Here you can find more than 750 posts tracking every major development in probation since 2011. You can trace the rise and fall of Transforming Rehabilitation, see the latest performance figures and explore new practice developments. If you’re looking for something in particular, try the search box below.
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.
Peer Courts are basically community led, problem solving courts which are focused on young people. They provide disposals outside the criminal justice system for young people who have committed minor offences. They mainly work with first time offenders as a means to delay entry into the formal criminal justice system.
The Justice Data Lab also now has access to reoffending data for individuals sentenced to community orders or released from prison in 2011 and so covers the full decade from 2002. Organisations are invited to make new submissions if they would like the most up-to-date reoffending information on their service users.
The MoJ has decided to stick to its decision to make PbR payments on both binary (reducing the proportion of people who commit further offences) and frequency (reducing the total number of offences) measures. However, providers can only receive the frequency payment if they meet the binary target – the so called binary hurdle remains in place.
The Committee expressed reservations that the MoJ would be able to run an effective competition process with the required level of transparency. It noted that a number of significant components of the programme had not been finalised. This issue was related to one of the Committee’s overall findings that the whole TR programme is being implemented too fast and without sufficient consideration and, where appropriate, piloting.
The overall findings are positive with the proven reoffending rate dropping to 26.5% compared to 26.8% for the previous year.This figure is the overall rate of reoffending for the 600,000 adult and juvenile offenders who were cautioned, convicted (excluding immediate custodial sentences) or released from custody between April 2011 and March 2012.
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 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.
There was also concern that there would be insufficient investment in TR to enable providers to reduce reoffending – particularly with the extension of probation to short term prisoners. Ideally, the payment mechanism should incentivise providers to take risks and develop new approaches to reducing reoffending. If these approaches are successful, society (through less crime), the taxpayer (less demand on services) and the new providers (PbR bonus payments) all benefit.
At its annual conference last week (23-24 January 2014), the Probation Chiefs Association launched a publication to celebrate its past achievements and to capture key aspects of its 107 years of history before the radical changes of the government’s Transforming Rehabilitation agenda which will see most of the probation service’s work outsourced with new providers delivering services from April 2015.
However, one key component which seems to be excluded from these calculations is the likely impact of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. Many expert witnesses who contributed to the recent House of Commons Justice Select Committee report expressed their concerns that TR would increase prison numbers through two main causes:
