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.
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.
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,
Debbie Ryan, Director of Rehabilitation and Resettlement for G4S, gives her views in the latest in a series of interviews about the MoJ’s probation reform programme: Transforming Rehabilitation. Debbie sees TR as a once in a lifetime opportunity to look at probation with a blank sheet of paper. She sees it as an opportunity to put service users at the heart of new service models and thinks that if new providers get TR right, we will see less people in prison…
