The justice system cannot cut reoffending

Somewhere on social media I voiced doubts that the criminal justice system can, in fact, cut reoffending. And - rare event! - a reader emailed me to ask for the evidence. I wrote this in reply.

The case for doubting the ability of correctional services to make significant, permanent reductions in the rate of reoffending is as follows.

1.  Sustained, well resourced programmes to do this have had little, or temporary, effects, here and in New Zealand. See my analyses ;
https://www.julianlevay.com/articles/20-years-of-reducing-re-offending-well-did-it-work
and
https://www.julianlevay.com/articles/nothing-works-again
and on NZ
https://oag.parliament.nz/2016/reoffending
 
2.   Reconviction rates for prisons and probation  have fallen substantially since 2010 ie during exactly the period when both prison and probation servcies were being devastated and reduced to unprecendented chaos by cuts, and in probation,  botched privatisation. Here

3.      Reconviction rates fell similarly over the same period for disposals that have nothing to do with the work of the correctional services eg the fine, discharge. See above also.
 
4.      Reoffending rates are merely a subset of the overall offending rate – the ‘crime rate’. The  crime rate rises and falls hugely, for reasons we cannot know, but which certainly having nothing to do with the criminal justice system. See
 
https://www.julianlevay.com/articles/doubling-prison-numbers-did-not-halve-crime
 
I am not - of course - saying that ‘nothing works’ in reducing reoffending. We know that some interventions do work for some peole for at least a couple of years (longer, we don’t know). But they have to be particularly suitable for those interventions. For the whole mass of offenders, it is doubtful that interventions can make a difference that lasts. Though at the individual level, we should always try to help those offenders who do want to change, or who are suffering because of the same things that push them into crime - homelessness, drugs - but (in my view) for moral reasons (the State has assumed control of them, therefore takes  responsiility for their problems which it arguably doesnt have for a 'free' person). But not as part of social engineering.

And is that  so surprising? A person is shaped by heredity, family upbringing, social circumstances, experience, over perhaps 20 years, their formative years, in ways predisposing them to offending. How likely is it, when society itself is unchanged- or rather, since 2010, has become much tougher, bleaker, and public services have greatly deteriorated  – that a brief course run by prison or probation officers will offset those influences, that in the real world are as strong as ever, or stronger?

Two things interest me out of all this.

One is the way both right leaning policiticans/media and left leaning criminologists/commentators resist - almost without thinking - the evidence that contradicts their beliefs. And not just on crime. On everything. We choose our beliefs, ones we feel ‘comfortable’ with, then sort through the evidence and pick out what supports them. ‘Confirmation bias’, they call it.

The second is what aims and values should the criminal justice system follow, if in fact it is not capable for reducing the crime rate? That is an interesting moral question. Because if the system isnt a machine to produce changes in society, in mass behaviour, surely its only rationale must be moral? Which leads us I suspect to a place equally far from the Guardian and the Mail....