What strikes me about the ’10 year’ prison strategy just published by MoJ:
10 years is fantasy. 3 would be remarkable When I was responsible for strategic planning in HMPS, Martin Narey would sardonically remind me how short the timespans really were. Suppose a 10 year strategy had been issued in 2010. Since then we have had a Coalition, 3 Tory PMs (and a lurch from centre right to far right), 8 Justice Secretaries averaging a little over a year in post, and 3 game changing external events, austerity, COVID and allegedly recovery. Our political system assumes that new Ministers, even if of the same party, will start completely afresh, and there hasn’t been much common ground between Clarke’s aims of reducing imprisonment and incrementally increasing competition for prison, Grayling cancelling prison competition but botching massive big bang privatisation of probation and forcing through deep, deep cuts, the various announcements mid decade of massive new building programmes that then failed to happen, COVID lockdown and now this. In less than 3 years, there must be a General Election, and currently there’s every chance we’ll have a new PM well before then (and new PM’s never leave their Cabinet untouched). Raab is known not to feel MoJ is in line with his ambitions. And so on. That said the approach of detailed planning for 2 years only and general objectives beyond that seems the best we can do, within the confines of a political system incapable of sustained policy. Dodging the big strategic issues If you’re going to have a 10 year strategy, though, one could expect it to include the big issues. And some of the biggest and most obvious challenges the prison service faces are airbrushed out of this strategy altogether. For example:
Some linkage across CJS but not on fundamentals The strategy takes account of the impact on prisons of recruiting 20, 000 police - having just sacked 20, 000 police, BTW, but hey ho – because it has to, the numbers are so big. But there isn’t the slightest awareness of the operation of the CJS system as a whole system, designed to achieve certain ends. For example:
The lack of much new Almost everything in here has already been tried before. I went through keeping a note of anything I thought might be really new (as opposed to existing ideas given wider application, or re-labelled). It’s a short list. For example, ‘fast track’ adjudications (though the small print says, only where the prisoner has already admitted culpability); or avoiding Friday releases in certain cases by releasing early; or greater awareness of neuro-diversity. No doubt good stuff, but emphatically not game changing. Again and again in the documents, anyone with any background in prisons would recognise old favourites, for example greater autonomy for Governors BUT also league tables and KPIs, where is Derek Lewis now? It’s cringe making stuff. A lot of it has been announced by half a dozen different Justice Secretaries before Raab. And despite the well known penchant of Ministers for anything shiny that beeps – 5 references to ‘cutting edge’ innovation (thankfully not for suicide prevention!) and 32 admiring references to technology in general – I don’t see anything likely to be transformative here. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily. Innovation for the sake of it, that isn’t useful, isn’t to be encouraged. But, if nothing much changes in what you do, why now expect a different result? Lack of awareness of or learning from the past This I think is the most depressing thing. As Churchill remarked “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it”. (Indeed, reflection on the past used to be a defining characteristic of real Toryism). But there is simply no recognition here that the past exists, let along learning from it. (BTW, the same is true of every minister I can recall.) For example. I played a minor role in New Labour’s extensive (and expensive) programme to reduce reoffending by prisoners, based on the latest evidence of ‘what works’ in offending. No one, Labour or Tory, has ever shown the least interest in examining what that programme achieved, which was marginal, and why it didn’t achieve more. No one, ever (though I had a go here). Without exception, every new Justice Secretary announces that reoffending rates are too high, as though they are the first to notice it. They never inquire about what was done before. If they did, they might possibly find out why rates are still high. Or even accept that they cant change them much. As I said in my very first blog, here, prison and justice ministers, and most of the media, are in the grip of a penological version of that terrible affliction, Korsakoff’s syndrome, where a brain damaged patient cannot recall the past, and cannot form new memories, but exists only in an eternal present. It is pathological. Conclusion There’s no real promise here of a better prison system. Just a much bigger one.
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I am reading the memoirs of Robert Badinter, French politician and jurist, Minister of Justice under Mitterand. He is best known for having abolished the death penalty in France (the French were still guillotining people in the 1970s), and campaigning against it worldwide after leaving office: he also secured many other reforms, equalising the age of consent for gays, suppressing some especially repressive laws, improving prison regime, seeking to reduce use of imprisonment and so on. A sort of French Roy Jenkins you might say. Except that Jenkins would hardly have made it his first ministerial act on coming into office to cancel the haute cuisine lunches served daily to the minister, and the daily replacement of flowers throughout the ministry, pointing to the meagre daily allowance for maintaining prisoners in France. Nor I suspect would Jenkins have devoted pages to extolling the merits of his civil servants, ascribing his success to their brilliance. But what is most striking to an English reader, especially today is the passionate belief of the man. Thus: "For the whole of my career in law, I had dreamed that one day it might be given to me to effect a transformation in French justice, to give it a place of eminence in the heart of European liberty. What was a passion for me as a young man under the spell of history, became a sober ambition as university and experience of law brought greater maturity. My conviction was total: the grandeur of France, that phrase that nowadays has almost an antique flavour, and which had nourished me since childhood, could not reside in its military power, now of the second rate, nor its economic power, important though that remained, nor even in the splendour of its culture, overtaken by the dominance of the Anglo Saxons. The grandeur and influence of France for me had to be measured by its contribution to the cause of liberty. It should shine at home with a brilliance without equal, and demonstrate a global influence greater than its actual power. "This vision, which might seem naive, was instilled in me as a child by my father, in the ‘30s, a time when France lived in the glorious memory of the victory of 1918. In Jewish families where one heard that Yiddish accent so sweet to my ears burnt a deep love of the French republic. Then came the black days of defeat, Occupation, Vichy, persecution and deportation. They reinforced my faith in an indivisible alliance between the grandeur of France and liberty. As it became evident that, as the flame of liberty died down or was extinguished, France was plunged into shame or barbarism, I measured all politics by that standard. That principle kept me from supporting communism when I was a student at the Sorbonne, immediately after the war. It caused me to break with governments of the Left which got bogged down in the war in Algeria after 1956. It forbade me to accept the coup d’Etat of May 1958, despite my admiration for General de Gaulle, man of destiny. It made me rally to the small group of friends gathered round Francois Mitterand in the Ligue Pour le Combat Republicain. And later, in the discussion clubs which grew up among the non communist Left in the 70s, my subject for study and discussion was always the same: what should French liberty be like at the end of the 20th century?" When one thinks of the pitiable succession of mediocrities who have shambled through the offices of Lord Chancellor and Home Secretary in recent decades, each replaced and forgotten within a year or two, each leaving a little more mess behind them (1), it is inconceivable to imagine of any of them harbouring such elevated thoughts. And so degraded is our political culture that if any of them had said something like this, it would have simply been assumed that they were suffering from an unusual form of mental breakdown. But he was not a dreamer. Badinter was - or rather is, happily alive and engaged still in his 90s - that rarest thing in politics, an idealist who got things done. As we say: a mensch. (1) Or Grayling's case, a vast mess A thing I keep saying is, what the criminal justice system does, doesn't affect the level of crime much, or perhaps not at all. Which means that most of what politicians say or do on crime is nonsense. This graph might help show why. It plots crime v convictions/cautions over half a century. The figures are taken from 'Criminal Statistics 20001, and are dodgy in various ways, most notably that they were read off a graph since (grrr!) the statisticians published a graph without publishing the data which generated it (that's a hanging offence, BTW). But for illustrative purposes it'll do. See?
