29th May 2009
Overpopulated prisons and the inappropriate use of custody are two reasons behind calls for a new approach to criminal justice, which would move decision making and funding on to a local level. Amelia Cookson reports on the debate
Justice is a critical concept for society. It is a basic ingredient in the consideration of right and wrong behaviour, of consequences for social disruption and of distribution of wealth. But it is a concept mostly absent from our dialogue at the local level. We talk about safe, clean, green and healthy communities but not about just communities.
A central reason for this is the monopoly on justice currently held by the criminal justice system. The problem with this narrow mentality is that it denudes justice of its full meaning. It isn’t only about offenders, it’s about all of us and how we live together with as much harmony as we can. Leaving it to the criminal justice system runs counter to everything we accept about solutions to difficult public policy problems – that is, that nothing exists in isolation and that the solutions that work are the ones that complement each other.
Justice in England today is disconnected from communities. This is a gap now widely recognised by policymakers – something emphasised in both government crime adviser Louise Casey’s review Engaging communities in fighting crime, and the Ministry of Justice’s new green paper on the same topic.
But still not enough attention is being given to bring justice into the heart of what we are trying to achieve at the local level. This is why in March the Local Government Information Unit launched the inquiry into Justice in Communities with the All Party Parliamentary Local Government Group. The inquiry report will be published on July 22 at the annual group reception. We have now heard much of the evidence, and some clear messages are emerging.
The first is that there is a problem to answer. Crime is going down and reoffending is on the decrease yet the prison population is spiralling out of control. The figures speak for themselves. In 1980, the prison population was just over 42,000. Ten years later, in 1990, it had risen by only 2,000. But since then it has almost doubled, reaching an all-time high of 83,731 on August 15, 2008. This was not just a huge increase but exceeded the operational capacity of the prison estate by 88 places.
This expansion is predicted to continue, reaching 95,800 by 2015. Nor is our prison system merely rising to match levels of imprisonment elsewhere. England and Wales now have more people in prison per head of population than any country in Western Europe apart from Luxembourg.
The result of this expansion is a state of perpetual crisis in the National Offender Management Service, one that impedes problem-solving and co-operation. Former home secretary Charles Clarke said the reason was ‘because the whole of the prison system is absolutely gripped by the problems of keeping the show on the road; because it is so near capacity and there are so many issues, and people are terrified of terrible things happening. So they are simply not able to loosen up’.
But this is not just a problem for the prison service. Recent reports from Labour peers Jean Corston and Keith Bradley focused on two specific groups in prison, women and people with mental health problems and learning difficulties, respectively. Both reports found that the current system puts in custody people who should be dealt with by other, more community-based, means.
This is a very local issue as services in communities are simply not adequate to provide for people on the margins with significant and complex needs who also break the law. But prisons – especially those in crisis management mode – only make troubled people worse. They hold them for a short time and then push them back into local communities with all the conditions that led to criminality still in place.
National thinking on this topic is moving in the direction of localisation. So while it might seem incongruous for a local government group to look at justice, this is the direction of much of the current debate.
One significant area being explored in a number of forums, which has also cropped up frequently through the course of this inquiry, is whether our current funding system encourages inappropriate use of custody when other solutions might be used to better effect.
This debate is being played out in different forms for both adults and young people. The argument about funding for young people goes like this: because local authorities have responsibility for youth offending teams as well as children’s services more widely, they have responsibility for funding the whole spectrum of interventions that young people might need. For some young people, this can involve very intense and very expensive interventions, such as intensive fostering or intensive supervision and surveillance.
The exception to this is custody. As soon as a decision is taken to deal with youth offending by using custody rather than any other intervention, the costs are met centrally by the Youth Justice Board.
While no one would suggest that anyone would lock children up for financial reasons, there can be no doubt that this appears to create a perverse incentive to opt for custody. In particular there are concerns about children in custody on remand. One in six children in custody is on remand, and more could be done to use alternatives for children waiting to go to court.
Discussion about this is creating some turmoil in the Youth Justice Board. With the prospect of a Conservative government looking for quangos to abolish, the board rightly sees questions in the air if funding moves from its hands to local government. The position it argued to the panel was that funding probably should move – but that it should ke
ep the commissioning role for the secure estate. The problem with this is that it leaves local authorities carrying the financial can without the means to manage costs. On the other hand, focused national expertise is probably needed to ensure adequate provision for specialist secure institutions. In any case, some rebalancing is likely to be on the cards in future, although balancing these needs will be challenging.
The adult version of this debate has become associated with the term ‘justice reinvestment’. A concept borrowed from the US, it advocates moving custody budgets to the local level, so that local areas can opt to spend the money on cutting crime and reducing reoffending, rather than on costly prison places after the fact.
For England and Wales, it is early days in the debate. The Commons justice select committee will be publishing on this topic this summer and the inquiry has heard several proponents of the idea.
For this inquiry, finance will be a critical issue. But it won’t be the only one. There is clearly a wider picture – about building confidence in all the agencies, including councils, who should be leading on fighting crime and delivering justice; about rebuilding fractured communities with tools such as restorative justice; about reviewing our approach to partnerships on justice; and much more. They are complex challenges, but it will be communities who benefit.
Amelia Cookson leads the Centre for Service Transformation at the Local Government Information Unit
