Tags are keywords. I put tags on every post to help you find the content you want. Tags may be people (Dominic Raab, say), organisations (The Howard League, PRT), themes (women offenders, homelessness) or specific items (heroin, racial disparity, ROTL). If you’re looking to research a particular issue, they can be invaluable.
We know that employment is key to desistance from crime, surely the Prison Service should be doing everything it can to help prisoners reintegrate into the community and go straight?
Perhaps the main challenge for probation staff working with young adult offenders in the new CRCs will be to have sufficient time to develop a trusting relationship which underpins the best probation practice.
It will be interesting to see whether the picture of reducing reoffending services looks any different by the time of the next report. At the moment, the voluntary sector which works with offenders and their families are stuck in the same position as Dante’s virtuous pagans, not sure if the future will be heaven or hell.
This is a chance to tell your story and help Clinks influence decision makers – responding to the State of the Sector survey is vitally important as it helps to develop an evidence base so Clinks can advocate on behalf of the sector. You’ll be helping Clinks to gauge the impact of policy changes on your organisation and the wellbeing of your service users. Your anonymised responses will make up a report which will be sent to key decision makers and influencers.
The value of this report is that it does not waste time and space rehearsing the depressing level of inequality within the criminal justice system, with which everyone is familiar.
Instead, it focuses on practical ways forward grounded in the real life work of a number of pioneering voluntary sector organisations.
The extent of voluntary sector participation in the new privatised probation service introduced by the government’s Transforming Rehabilitation programme is very unclear. The recent Clinks State of the Sector report found that many organisations were unsure about whether there would be opportunities for them to be involved in delivering TR.
Perhaps the most depressing finding of the survey, was that the majority of the sector has had to make redundancies with 50 organisations expecting to make 131 redundancies in the current financial year. Some of these job losses are being offset by the recruitment of more volunteers. In fact, the voluntary sector is again starting to resemble the volunteering sector with organisations having on average 1.7 volunteers for every member of paid staff.
The fact that women make up only 5% of the prison population and 15% of those on probation means their needs are often overlooked by a system which is focused on the profile and behaviour of male offenders.
The central conclusion of the report is that the Criminal Justice System’s approach to young black men of African Caribbean descent is based on the supposition that they belong to a gang, and that young Muslim men are, or soon will be, engaged in terrorist activity.
It will be interesting to see if PCCs build on this promising start and make the voluntary sector a keystone of their work in tackling crime locally. They will face two substantial challenges over the next two years. Firstly, the outcome of the general election will have a significant impact.
One of the best aspects of this important Clinks report is that it does not merely report the difficulties faced by organisations working with women offenders but highlights innovative practice and makes recommendations for ensuring that the needs of women offenders are not neglected under TR.