Now, your Tory will say, OK, all the more reason to put in enough police and CPS and courts and prisons to move that orange line much closer to the blue line. 3 problems. 1. Since 2000, the blue line has not risen (a fact incompatible with the idea that the work of the CJS affects crime rates) 2. Since 1995 we have used a much more accurate measure of the amount of crime than police stats, known and documented (by the Inspector of Constabulary) to be ropey to say the least, , by asking the people every year how much crime they have experienced and they say, the people of this country say, the voters say, crime has more than halved since 1995 (as above, but even more so) 3. bringing blue and orange lines together would require about a ten fold increase in spending on the police, courts, prisons, something even the new high tax, high spending Tory party might have a problem with. 1,000 new prisons....mm. But funnily enough, I do have ideas on what to do to bring crime levels down. (TBC) NOTE On re-reading this, see I was wrong to single out the Tories for criticism. The only Ministers ever to state clearly that we use too much imprisonment, to manage the prison population down as an aim of policy and to close prisons as a result, were Tories. It took courage and in the case of Ken Clarke, made him a non person in his own party. No Labour Minister has ever shown that courage. Indeed the fastest ever increase in prison numbers was under Jack Straw, Labour opened prisons at a faster rate than before or since and even now, Labour is engaged in a bidding war with the Tories to force up sentences even beyond what they proposed. Labour's record is ever bit as shameful as the Tories, but a lot more disappointing. Last month's budget gave MoJ more than many expected (including me). So, is MoJ now on an even keel, after 5 years of running a £1bn structural deficit? Can we look forward to a flourishing criminal justice system? Absolutely not. While there are some small welcome improvements, when you look into it, the settlement essentially represents the continued unfolding of two of the great public policy disasters of our times: 'austerity', and the never-ending increase in use of prison, already higher than almost every major European country. Compulsive obfuscation syndrome The settlement is hard to interpret because MoJ are playing silly buggers with the figures. While this is not new – Gordon Brown was notorious for ‘re-announcing’ money already previously announced – it is here taken to new lengths. This is done by mixing currencies. Some figures are for changes taking 2019-20 as the starting point, and some taking 2021-22 as a starting point. This is so misleading: they should be announcing what’s new, not trawling over past years, already announced and not 'new' money at all, in fact a lot of it already spent. Likewise, some figures are for the extra in the final year, 2024-25, and some for the extra the extra over the three years 2022-23 to 20-24-25, all rolled together (1). And always, a studied vagueness: when MoJ talk about £xm a year more by 2024-25 for various things – is that compared to the baseline i.e. today, or to 2019-20? It isn’t clear. In one case, probation, they make it clear that all that has been done is to continue existing, baseline funding: so no new money, it appears. Similarly on victim support, they trumpet the increase over 2019-20. That is, they are in part re-announcing extra money already provided in previous SRs. So, we do not know how much extra is being provided from where we stand now, today. The passage on prisons is especially hard to follow, since they mix capital to build and current to open and run prisons. They pronounce that SR 2021 ‘confirms £3.8bn of investment ….over 3 years to deliver 20,000 additional prison places.’ But the capital programme through to 2024-25 was already agreed in SR 2020. It’s impossible to relate that £3.8bn to the previously published figures, since the additional capital actually comes to only £1.9bn. Presumably, some mix of that capital and supporting current spend. But what does ‘confirm’ mean, exactly? As a result, it is impossible to take the SR settlement and see how much growth is allocated to which purposes. And this is not accidental: it is deliberate. Why does the Government feel the need to play games with the figures, when in fact it is a bigger settlement than many expected? Perhaps, when you’re so used to deception and spin, telling the plain truth is just too difficult. Where we start from: a system brought to its knees by a decade of savage cuts Proof that MoJ do have a sense of humour: their proud claim that the settlement is the “largest funding increase in more than a decade for justice system”. They are hoping you’ve forgotten ‘austerity’: a decade of deep cuts – and the damage they have done, and are still doing. But no prison or probation officer or judge or defence or prosecution lawyer or victim or defendant has forgotten the damage done, because they witness it every working day. MoJ spending was cut by a third in real terms from 2010-11 to 2019-20. Deeper cuts than most Departments. Now, as FD I favoured efficiencies. But there's a world of difference between doing the same just as well or better with less, which is true efficiency, and doing less with less, which is what 'cuts' are. Consider prisons, reduced to the worst state in a generation, because the Tories cut staffing on the landings by nearly a third, without cutting prisoner numbers. And they also cut prison officer starting pay, which meant difficulty in recruitment and high leaving rates, not surprising when (as has been carefully documented by the Prison Service Pay Review Body) you can earn as much doing a much easier job elsewhere. And low staffing numbers and high turnover in prison means frightened, inexperienced staff. Result: violence and self-harm have more than doubled. In 2010-11, only 2% of prisons were rated as ‘of concern’, none of them ‘of serious concern’. In 2019-20, nearly a third of all prisons were rated as being ‘of concern’ – 6% ‘of serious concern’. MoJ took a prison service working better than it had done for generations, and damaged it, possibly beyond repair. Today, staffing is still 14% lower than in 2010. And there is no new money in this SR to make good that cut in prison staffing. Nor the cut in pay. On the contrary, MoJ has just outrageously prevented the supposedly independent pay review body from recommending a proper pay award. Or consider courts. MoJ has closed half the courts in the country since 2010. To cut costs, MoJ turned actual face to face courts into Zoom courts, a huge, epochal change in our justice system made without any understanding of how it affects the quality of justice. Those of us reduced to Zoom during lockdown know how different it is to face to face, especially in group settings. In fact, research – not commissioned by MoJ, which didn’t think it important – confirms that virtual courts seriously disadvantages the poor, marginalised and disabled defendants. (Ironically, this is done by the same Government that insists video links are not good enough for GPs, and they must return to face to face.) Or consider cuts to criminal legal aid – halved in real terms since 2010-11, leading to an exodus of defence lawyers who find the work simply does not pay. Barely half as many solicitors are providing criminal legal aid as in 2010, and the number of Chambers with full practice criminal barristers is down a fifth since 2015. As we shall see, this is a fatal flaw in MoJ’s recovery plans. (There is some money to extend eligibility for legal aid, but none to pay lawyers a decent rate, so in effect they are just extending the malfunction.) No money is provided in the SR settlement to put right this appalling record of serious damage to so many parts of the criminal justice system. Thus the first of our great public policy disasters, austerity, blunders aimlessly on, damaging lives, damaging justice. What then is the money for? So, if all this new money isn’t to put the system back into reasonable health, what is it for? As I say, MoJ make it impossible to quantify that at all precisely, but it’s clear than most of the increase in spending is to manage huge increases in demand , which is caused by two things: the backlog of court cases that built up during lockdown, and the massive increase in prosecutions expected as a result of increasing police numbers by 20,000. Obviously, it’s desirable that these things are remedied, indeed, essential. During the last decade, the Tories cut police numbers by around 20,000. As a result, the clear up rate has fallen (under the party of law and order!) to its lowest on record. And yet, despite this falling off in prosecutions, court delays have also reached new heights, with new cases being listed for hearing in two years time. Clearly these problems had to be fixed. [Though one might inquire, why the Tories first cut 20,000 police and then added 20,000 police back…..? And no, its definitely not because in the meantime they fixed the national debt or government spending deficit – both are infinitely worse this year than at any time in the past decade. And by the way, cutting 20,000 meant above all losing the more experienced officers, the ones who’d teach new recruits how to do the job well. And by the way, it meant paying a shedload of money to get them to go. And by the way, re-recruiting 20,000 