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.
Charlie says there is potential for the resettlement prisons to be a major factor in helping prisoners maintain contact with families. However, she questions whether more offenders might end up in prison because of TR and is particularly concerned about the fate of long term prisoners – will they lose services and interventions to help fund the new resettlement work?
Frank Curran, Senior Consultant at RedQuadrant (which has been helping probation mutuals to establish themselves and bid for Transforming Rehabilitation contracts) is the latest contributor in a series of interviews about the MoJ’s probation reform programmes.
He points out the dangers that many skilled professional staff are leaving the probation service and expresses the hope that the new Probation Institute will be a cohesive force to ensure that the same levels of dedication and professionalism are found in future versions of the probation service.
However, he is very concerned about the lack of staff engagement in Transforming Rehabilitation. He thinks that probation could be improved but that improvement is most likely to happen via a process of co-production with staff and service users at the heart of it.
Eric sees the potential that TR brings to providing help to alcohol using prisoners, many of whom serve short sentences and relapse as soon as they leave the prison gates.
However, he has serious concerns that TR may not work in practice and that probation expertise at working with offenders with complex needs could be lost.
While welcoming the acknowledgement that rehabilitation is key to reducing reoffending, Savas argues that there is no need to reinvent probation, especially when probation trusts have been performing at such a high level. He points out the risks of moving away from a local system to a national one and sees the new Institute of Probation as being key to ensuring that probation staff remain a highly skilled workforce.
Christine applauds the fact that TR makes rehabilitation as important as punishment in the criminal justice system but is disappointed that the public sector was not allowed to compete. She is concerned that there will in effect be two probation services (the National Probation Service and the new Community Rehabilitation Company) in each every area, leading to a cumbersome system.
Tom is concerned about the pace and scale of the TR reforms and the danger that new providers may “park” offenders who are assessed as difficult/expensive to help change, not providing them with the services they need. He advocates that the MoJ must be careful to protect its knowledge about what works in reducing reoffending; it will need to steward the market to prevent domination by a small number of players and ensure access to new providers.
Marcus Roberts, Director of Policy for DrugScope, gives his views in the latest in a series of interviews about the MoJ’s probation reform programme: Transforming Rehabilitation. Marcus welcomes the ambition and potential of TR but expresses concerns about a number of key issues:
A4e’s Jen Byrne sees TR as an opportunity for co-designing a new probation service with both service users and probation staff. She calls for transparency in commissioning and acknowledges…
Mark Johnson, Founder and CEO of User Voice, gives his views in the latest in a series of interviews about the MoJ’s probation reform programme: Transforming Rehabilitation. Mark questions the commercial basis of TR and says that the focus on re-offending misses the main point about enabling behaviour change – further offences provide the best opportunity for getting people on the road to desistance.
Rob Allen has a lifetime of experience in the youth justice, probation and prison sectors, in the latest in a series of interviews about the MoJ’s probation reform programme: Transforming Rehabilitation. He questions the whole structure of TR, the speed of change and thinks that even the positive measure of providing support to short term prisoners is likely to result in increased levels of custody…
