of programmes by instilling a culture of outcome achievement, monitoring, and evaluation.
Heroin use in the UK has been steadily declining over recent years, so to lose more people to this drug is doubly sad. It is to be hoped that the take-up of naloxone has a significant impact and there is a distinct improvement in next year’s figures.