means another shedload of money to train the new ones. The Tories used to be careful with public money.] The reason why this is in fact not such good news is hinted at by asking the question: how come, if prosecutions slumped, prison numbers stayed much the same? The answer is: because since 2010, proportionate use of custody (the % of those convicted who are sent to prison) and average sentence lengths have been steadily climbing. And a quite a lot of that increase has been driven by Government policy. So: the slump in the number of crimes brought to justice, as a result of cutting police numbers, meant that rising use of prison by the courts didn’t affect immediately drive up prison numbers. But obviously, there was a very large IOU: because when police numbers are increased, and when prosecutions increase, there will be an enormous rise in prisoner numbers. So, nothing to do with there being more crime. It’s simply the deferred cost of increasing use of prison since 2010. And it is an enormous increase, on top of the large increase caused by tackling the backlog of court cases, due to COVID. Bear in mind that the margin of spare capacity in the system now is about 2%. That by the way isn’t the uncrowded capacity: it already assumes that every prison is as heavily overcrowded as it safely can be. And we know that overcrowding of this scale means prisoners located far from their families, programmes to cut reoffending overwhelmed or not available, staff hard put to stop bullying and self harm. It is damaging to everything prison is supposed to achieve. Now, MoJ say that the SR settlement includes funds for 20,000 new prison places by ‘the mid 2020s’ (BTW I make that precisely…2025. Not, say, 2027. Still less 2028). Note in passing that that number has already by risen by 2000 since. Note also that as recently as MoJ was saying the extra places would ease overcrowding. They wont now. There isn’t the slightest, the least, the tiniest chance of MoJ building 20,000 new places between now and 2025. It isn’t a question of funding. It just cannot be done, in 4 years from now. I know. It was once my business, when we did it faster, better and cheaper than ever before or since (2). Recall this is the same Department that announced in 2015 a 10,000 place building programme that would open 5 new mega prisons by 2020, but by 2020, hadn’t opened a single one, had provided just 206 new places out of 10,000. Even now, there are only 2 prisons now under construction: they will provide next year, 2022, just 3,360 places. Where are the other 16,540 coming from? That's 10 of the modern mega prisons. Prisons take, at best, 2 years to build. Sites are hard to find. Planning objections stall plans. Around the year 2000, using PFI which achieved record speeds for designing building and opening new prisons, we manage to open 2 new prisons a year. MoJ is currently taking 6 years to do so. But now they seem to think they'll find sites, get planning approval, build and open 10 more of them, in 48 months! And it’s not just building, it’s staffing. We are in the midst of huge labour shortages. Prison officers pay is demonstrably extremely uncompetitive. It is a hard, hard job: others, much less stressful, pay more. Meanwhile, others are fishing heavily in the same pool: 20,000 new police officers and huge expansion of the UK Border force. Both are already tempting serving prison officers to quit. The quit rate is currently 10% for officers, over 13% for OSGs. A decent pay rise has been blocked. And you mean to recruit and train and retain say 5,000 more, in four years? Really? So: the Government has just announced a programme which everyone involved knows is completely unachievable. It is highly likely – almost inevitable - that numbers will outstrip safe capacity well before 2025. Already, MoJ is earmarking 2000 ‘temporary’ buildings, ‘Portacells’, for permanent use. This is not an unforeseen difficulty: like probation privatisation, it is a well-publicised, entirely foreseeable train crash. Thus, much of this SR merely moves up a gear one of the greatest public policy disasters of our time, the never-ending rise in use of prison. Admittedly, it’s been going on for 25 years now (and Labour has been, and is now, entirely complicit). But this is the first time that such a huge step increase has been deliberately engineered, and the first time that there isn’t the slightest possibility of meeting it. It is such a pointless thing to do, in so many ways. It will not in the least relieve our current high level of overcrowding – with all that means for running decent, rehabilitative prisons – it’ll make it much worse, and quite possibly crash the whole system. It will not reduce crime: and crime is in any case at a historic low. As is public worry about crime. Moreover, this penal inflation is an addiction that is incurable, it is endless. It will go on and on because it is not a rational policy designed to achieve some social aim: it is the mere feeding of an appetite, and the feeding of it is a political end in its own right. The spending of such huge sums of money on something that does no social good, that feeds off and feeds into a spirit of mean vengefulness, is the very opposite of the ‘investment’ MoJ love to trumpet. There is something profoundly malign about it. The proliferation of super-sized prisons across our green and pleasant land is the modern equivalent of Blake’s dark, satanic mills. It taints everyone involved in it. And, even in its own terms, it will fail. Three big risks MoJ’s spending plans are vulnerable to three other risks, besides the impossibility of building prison places fast enough. The first is inflation. Inflation, like termites in a house, chews up money and turns it to dust. So much depends on how realistic the inflation assumption is that’s built into the settlement, HMT’s claim that MoJ is getting an average boost of 3.3% a year in real terms appears to be based on an inflation peaking at around 4% next year, then returning to at or very near the target of 2% a year. Many commentators think inflation will be hard to bring down. The impact of Brexit and COVID on supply chains seems likely to last. On pay, we have massive over-employment – too many vacancies needing too few workers. The end of cheap labour from the EU, the end of the public sector pay freeze (announced by the Chancellor) and of course the effects of rising prices on workers, also the cuts made in the last decade in starting pay for prison officers (which makes this exceptionally demanding job no better paid than others far safer and more congenial), all suggest that these forecasts are optimistic. If the assumptions made yesterday prove too low, much of extra money will go simply on paying higher prices, especially for pay. If we are in luck, this will also slow police recruitment. Second, shortage of defence lawyers. As I’ve noted, savage cuts in legal aid have caused an exodus of both solicitors and barristers from the work, which simply doesn’t pay. It’s not just the lower fees, its flat rating fees so there’s little difference between a massive brief and a minor one. This may not seem worrying to Tories, who have moved seamlessly from being the party of law and order to the party that loathes law – our highest judges are ‘enemies of the people, judges re using judicial review to overturn wise, well-thought out government policies, ‘activist’ lawyers are preventing us from dispatching asylum seekers, and of course, defence lawyers are over-paid claret swigging parasites (not City commerical lawyers though, it appears). But you can't – or can't yet, anyway, though Priti Patel, that authoritarian nightmare, may yet sort this one out – have trials, if there’s no defence lawyer. The Government has set in motion an independent review of legal aid, but there’s no money in the SR outcome to fund an increase. And this is ironically one area where the Government is really at the mercy of the market. Finally, there is MoJ’s track record of incompetence: its poor financial management over the past decade, leading to a massive structural overspend since 2015, its botched privatisation of probation and of FM in prisons, repeated botched procurement of tagging, its court programme that cost more than was planned and delivered fewer benefits than was planned, the near complete failure to deliver the previous, far less ambitious prison building programme, the long delays at fully opening their largest ‘flagship’ new prison, Berwyn. There is something truly bizarre about a Government which so publicly despises its civil servants, but still expects them always to do more, faster, and somehow, this time, get it all right and on time. (The Telegraph thinks the answer is to put in ‘business experts’ – gosh, isn't it amazing that no one has ever thought of that before! But then, the Telegraph also think that the PUSS, Antonia Romeo, will change MoJ’s luck, because she knowns about, well, ‘data’ (wasn't there some chap from Barnard's Castle made the same claim?) and is a new broom. I don't want to be the one to tell them that she was the top official charged with ‘transformation’ in the MoJ in the 2010s: her prints are all over the record of MoJ in that decade.) What should they have done, then? Be honest, for starters. Look at the data, see that crime is far less of a problem now than for generations, as is fear of crime, that we have other, much more grievous problems, that