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.
he MoJ will write into the new contracts for CRCs exactly which statutory bodies they will be expected to work with and what duties they will be required to perform. The paper doesn’t cover non-statutory partnerships such as Integrated Offender Management although the TR strategy makes it clear that CRCs will be expected to maintain, and indeed take the lead, on IOM.
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…
Perhaps the best outcome from the MoJ Transforming Rehabilitation project is the renewed interest in and focus on the whole area of tackling re-offending
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.
However, the main challenge I can see is that most women in the criminal justice system have complex, entrenched needs which require intensive and extensive help. The response paper seems to imply (page 16) that the additional £3.78 million paid to Probation Trusts for services for women offenders in the current financial year will be discontinued when new providers take over in April 2015 (see timeline here).
The first recommendation of the Corston Report was that “[e]very agency within the criminal justice system must prioritise and accelerate preparations to implement the gender equality duty and radically transform the way they deliver services for women On Friday, the MoJ put out three documents , a response to the Justice Committee’s report, an overview of the women’s custodial estate and a stock take of community services.
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…
One of the least controversial aspects of Transforming Rehabilitation, the Ministry of Justice’s project to reform the probation service, is the establishment of 71 resettlement prisons. These resettlement prisons are linked with one or more Contract Package Areas and the aim is for all prisoners to spend the last three months of their sentence in their local resettlement prison so that release plans can be properly developed. The MoJ target is to ensure that at least 80% adult male offenders will be released from these resettlement prisons. But is this target achievable…?
This post examines the challenges facing resettlement prisons.
Clive Martin, Director of Clinks, in the latest in a series of interviews about the MoJ’s probation reform programme: Transforming Rehabilitation. Clive sees the potential that TR will be a success but he also expresses serious concerns on a number of issues…
Last week the MoJ published modelled data for the 6 years from 2005 to 2010, showing the number of offenders in each PbR cohort and the 1-year re-offending rates among those offenders. The report provides an historical picture of probation performance in reducing reoffending aimed at those organisations interested in winning the new probation contracts. It presents performance on a Contract Package Area, rather than Probation Trust, basis and it looks specifically at the group of offenders for whom the new Community Rehabilitation Companies will be responsible.
