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On Probation
The Leveson Review

“time and resources are frequently being wasted as a consequence of the practice of adjourning the sentencing hearing so that the Probation Service can prepare a presentence report (PSR) for cases that either do not require a PSR or when an oral report would suffice.”

Alcohol/Drugs/Gambling
Who’s taking drugs into prison?

Cuts in public expenditure have resulted in very well-publicised shortages of prison staff. It may well be that these figures fall in 2014/15 , not because there are less drugs getting into our prisons, but because there are less prison staff to detect them.

Payment by Results
28% released prisoners have benefits removed

Disappointingly, and somewhat bizarrely, the evaluation was not able to provide information on the core outcome of whether released prisoners were helped to find work by the Work Programme, apparently because the DWP did not require providers to provide separate statistics for this group.

Infographics
Reducing imprisonment AND crime

Over recent years most US states have reduced the amount they use incarceration (driven in great part by economic concerns) and have found that crime rates have gone down. Indeed, as this infographic from the Pew Foundation shows, those states which have cut the use of imprisonment have seen their crime rates fall further than those that haven’t:

Commissioning
There’s not enough choice in public services

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.

Alcohol/Drugs/Gambling
What drugs are young people using?

This post is based on the most recent survey of teen drug use by the USA’s National Institute on Drug Abuse. It’s always interesting to look at drug trends in this States because so many substances that are popular there cross over to this country.

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Russell has over 20 years’ experience as a researcher and consultant specialising in substance misuse and crime.

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Prison, probation, police, substance misuse, commissioning & payment by results.

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