also need money. Educate the Neanderthals on crime and punishment. Step use of custody down, not up, cancel those new prisons. Look at the rest of Europe for ideas, not just the prison-mad USA. Plan changes to the criminal justice system on a whole system basis. See that in dealing with crime, speed and fairness of justice is much more important than weight of punishment. Pace increases in processing upstream in a way that the impact can be managed safely downstream. And fund criminal legal aid adequately. Make plans that your organisation can conceivably deliver. Empower the prison service to run its own itself, with its own finance, procurement, estate management - the way the Tories did in the 1990s, when we pulled the service out of disaster, instead of plunging it into decline. And remember that only one political party has ever managed to talk use of custody down, to publicly recognise that prison does little social good, and in so doing, to close prisons because they were no longer needed. Your party. NOTES 1) Thus "£90m over 3 years" has very different meaning it is it 30/30/30 than if it is 10/20/60. The latter is worth twice as much long term 2) Not much of that down to me. Home Office Civil Servants David Acland and Tim Wilson did an astonishing job inventing PFI from scratch - you really dont need £5000 a day consultants - while the ever reliable David Kent handled prison procurements for me and, let me say, not one of those deals fell over, as Birmingham prison, probation outsourcing, and FM contracting out all did in the 2010s. SEE UPDATE AT THE END OF THIS
* Amended 23/6 to refer to COVID outbreak * The Justice Secretary has just announced that Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre, run under contract by MTC, has been treating the children it its care so badly for so long that he’s taking all the children out of it. It’s a saga that tells us that not only is MTC not fit to run prisons, but MoJ is not fit to run prison contracts. Secure Training Centres The Management and Training Corporation (MTC) is an American company that runs 24 prisons in the US, also training schemes for young adults. It gained a foothold in the UK with the privatisation of probation, running the service in 2 areas. Privatisation was an unmitigated disaster and has now been reversed. In 2016 the MoJ gave it the contract to run Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre, which had had a troubled history under G4S. It got worse under MTC. Three successive inspection reports were negative (jointly between Prisons Inspectorate, Ofsted and the CQC for healthcare). Despite this, the MoJ last year extended the contract to 2023. To be fair to MTC, no company has made a success of STCs, a sort of prison for children, introduced by Michael Howard, but then carried forward by Labour. Four were built, under the Private Finance Initiative. They exemplify the perennial problem – possibly never entirely solvable – of providing in the same place both secure custody for children who’ve been convicted of sometimes quite serious crimes, and also care and education provision for children who are often seriously damaged, disturbed and disruptive. They are small units, 80 or so fully occupied, with high staffing levels and hugely expensive (1). Two have been closed, two remain, while the MoJ dithers about what’s to replace them. Meanwhile, as the number in custody shrinks, the remaining population has become much more difficult. The failure of MTC When the Inspectors returned in October last year, they were so appalled at what they found that they met the MoJ officials and wrote to Buckland on 5 November, who replied on 18 November saying that necessary action was being taken. That inspection report is here. When the inspectors returned in December, they found little evidence of progress. Children were locked in their bedrooms for 23 1/2 hours out of 24. On 16 December the inspectorate issued an Urgent Notification to Buckland, their last resort where institutions don’t just fail, but fail unacceptable and persistently (2). They said: “Children’s daily experiences were bleak. They continue to receive a spartan regime. They receive little encouragement to get up in the mornings and there are very few efforts by staff to engage meaningfully with children…. there is no evidence of children’s’ educational entitlement being met…. senior managers were unaware of the regime.” Whatever your views on crime, who in Hell’s name could think such a place could do other than lasting harm to deeply troubled children? Even Priti Patel might blench. Buckland replied on 15 January, again saying that the necessary action was in hand. The inspectors returned on 26 January and found some improvement - an action plan had been drawn up - but little of it actually actioned. In March the Justice Committee held a special one off session and questioned the inspectors, Buckland, MoJ officials and MTC managers. The transcript is here. It should be said that the Committee’s session focussed primarily on the Urgent Notification and the report made at that time. It paid relatively little attention to the brief report of the further visit in January, which noted some early signs of improvement. Nor did the Committee pay much attention to the fact that there was a COVID outbreak at the time, causing staff to be off duty and requiring newly arrived children to be isolated (though Oakhill STC managed isolation with a lot more time out of cell) .MTC may well have felt aggrieved at that. And it was especially hard on the new Director, Ian Mulholland, who’d arrived only on 4 January. But clearly MTC had by then expended all credit with its critics. It had had one too many drinks in the Last Chance Saloon. The unfortunate Mulholland arrived just in time to pickup the tab. The Committee reported on 29 March (2), saying that they were ‘shocked and appalled by what we heard’ and were ‘deeply concerned about MCs ability to manage the Rainsbrook contract’. What shocked them most was that not only did the MoJ and YCS not know, at the time of the inspection, the state of affairs at Rainsbrook, but neither did MTC managers on site. Indeed, when inspectors told them face to face, in their December visit, that children were still being locked up 23/12 hours a day, the response by MTC managers was first to tell the inspectors they were wrong, and then to add that the children themselves were wrong. Here’s the Ofsted Inspector: “When I sat…with the director and deputy director and said ‘Children are still being locked up for 23 1/2 hours a day’ and they said ‘We don’t think they are’, I do not think they were lying. I just do not think they know the basic principles of going once a day to talk to the children…they were just not doing it…it was utter incompetence.’ The inspectors pinpointed the root of the problem: “senior managers issues instructions; they write procedures and protocols, often very detailed; but they are not implemented at middle and junior management level…. they do not have the means…. to follow through to make sure these things happen on a day-to-day basis, so they just keep repeated….” This is a familiar problem in prison management. The task of ‘managing upwards’ is very time consuming, and more so when an institution is in trouble and there are lots of inspectors and lots of questions. But all the more important to ‘walk the walk, and talk the talk’ to ensure that you are not blinded or mislead by all the paper, and that what you said should happen is happening. What makes this incomprehensible in this case – certainly to the Justice Committee – is the tiny scale of this institution. In a prison of 1,800 prisoners and maybe 500 staff spread out between many blocks and with layer upon layer of management, such a failure to check on reality would be more comprehensible. But this unit had, at the time of the last inspection, just 45 occupants. 45! From the Director’s office to the children’s rooms was a 2 minute walk. But they just did not do it. Moreover staff: prisoner ratio, 1:5 in some adult jails, was here more like 1:1, or even lower (3). How could managers not know the reality of something so fundamental as time out of room - something inspection after inspection had focussed on as unacceptable, and on which MTC gave assurances to the MoJ which were simply untrue? To my mind, this alone should disqualify MTC from any further contracts for custodial facility in this country. If it gets the basics of management this wrong, under this much external pressure, in such a tiny, heavily staffed unit, how on earth could they cope with a 1,800 prisoner new prison? The report reveals other fundamental and long-standing problems with MTC’s operation:
