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.
The official conclusion of the JDL analysis is that: “individuals who received support provided by Women’s Centres throughout England experienced a reduction in re‐ offending of between 1 and 9 percentage points.” This is a very positive finding and it is to be hoped that the JDL repeats this analysis in the near future with a much bigger cohort and more sophisticated matching method.
How does the new Justice Secretary direct extra resources at interventions that achieve the departmental objective of reducing reoffending, while managing what is likely to be a further 20-30% cut to the departmental budget? A brave leader would use this opportunity to end the madness of the highest prison population in Europe – costing taxpayers over £3 billion per year, a high proportion of which is
Perhaps the most important factor is the willingness for the MoJ to encourage and promote transparency in identifying what does – and does not – work to prevent reoffending.
Let’s hope this commitment to transparency continues when the new private probation providers start running Community Rehabilitation Companies in April 2015.
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.
Even with just one positive result in this month’s Justice Data Lab publication, it’s heartening to see that prison education – an area often very vulnerable to cuts – can help reduce reoffending, even when it simply consists of small grants for art and hobby materials.
However, the largest scheme which was assessed – the national analysis of all the NOMS CFO employment schemes with offenders who started their interventions in the community found that this intervention reduced reoffending by between 4 and 8 percentage points. The 19 individual regional schemes in this programme (which are run by different providers) were assessed in the previous month’s Lab Report and varied considerably.
The Transforming Rehabilitation programme has focused minds at the Ministry of Justice and the criminal justice sector generally on the key issue of what sorts of interventions do reduce reoffending. The MoJ has issued a number of new research studies including a Summary of Evidence on Reducing Reoffending and a series of rapid evidence assessments on different categories of intervention.
The purpose of the Justice Data Lab was to make it possible for small voluntary organisations to find out if their work with offenders made a difference to reoffending rates. It was launched as part of the Transforming Rehabilitation project as a way of government, commissioners and Prime providers having a way of comparing the impact of different providers delivering a range of interventions. Despite the strong publicity surrounding the launch of the Data Lab,
What works? One of the positive side-effects of the Transforming Rehabilitation project (launched in earnest yesterday) has been the debate it has provoked about what
The new MoJ data lab promises small voluntary organisations access to information about their effectiveness – for free. It could be invaluable for organisations looking to win reducing re-offending contracts under the new payment by results framework. But how will it work in practice?
