Re:duce, Re:habilitate, Re:form

The Executive have just completed a period of consultation on reducing reoffending, in which the focus is on improving how offenders are managed throughout their sentence and their subsequent reintegration into a law-abiding lifestyle in the community. In the Executive’s Partnership Agreement, they made a commitment to consult on whether a single agency (bringing prison and community offender services together to manage custodial and non-custodial sentences) might provide a better means of addressing the weaknesses in the system. They have also broadened the debate to cover five issues on what can be done to try and reduce the likelihood of people reoffending.

Key background facts

The starting point for the debate is that the present system is not working. Too many offenders who pass through prison, or who are given community sentences, reoffend. Provisional figures for 1999 show that, within two years 60% of offenders released from prison were reconvicted of another offence, as were 58% of offenders who received a probation order, 42% of those who began a community service order, and 40% of those fined. 53% of offenders under 21 years were reconvicted, and almost 30,000 offenders convicted in 2002 of a crime or offences such as common assault or breach of the peace had at least one such conviction in the previous ten years.

In 2002, 97% of all custodial sentences were for less than four years; 82% were for six months or less. There is no statutory aftercare or supervision for offenders sentenced to less than four years imprisonment (except for a few exceptional cases).

The prison population also continues to rise (in many cases with offenders who might actually be suitable for non-custodial sentences). In 2003, Scotland had the fourth highest rate of imprisonment in the EU (after England and Wales, Spain and Portugal). The provisional figure for the average daily population in prison in 2003 was 6,523, although the current available prison capacity in Scotland is around 6,100 (the Executive intend to build two new prisons). In 2002-03 it cost an average of £29,839 per year to provide a place for a prisoner. It is estimated that over 13,000 children in Scotland each year are affected by the imprisonment of a parent.

Furthermore, the increase in the use of probation and community service orders made over the past decade has not slowed the rise in the prison population, even against the background of an overall decrease in recorded crime.

It was against this background that the Executive presented the following perspectives for consultation.

Issue 1: Roles and Responsibilities

Many agencies contribute to the process of managing offenders, including the police, the Procurator Fiscal Service, the courts, Prison Service, Parole Board, local authorities, voluntary groups, Victim Support, as well as other agencies like mental health services.

Each agency has a different primary focus, with its own separate targets and objectives, and reducing reoffending is normally one of several objectives which each agency has. There is little overall co-ordination of objectives and there is no one organisation responsible for enforcing or co-ordinating court sentences.

This means that, in the current system, each organisation can only be held to account for its own specific objectives in its own part of the system. No single organisation can be held to account for reducing reoffending rates.

Issue 2: Purpose of Prison

Prison is necessary for the punishment of serious offences and to protect the public from dangerous offenders. However, what prison is not good at is returning offenders back into the community as law abiding citizens. Prison isolates offenders from the community and their family responsibilities, as well as surrounding an offender with other criminals. On release an ex-prisoner may find it difficult to get a job, stable housing, or other types of support – these factors all make it more likely that an offender will return to crime.

Offenders are more likely to offend again if they have received a prison sentence than if they had received a community sentence. Although every ex-prisoner is entitled to ask social work services for advice and support within a period of 12 months, few do and of those who do, most are looking for support of their welfare needs, not for ways to address their offending.

Large numbers of prisoners are there for less serious crimes, which means they are only in prison for short periods, often less than three months. Because of their short time in custody, there is little prison rehabilitation services can do to address an offender’s behaviour. Even after only a short period in prison, reintegration back into the community can be difficult but few offenders on short-term sentences are placed on offending behaviour programmes on their release; yet, these are the offenders who are most likely to reoffend.

Some of those remanded in custody prior to conviction or sentence may not pose a threat to public safety and so could be subject to community bail supervision, eg electronic monitoring, instead.

Issue 3: Addressing Reoffending

Research shows that three important factors in reducing reconviction rates are: (a) stable accommodation (b) supportive family relationships and (c) a job. Addressing alcohol and drug misuse and mental health problems can also reduce the risk of reoffending.

Research also shows that programmes which help the offender focus on his/her offending behaviour can reduce the risk of reoffending. But not everyone is assessed as suitable for these programmes; for those who are, many are still offenders not placed on them for various reasons, including unavailability of a programme in a particular area or prison.

Although programmes have been developed by both local authorities and the Prison Service based on this research evidence, this has mostly been done in isolation from each other, resulting in the repetition of work in designing and implementing the programmes. Different risk and need assessment tools are often used.