I suspect there is another problem behind this all. MTC is a huge American company with a tiny UK business, that’s not doing at all well. The majority of Directors of MTC (UK) appear, from the accounts, to be Americans. I have experience of just such an environment in the IT sector. I know how difficult it is to get backing or even understanding from the US parent for the very different trading and operating environment of the UK – especially when, as is the case with Rainsbrook, they were not making a profit. (I’ve seen critics denounce MTC for making money while failing the children in its care: incredibly, it didn’t.) I suspect the UK business was not regarded at all positively by the American parent, especially after the failure of the bid for Wellingborough prison, and the collapse of the probation contracts. Then there is another failure, equally fundamental to a good contractual relationship. Incredibly, MTCs reaction to the inspector’ comments, and (it would seem therefore) Buckland’s decision to withdraw all children from the unit, is to say that they are wrong! They said : “Given the previous positive assessments, including Ofsted’s follow up visit in January, we were very surprised to receive Ofsted’s feedback at the end of last week’s inspection. We have a number of concerns about their approach and ultimately the conclusions they have reached. We plan to vigorously challenge this as we go through the fact checking process” And this is MTCs’ preferred style – confrontation, not contrition. We’ve seen they told the inspectors to their face they were wrong – that the children were wrong about what they were actually experiencing. Mulholland then upset the Justice Committee by declaring that MTC would only accept Inspector’s recommendations they thought ‘fair and grounded in evidence’– an exceptionally foolish thing to say, in the circumstances. Likewise, in the recent competition run Wellingborough prison, when their bid was unsuccessful, they immediately threaten legal action against MoJ. ( Again I suspect this comes from the very different American background, where there are many possible customers, so you can afford a fight – here, one only, and you can’t.) The relationship between a prison contractor and its customer is a subtle one. Relying just on the formalities of the contract is not enough. These contracts are long term – typically 15 years for prisons – and inevitably, in prisons, there are problems, inevitably, requirements change, and inevitably, sensitivities to be managed with ministers, with the media. So there has to be some sense of partnership, and partnership must be based on mutual trust and understanding of each other’s position, without of course losing sight of their fundamentally different roles. MTCs track record of assuming such an adversarial role – and so quickly and so publicly – suggests to me that it will not be possible for them to enter into the right sort of long-term relationship with MoJ as customer. I am not, God knows, saying MoJ is always right. And in fact, I have sympathy for the stance that what is to be done in an institution should be determined by MoJ as customer, not by an outfit whose role is inspection and which is not charged with considering the resource consequences, feasibility or effectiveness of its recommendations, nor considering other approaches. But it’s the bull-headed way MTC charge at its critics frontally and publicly that is so unacceptable. For all these reasons – the failure over many years to provide a decent environment for children, the failure over a long period to do what they said they’d do, the failure in the basic management grip on what is going on in the institution, the high turnover of staff and mangers alike, the lack of understanding of work with children, and the ready assumption of a legalistic, adversarial relationship with MoJ and the inspectorates – it seems inconceivable that MoJ can now ever offer MTC a contract to run any custodial institution. MTC is currently on the MoJ’s framework agreement to enable it to bid to run new, 1800 place adult prisons. It should now be removed. MTC has no prospect of significant further business in the correctional services of the UK. And that means, looking at its accounts, it would then no longer be viable in the UK. It is finished. The failure of the MoJ A truism to which I often return, so often ignored by those criticising the private sector, is that when a service is being supplied under contract, failure by the contractor very often reveals failure by the customer also. Failure to properly appraise the supplier before contract, failure to specific the service properly, buying a service too cheaply, failure to get the commercial terms or performance sanctions right, failure to manage the contract properly, failure to deal with failure, failure to ensure a competitive market. As I note in my book, most of these have applied at one time or another to the market in corrections in the UK. And this applied in spades to the Rainsbrook saga. Something the Justice Committee understood: ‘The Ministry of Justice, Youth Custody Service and HMPPS are equally responsible for some failings at Rainsbrook because of significant and fundamental failings in the way they have overseen what happened there…. the YCS and MoJ manifestly failed to understand what the conditions were at Rainsbrook…and it is a question that goes wider than..…one custodial institution.’ The inspectors also understood this. They told the Committee: “You cannot lay this solely at the door of the provider. The YCS when it contracts for a service does not absolve itself of responsibility for making sure the service is delivered…” I set out here different ways in which the MoJ, in which I include the YCS and HMMPS, failed to do their job as customer for Rainsbrook and for youth custody services generally. 1. They did not know what was going on This is perhaps the most extraordinary thing: that MoJ did not know that children were being locked up 23 1/2 hours a day. Of course, MTC consistently misled them. But – here’s the thing -the great strength of contacting for prisons in the UK, unlike the US, is that the customer has a permanent staff of monitors within the prison. At Rainsbrook, there were three YCS monitors working fulltime inside the institution. Three, full time! With just 54 children! Their failure to notice what was happening is even worse than that of MTC managers, because the monitors were there only you monitor what was actually happening. What on earth did they do with their days – in this tiny, tiny institution – is beyond comprehension. (MoJ’s response on this is a Civil Service classic: to appoint a fourth monitor!) 2. They extended the contract in 2020 - despite MTCs serious failures documented by inspection after inspection The Justice Committee were perplexed by this, but, as with so much of this story, never got an answer from the MoJ. It is surely linked to MoJ’s other failure, their endless dithering over the future shape of youth custody, see 4) below. MoJ were perpetually ‘planning’ to replace STCs, having already closed 2, but are still years way from doing so. In those circumstances, no other provider would take on the poison chalice of Rainsbrook, two operators already having failed. Nor could the Prisons Service step in, because the whole point of STCs was to be an alternative to mainstream prison culture (and the absorption of that culture into Rainsbrook was part of the reason it failed). 3. The YCS failed to use the contract to push MTC into doing better As I’ve said, a good contractual relationship doesn’t rely solely on contractual sanctions when dealing with persistent failure. But they a time comes when they should be used: they get the attention of senior management in the company because it’s all lost profit (4). My book showed this in relation to earlier failures by prison providers. And in the case of an institution which has failed so completely for so many years that the customer withdraws all business, you’d expect significant financial penalties. Well, the grand total for the 5 ears of MTC’s contractual failures at Rainsbrook is…£76k. Against a total contract value of £50 million. An irrelevance. I’ve FoI’d the details, but expect to be stonewalled – this Government has set up a unit specifically charged to obstruct FoI requests. So, I can’t say whether the fault was in the way the contract was written or the way the contract was managed, but either way, it makes a mockery of contracting. (By comparison, the operator of the now closed Medway STC was fined nearly £1 million.) 4. MoJ have dithered for years about the future of youth justice Following the Taylor report in 2016, the Government accepted his recommendation to replace STCs with ‘Secure Schools’ and proposed two pilots would be opened, one in the north, the other in the south of the country (see Justice Committee's summary in their report on the future of youth custody, here ). They said the one in the south would open in 2020. That was then postponed, to 2022. And postponed again, to the end of 2022 (‘working towards’ December 2022, so let’s be clear, 2023). Seven years after the report. Never mind the points made by critics, that 1 or even 2 are not remotely enough, that there are still huge questions about what they will be like. This timetable means that STCs cannot be fully replaced for the best part of a decade after Taylor’s recommendations were accepted (certainly a decade after Grayling announced 'Secure Colleges' would be the future of youth custody, in 2013 - on which he spent some millions before cancelling 2015). And still MoJ cant spell out how they will be different from STCs (5). The reason for the delay isn’t, as often with prisons, finding a site, nor planning consent – they are using the site of an old STC, it’s ready and waiting – but because MoJ let the contract to a charity only to find that….. a charity can’t legally run such an institution. They seemingly hadn’t thought to check. This delay echoes the truly pathetic failure of the MoJ to deliver on the promise of 9 new prisons with 10, 000 new places, originally made in 2016, of