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Transforming Rehabilitation by the numbers
Transforming Rehabilitation is the Ministry of Justice’s initiative to outsource the probation service. The graphic below provides a brief overview of the size of the project. The new reoffending contracts will be worth a total of £450m per year…

NAPO: Transforming Rehabilitation is an obscene social experiment
Ian Lawrence, General Secretary of NAPO, the probation service union and professional association, in the second in a series of interviews about the MoJ’s probation reform programme: Transforming Rehabilitation. Ian states that probation staff are not opposed to opening up the probation service to competition but argues that probation staff should be allowed to compete on a level playing field. He sees current plans as rushed…

Police, Camera, Action!
Police all over the world are currently trialling wearable body cameras. Typically, cameras are worn on patrol and record high definition footage which is transmitted wirelessly to a central database. Currently, the video cameras are worn openly and are attached to uniforms, sunglasses or even hats. They have a number of possible benefits…

The real cost of the war on drugs
In 2011, fewer than half of all violent crimes in the USA found any resolution. An alarming 59% of rape cases and 36.2% of murders in the United States are never solved. Why are so many violent criminals walking free? Professor Alex Kreit suggests that U.S. police forces should stop focusing so much of their resources on enforcing drug laws…

The voluntary sector and Transforming Rehabilitation
A new report from the Centre for Social Justice sees the criminal justice voluntary sector as critical to the success of the MoJ probation reforms. A survey completed by 173 organisations highlights hopes and concerns of a new world where relationships with large private sector companies are seen as the key to…

Payment by results and the Work Programme
Work Programme providers are still not hitting their targets. The worse performers are being penalised by losing market share to their better performing rivals. This direct competition is a feature that the DWP deliberately built into its payment by results model…
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