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.
Last month (24 October 2014) the MoJ published a new set of statistics in readiness for the implementation of Transforming Rehabilitation – the reoffending rates for these short term prisoners. In effect these statistics provide the baseline against which reducing reoffending rates will be measured.
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.
Last week the MoJ published the latest local adult re-offending rates for the year ending on 30 June 2013. These figures will be scrutinised more closely than ever given the upcoming privatisation of the probation service via the government’s Transforming Rehabilitation project.
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,
The latest MoJ reoffending rates show that probation trusts continue to reduce reoffending even under the pressure of the proposed wholescale changes under the government’s Transforming Rehabilitation agenda. This overall good progress does, however, conceal a considerable variation between trusts.
Last week the MoJ published the latest data on re-offending rates. These figures will be scrutinised more closely than ever given the upcoming privatisation of the probation service via the government’s Transforming Rehabilitation project.
Proponents and critics of TR will seek to find ammunition for their cause. And those seeking to win the new reoffending contracts will be delving into the small print. I’ve done some very basic analysis to try to identify key trends…