which 5 were to have opened last year. In actuality the first will not open til 2022. That delay was also self-inflicted. MoJ believed they could only afford the programme through Private Finance. But HMT had decided to drop PFI. That meant a long and – of course! -doomed paperchase to persuade HMT change its mind. 5. The original choice of MTC to run Rainsbrook As I say, MTC is an American company. When I was FD, we were dubious about appointing an American company as prison contractor, because of the very different culture of American prisons. MTC has since tried several times to enter the prisons market here and has consistently been rejected, most recently for the Wellingborough contract. Yet the YCS nevertheless appointed them to the far more specialised, notoriously sensitive job of looking after troubled children, of which the MTC had seemingly no experience, certainly not in the UK. (This is why, in my book I argued that an STC should never be a new operators first experience of running a custodial facility). Of course, G4S had already failed with its STCs, it is possibly that none of the other UK custodial operators – Sodexho, MITIE - wanted to get involved. Nevertheless, appointing MTC turned out to have precisely the consequence one might have predicted, a failure to understand the specialised work of STCs. 6. Organisational complexity I do not know, but I suspect another factor is the labyrinthine structures and relationships with the MoJ. When I was FD of HMPS, things were blissfully straightforward. We held all the prison contracts; we had the procurement people and the contract managers and the operational managers; we decided , subject to ministers, what prisons should be asked to do: we decided on the shape of the make and how and when it should move forward. And, I may say, we made a fair success of it (little of that down to me, I should say – I had just very able procurement people). As far as I can see for youth custody, the contracts are held by the Youth Custody Service, they rely on MoJ for procurement, someone in the MoJ decides on policy and on development of new operating models, the YCS answer to the head of HMPPS even though HMPPS also supply custodial services to the YCS….plenty of opportunity there for accountability to diffuse. Note: what is the difference between the failure of MTC, and the failure of MoJ? Come on – you know this! It is of course that people at MTC will lose their jobs, while no one in the MoJ will suffer the least consequence. That, Buckland has already made clear, at his appearance before the Committee. They never, ever do. Why I've changed my mind on contracting for custody My book, published in 2015, argued the case that competition for running custodial institutions worked to the public good. I think I now have to revisit that conclusion. Not because I think contracting out inherently wrong, nor because the private sector always does badly – in fact, at present, privately run adult prisons are doing better than publicly run ones. But because I have come to the conclusion that the MoJ is institutionally incompetent as customer. And as I’ve said before, an incompetent customer sooner rather than later leads to failure by the supplier. As it has with contracts for probation, with Birmingham prison, with facilities management, with electronic tagging, now with Rainsbrook, and with the replacement, Secure Schools. The catch 22 of outsourcing : a Government that isn't good at managing services is probably not good at managing outsourcing. Afterword: the curious incident of the dog in the night time And what of Barnardos, paid to supply an advocacy service for these children on site? It seems it did not bark… UPDATE 22 JUNE MoJ has just published here a further letter from Ofsted which explains why Buckland had to act to remove all children from Rainsbrook immediately. So much for MTCs extraordinary decision to publicly challenge Ofsted's findings. I doubt I've ever seen a more damning report, and that's certainly saying something. NOTES
When you look into it, it's amazing how many famous quotes were never said, or at least not those words, not by that person. Einstein particularly. A vice of the Internet.
This one annoys me so regularly that I'm correcting it here. Douglas Hurd when Home Secretary famously said, 'prison is merely an expensive way of making bad people worse'. No, he didn't. The 1990 White Paper, '"Crime, Justice and Protecting the Public' - actually published under his successor, 3 months after he left office - said: "Nobody now regards imprisonment, in itself, as an effective means of reform for most prisoners….. For most offenders, imprisonment has to be justified in terms of public protection, denunciation and retribution. Otherwise it can be an expensive way of making bad people worse." The misquote is often associated with the semi-fact, that 'community punishments are more effective than prison at reducing reoffending'. I'll return to that. On 15 and 16 March, the House of Commons debated the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The Bill will increase time served for ‘serious’ crimes and contribute to Government policies which are forecast to increase the prison population, already proportionately the highest of any major European country, to nearly 100,000. This will necessitate a huge prison building programme. Each cell costs a quarter of a million pounds to build, enough to build a family home. These sentencing policies are built on a series of untruths. What is so extraordinary is that each of these untruths is refuted by statistics which Government itself produces and, in one case, by the Minister responsible for sentencing policy himself. We are faced with rising crime Crime has fallen stupendously, almost unbelievably, since the mid-1990s (as it has done in other countries also). Regular surveys of victims show that violent crime, as experienced by the public, is down nearly 75% over the past quarter of a century. Crime estimates by the CSEW 1981 to 2020 Violent crime is no exception. It too has fallen dramatically. Some particular types of violent crime, like knife crime, have risen - but are now falling again, to around the level of a decade ago; and the numbers are small, and the crime highly localised. Sexual assault is decreasing. Conclusion: our streets are safer than they have been for several generations. This huge fall in crime is unprecedented for hundreds of years. But we apparently cannot bear to recognise it. We prefer to be afraid. Longer sentences will cut crime “Harsher sentencing tends to be associated with limited or no general deterrent effect. Increases in the certainty of apprehension and punishment have consistently been found to have a deterrent effect.” Typical left criminologist, eh? No. Actually, it’s Chris Philp, the minister responsible for sentencing police, answering a recent Question. Correctly summarising decades of criminological research. Days before his own policies for harsher sentencing were introduced in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. What better illustration of our strange post-truth, post-reason, post-shame politics. See also here. Longer sentences are needed to restore public confidence The public have lost confidence in the courts to punish crime effectively, says the Government. Except, no. they haven’t. The contrary, in fact: for a decade, now, the public have steadily become more confident that the courts are fitting punishment to the crime. Prison can be an effective way of rehabilitating offenders
Well, it isn’t and never has been, despite the avowed intent of every Home Secretary or Justice Secretary for the past quarter century that it should be, and the investment of hundreds of millions in programmes to do so, based on the best what works evidence, and this when the system was under far less pressure than today. More here, and here. In fact there is recent research that the more unsafe prisons are, the less good they are at cutting reoffending. And they have become far less safe since 2010 (1). So, to summarise: the case against longer sentences is solid, well founded in easily available evidence. Almost no one mentioned any of this in the debate on 15/16 March. Instead, MPs queued up to say what a brilliant idea it is to increase sentences still further. No surprise on the Tory benches, now purged of the great tradition of Liberal Toryism. Bob Neil, who as chair of the Justice Committee certainly knows better, went along with this orgy of punitiveness. He is not one to raise his head aboe the parapet. No Ken Clarke, he! Labour continued its long and shameful (or rather, shameless) history of aping the Tories on sentencing. No surprise, really: the steepest rise in prisoner numbers occurred under the last Labour Government, as did the fastest ever prison building programme. Indeed, Labour specifically criticised the Government for not increasing sentences enough, for example for rape. Labour is the party of mass incarceration. ‘Tough on crime’, soft on thinking about crime. Instead, Labour focused on identity politics – women, Roma. A historic mistake, in my view, and not just on crime. Yes, minorities are often ill served and need protection. But if that becomes your only selling point, you will never get the nation as a whole behind you and you will never tackle the great radical changes that are needed. Labour has become a party of sectional interests. A word