Attempts are now being made to address these issues, eg plans for joint national accreditation of offenders’ programmes; but the current situation means that an offender moving prisons is not guaranteed access to the same programme, and on release may have to start again from the beginning of the work he or she first started in prison. Lack of consistency in design, quality, and delivery of programmes makes it difficult to evaluate their impact fairly against the investment made in them.

Issue 4: An Integrated Approach

The Scottish Prison Service and local authority criminal justice social work services have a statutory responsibility to supervise offenders once they are sentenced by the courts and often work with the same individuals, there is often little integration in the work of these organisations and with the other organisations involved in the system.

A number of initiatives are underway to improve the integration of the various organisations involved in the delivery of sentences and rehabilitation of offenders, but none address the process as a whole. One way of improving the situation could be the establishment of a single agency to deliver prison and non-custodial sentences, but there may be other possibilities.

The sharing of data information on offenders is often poor between the prison service and local authorities because the functions of custodial sentence delivery, community sentences and reintegration are separated. Previous efforts to improve communication links have met with limited success, although the development of ISCJIS (Integrated Scottish Criminal Justice Information Systems) is beginning to make some improvements.

Issue 5: Effectiveness and Value for Money

Prison sentences are expensive and relatively ineffective in reducing reoffending, particularly for short-term prisoners. Interventions need to be supported by robust assessment processes identifying the risk of reoffending and a management plan identifying the most suitable course of action for an individual. The worker responsible for managing the case needs to ensure that intervention follows a logical process that will allow the offender to make sense of his/her situation and address those issues that cause him/her to offend. Interventions must be subject to evaluation in order to determine their effectiveness - a complex process, made more problematic by the variation of programme delivery across Scotland.

For those sentenced to short prison sentences there is often no access to programmes even if the need for one is identified.

Church Concerns

Key points made at a recent SCPO consultation meeting for faith communities on these proposals included:

·         Before rushing into a single agency, we need to look at why the system has evolved with different agencies, having distinct roles and priorities. While tackling reoffending is crucial, there are other valid priorities and it is simplistic to suggest that bundling the prison service and local agencies into a single agency would, of itself, reduce reoffending.

·         While security issues clearly have to be a priority for prisons, these often inhibit programmes, such as when offenders’ attendance is curtailed by security/ staffing issues.

·         Some problems may be issues more of resourcing than of structure. It is primarily cutbacks that restrict prison programmes to those serving longer sentences.

·         The assumption that there are severe limits on what can meaningfully be done with offenders serving less than four years is open to challenge.

·         There is an apparent contradiction between (a) the stress on community disposals and tackling reoffending and (b) the policy of building more new prisons. Tabloid and other pressures on sentencers seem to be keeping prison populations high.

·         One possible alternative might be replacing short sentences with a points system (as with motoring offences), until a point is reached when a longer sentence is justified.

·         Continued stress on alternatives to custody is needed, along with evaluation of "what works" in reducing reoffending. Such evaluations will help gain the wider community support that is needed.

·         Faith communities have a vital role in building that backing, getting people to know that offenders are not a different species. They also have a role in service delivery, and in personal support of offenders (eg mentoring schemes starting in prison and continuing after release, and "circles of support" for offenders), and the faith element in what they offer should not be dismissed.

·         While a national strategy is attractive to ensure consistency, it might lack the flexibility to encourage new initiatives and voluntary agency involvement. Rather than having the same programmes in every prison so that offenders can be moved around, we need to look at how the system works, and why prisoners are regularly moved without consideration of the continuity of appropriate programmes.

·         Addiction is central to reoffending, yet figures little in the consultation. Tackling addictions (alcohol and other drugs) would have a dramatic effect on reoffending; this is where resources should go.

Theological Context

Many of the points made at the consultation meeting came from the pastoral experience of prison chaplains and people involved in community projects working with offenders. There was a major concern that restorative justice hardly figured, in a consultation based on retributive justice with little reference to the victims of crime or the communities in which crime occurs.

Whatever organisational structure is adopted, the system still appears to be working with an understanding of justice which is truncated to focus on impartial decision-making and proportionate punishment. While these are clearly ingredients of a Biblical understanding, there is at the heart of Christian faith an orientation towards rebuilding and remaking people’s lives, which suggests an emphasis on the offender confronting the reality of the offence. We are people who believe in the redemption of sinners, and that must surely be central to our approach to tackling reoffending.

Part of that approach must be to work holistically - treating offenders as people, and giving attention to their whole selves and their relationships (inside and outside prison).

This richer understanding of justice has its primary focus on making a difference to the lives of people and communities, offenders and victims.