of special shame for Yvette Cooper. She chooses to highlight a rise in police recorded crime since 2015, although she must know that the very bulletin which she took the figure from said that the rise was an apparent one, reflecting improved recording practice; she knows that the same bulletin says that crime survey data is the acknowledged best measure of actual crime, not police statistics; she knows that violent crime is far less frequent today than in the mid-1990s. Yet she chooses to join the Tories in talking up an imaginary crime panic. I used to esteem her, among a lacklustre Labour gallery. Not so much now. It was left to Liz Savile Roberts for Plaid Cymru and Anne McLaughlin for the SNP to oppose further growth in incarceration.. The fine English tradition of opposing mass imprisonment now survives only in the Celtic world. All honour to them. Not that anyone listened. No one listens, nowadays, do they? (1) Katherine M. Auty & Alison Liebling. Justice Quarterly Volume 37, 2020 - Issue 2 6) I received my council tax bill today. As always, it is impenetrable. In terms of transparency, clarity and accountability, it rivals the political and legal structure of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire. It’s headed ‘Oxford City Council’ and says I must them pay £2599.99. Except hardly any of it is for them. Most of it is for the County Council; for some reason, this as shown as 2 separate amounts. The larger amount is footnoted ‘The council tax attributed to Oxfordshire County Council includes a precept to fund adult social care, visit www.oxford.gov.uk/counciltax. No, Won’t. Shan’t. Just explain right here and now, in English (how many people know what a ‘precept’ is – sounds like something out of Trollope.) Likewise, there are two amounts for the City Council, one marked ‘special expenses. Councillors’ sauna? I think we should be told. But we aren’t. And some is for ‘PCC for Thames Valley’. Probably most people can guess the missing word here is ‘Police’. But why not just say so? (Or what a PCC is. My wife, not unreasonably, thought it must be the parish council.) Inside is a note explaining that the amount I’m required to pay is based on the value of my house. Using values dating from 1991. That might as well be contemporary with the Holy Roman Empire. Inside also are leaflets from the County Council and PCC explaining how they spend the money: The City doesn’t think I need bother myself with that, though there is a nice leaflet about waste disposal, a subject that interests me hugely. I too would like to see less waste. The County Council explain that they spend £828.9m ‘excluding schools (£663.7m)”. It does not explain why schools are excluded, and later on tells me that, despite having excluded schools, they do actually spend £192.4m on ‘maintained schools’, leaving the average reader in the dark about where money comes from whom schools and who spends what on which schools. (They also tell me that they too spend money on waste, as well as the City. Isn’t that duplication…wasteful?) As to Business Rates – how they are set, how they are divvied up, locally and nationally…a mystery within a mystery, for advanced students only (and anyway it changes every year or so). Yet it is something that has a powerful influence on councils’ thinking about development. The most opaque leaflet is by the Police and Crime Commissioner who cover two counties besides Oxfordshire. It’s entirely unclear who takes what decisions. He says the Government have set ‘the police grant’ and told him what he should raise locally which he then did. So, who actually decided the budget? Income is shown as coming from, amongst other things ‘CLG Formula Grant’. One day, maybe, we’ll welcome out the shadows the group known only as ‘CLG’. One of the oddest things in the leaflet is that it’s unclear whether it’s the CPP or TVP talking. ” The police funding settlement enables us to invest to expand our capabilities…” One has the sense that the PCC and TVP are really one outfit. Well, that wasn’t the idea. But don’t worry, it’s all democratic. The PCC asked …well, he asked some people and 2,814 of them, said yes, increase the precept. As the Government told you to do. Of course, that leaves just a million citizens not having any say. Democracy, the Tory way. hope that’s all clear. Because that believe it or not is the bit that’s above the water. Below are the murky depths. To an extent that is staggering, in recent years we have seen huge amounts of power and public money and decision making channelled into unelected, sometimes highly secretive bodies, some with councillors on them, some not, some packed with vested interests such as developers and landowners (I am endebted to an excellent analysis by a group of former council staff who campaign for great transparency and clarity in local government finance, here)
They include:
Some of these bodies ‘consult’ in random and often obviously inadequate ways, some never do. They don’t publish their papers or their minutes. You can’t meet them and talk to them, other than through councillors who may not themselves have any access. Yet (or maybe ‘therefore’) Government increasingly prefers to work through them. And increasingly huge planning decisions and huge amounts of money are the province of these groups, not the elected local authorities. And decisions made by these bodies tightly shape and constrain decisions taken by Councils on their own spending. Then we have the current vogue for bidding funds, where Government hands out money for certain specific purposes, Council’s bid for them, and most of the money goes to Tory-run councils. Another American institution imported by our mini-Trump: ‘pork barrel politics’. A true and uptodate picture of what public money is being spent by whom in Oxfordshire would be fascinating. But it doesn’t exist. What is so odd about the complete lack of interest by these councils in explaining anything of this to those who pay them and who consume their services, is that they have a tremendously important story to tell, and one which won’t be told by anyone else. Such as. Since 2010, central Government has cut funding for local authorities far more deeply than its own spending. Central Government has handed responsibilities to local government but without adequate funding for them. Central Government can spend whatever it likes and just borrow, local government cannot borrow and is very tightly restricted in its ability to increase taxation. Due to COVID, local government revenues have slumped, yet demand for services has soared. You might think that local authorities would be desperate to convey this story to residents. Not a bit of it. I’ve never seen any effort to do so from either County or City Council. It is an extraordinary own goal. Does any of this matter? Don’t normal people just open their tax bill, grumble a bit and then pay up? Who cares what it’s for, and who spends it? I passionately believe it does matter. In fact, it matters today more than ever. Because confidence and trust in authority is lower than ever. Because we are at the start of an economic and fiscal crisis unprecedented in many generations. Because the gap between what people would like to see in terms of local services and what can be afforded is enormous, and growing. If we don’t give ordinary people basic information about how the financing of local government works, the pressures on it, what is being funded and what has to be left out, we open the way to disinformation, alienation, rumour, misunderstanding – which I see every time I look at the comments on the Oxford Mail website. We are creating the conditions for a breakdown in civic society. Now I suspect that if I took councillors or council officers to task for their quite extraordinary failure to explain their finances publicly, they’d say: oh, it’s so complicated, you can’t expect the average citizen to understand. I utterly disagree - on the basis of a career in public finance myself. Failure to explain, to someone who’d like to understand, is ALWAYS, ALWAYS the failure of the explainer, a failure of their understanding of their duty ss officials, a failure of their understanding of communication, of language itself. It IS possible. It’s just in the self-absorption way of authority, everywhere, that it just can’t be bothered. As proof of that I offer two observations, one about councillors, the other about myself:
Every prison reformer knows Bastoy. It’s a model prison in Norway, a short way from Oslo. It has just over 100 prisoners. It’s on an island in a lake. The prisoners live in cottages without locked doors and work on the farm. In their free time, they ride horses, cross country ski, play tennis, enjoy a sauna. They have a chef to cook for them. The staff: prisoner ratio is 1:2. And the reoffending rate is just 16%, compared to the European average of 76%. Or so we are told by an unending series of pilgrims to Bastoy (1). For it is the Holy Grail, the Promised Land, the Mecca of every prison reformer. Really? No. Of course not. Once you stop to think. And consider that:
So, statements about how much better Bastoy is at reducing reoffending than prisons in this country, or across Europe, are quite simply, meaningless. No-one who knows anything about the subject should even think of making such a comparison. Wouldn't you like to live here? But there are other reasons, too, why we should stop wittering on about Bastoy.
We know perfectly well, thank you, what is so wrong with our prisons and what to do about it, on the basis of real, grown up, research. We know that prisoners are less likely to reoffending if when released they have somewhere to live and employment or training when they leave prisons and money to sustain them through their first days at liberty. And we know that many don’t (4). We know that prisons are likely to have lower reoffending rates if the prisoners in them feel safe (5). We know that they often don’t feel safe, because violence and self-harm in our prisons have doubled since 2010 (6). We know that the in 2010, our prisons were in the best state they’d been in for generations. And we know – or all of us who aren’t Tory Ministers, or their PR people, know – what was he main cause of its descent into violent chaos by the mid-2010s. It was because Tory Ministers made swinging cuts – removing one third of front-line prison officers while not reducing prisoner numbers at all, in the process losing a lot of older, more experienced staff and middle managers (see analysis and graph here). We know that by cutting prison officer pay, the Tories made the very challenging job of a prison officer much less attractive than other jobs paying the same which are much less challenging, leading to dangerously high staff turnover and difficulty in recruitment. We also know that reducing reoffending became at the make time more diffiuclt because the Tories botched a sell off of the probation service so badly that the whole lot had eventually to be renationalised. We know what we need to do now to try to improve matters. And it’s not about model farms on lakes. Nope. It would require us to:
Still, on balance it is no more difficult than finding 800 model farms on 800 islands in 800 lakes, with horses, saunas, tennis courts, ski runs and a constant procession of gullible, ill informed, self-indulgent journalists. Notes
Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research: “Reducing reoffending: review of selected countries” 2012: “comparison of reoffending rates are not possible…such comparison would require thorough investigation to control for the many differences in defintions, reportinrg practices, enforcement cultures and pltical systems” “A Systematic Review of Criminal Recidivism Rates Worldwide: Current Difficulties and Recommendations for Best Practice” S Fazel A Wolf. Plos One, 15.6.18 see https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0130390. “Sample selection and definitions of recidivism varied widely, and few countries were comparable. Conclusions. Recidivism data are currently not valid for international comparisons.” 4) 1 in 7 prisoners is homeless on release. Only 1 in 5 got a job on release which they held for 6 months or more. Prison Reform Trust Bromley Briefings Summer 2019 5) ”Exploring the Relationship between Prison Social Climate and Reoffending” Katherine M. Auty & Alison Liebling. Justice Quarterly Volume 37, 2020 - Issue 2 6) https://www.julianlevay.com/articles/the-prison-crisis-is-getting-worse-not-better "All I know is we got 5,000 niggers in this county who ain't registered to vote. And so far as I'm concerned, they never will be." Thus the sherrif, in Alan Parker's great 1988 film, Mississppi Burning, about the FBI investigation into the murder of 3 civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississppi, in 1964. The United States, as we have recently been reminded, is at heart a lawless, brutal, deeply racist country, where voter suppression is a hallowed tradition and has taken many forms, from gerrymandering, intimidation, removal of voting stations from poor areas, appointment of a Republican to head the US Mail to slow the postal votes before elections, Republican ID laws designed to make it near impossible for poor blacks to register or to vote, and of course, lynching and most recently, a Republican President who phoned election officials and ask them to fake the numbers his way, Republicans who gathered armed round the homes of election officials and sent deaths and rape threats to them and their wives and children, and Republicans egged on by their Republican President who attacked the nation's legislature, kill policemen and hunted down Deomcracts and even dissident Republicans to lynch right there and then, in the centre of the nation's capital, live on TV. Better no democracy than one that occasionally elects the other party. Of course, we don't do that here. True, every party supports or opposes changes in electoral processes and law that will advantage or disadvantage it. But neither party has ever gone in for voter suppression. Neither party attempt to make registration or voting more difficult. In fact now it's easier to register to vote than it ever has been, in the EU Referendum we signed up people on an IPhone in the street in 2 minutes. In this country, all parties accept that the voters' decision is paramount and if you lose, so be it. We dont try to stop people voting. Until now. Johnson has announced legislation which will stop you voting if you dont have the right ID. Is this because voter fraud is a growing problem in the UK? No: it isn't. And that's official. The Electoral Commmission whose job is it to monitor voter fraud, has this to say: They add that in 2019, there were 592 complaints of fraud to the police, mostly about local elections. Just 3 resulted in a conviction. Three. In a year.
Clearly, Johnson's legislation is not about fraud. It is about voter suppression. It is intended to make it harder for the most deprived, rootless, vulnerable in our society to have a say in how that society is run, on the assumption that they would tend to favour other parties than the Tories. It is utterly wrong and disgraceful. But entirely typical of Johnson and what one must call his Post Tory Party, because there isn't anything about it that connects to the great Tory tradition, not least of electoral reform, including the 2nd Refform Act and extension of franchise to women. The tradition Johnson choses to follow is that of Donald Trump's Republicans. A tradition more alien to this country and to our values and history than anything that ever came out of Brussels. |
I was formerly Finance Director of the Prison Service and then Director of the National Offender Management Service responsible for competition. I also worked in the NHS and an IT company. I later worked for two outsourcing companies.
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