Geoff Dobson s Speech to the Napo Centenary AGM Past / Present / Future

Transcription

1 Geoff Dobson s Speech to the Napo Centenary AGM Past / Present / Future 4-6 October 2012, Riviera Centre, Torquay I am delighted to contribute to Napo s centenary AGM. I became a probation officer working in Hackney and a Napo member in 1970, so my association with you stretches back more than 4 decades. It was Napo that helped me to think about many of the professional challenges facing the Service. I particularly remember, as the warden of a new hostel in London in the early 1980s, working with colleagues in Napo to press the case, with some success, for safe staffing levels in probation and bail hostels. A recurring theme over many years, sometimes with little regard to questions of effectiveness, has been attempts to toughen the image of the Service. Its origins long pre-date the mantra Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. In the 1970s a story circulated that was rumoured to have many people jumping up and down with excitement. It supposedly concerned the results of a survey on the public s perception of the Service. Much of the research was conducted during daytime hours in northern towns such as Ilkley in West Yorkshire. The researcher was a soft voiced southerner and many of the respondents were quite elderly. The particular finding that prompted such interest was the response to the question What do you think of Probation? Apparently, more than 70% said I d rather be buried! Incidentally, humour has on occasions proved useful in preserving essential features of Probation, including its name. It did not take a genius to tweak Community Punishment and Rehabilitation Service to produce an unfortunate acronym! Since 2001 I have worked for the Prison Reform Trust and it is from this vantage point that I am commenting today about both the context within which Probation operates and aspects of its future organisation. Much of PRT s work, informed by a freephone helpline available to prisoners on every landing, is concerned with prison conditions. Last month we published a report on resettlement practice, highlighting work that instilled a greater sense of responsibility on those held in custody. We have worked with prison, probation, police and court staff to use assessment tools to improve recognition of those with learning disabilities and learning difficulties. Prison governors told us that they were struggling to meet the 1

2 needs of the growing number of older people in prison and with their help we put together a best practice guide. We are working with UNLOCK to improve access to bank accounts and insurance cover for those who have criminal convictions. We are making renewed efforts with a range of partners to achieve a more secure financial footing for women s centres and to take forward the Corston agenda. PRT and Napo have on a number of occasions worked alongside one another in striving to create a just, humane and effective criminal justice system. I was recently reading the Napo submission to the excellent Justice Committee report Cutting crime: the case for justice reinvestment, published in January Napo made the case for an action plan focussed on factors known to contribute to crime levels including access to housing, employment prospects, drug and alcohol dependency, preventative work with children and literacy and numeracy. Along with PRT it cited evidence from the National Audit Office and others about the cost effectiveness of prisons and community sentences. The resulting report from the cross-party Select Committee, possibly the most thorough examination of value for money in criminal justice, concluded that the prison population in England and Wales could safely be reduced by about one third over a number of years, with considerable savings for the public purse. PRT has been concerned at the waste, in human and economic terms, wrought by the massive expansion in use of imprisonment in recent years. We have charted this through our Prison Factfile and have worked to raise awareness in Parliament through the All-Party Parliamentary Penal Affairs Group, of which I am the clerk. Our Out of Trouble programme, which worked with local youth offending teams in areas with high custody rates, helped to achieve a one third reduction in child custody between 2007 and Using lessons learned from this approach, we are aiming to help achieve a substantial reduction in women s imprisonment over the next three years and welcome the current Justice Select Committee inquiry on women offenders. We have published a series of reports on the problems inherent in the sentence of imprisonment for public protection. While we are pleased at the decision to end this sentence, we remain very concerned that more than 3,500 IPP prisoners have passed their tariff expiry date. To illustrate this point, I should mention that we were recently contacted by someone with a 71 day tariff who is now spending his 5 th year behind bars. Our Troubled Inside reports revealed the shocking use of custody for people with severe mental health problems, while the No One Knows programme broke new ground in identifying the large number of people with learning disabilities and learning difficulties who are incarcerated. We submitted detailed evidence to the Bradley review and, indeed, Lord Bradley has recently become a trustee of PRT. Our Care not Custody programme continues to support the development of liaison and diversions services. These services, which should be available nationwide by 2014, will help in identifying people with mental health problems and learning disabilities at the point of arrest. The information provided will assist courts, and probation staff who prepare PSRs, to ensure that sentences respond appropriately to the particular disabilities and impairments that offenders routinely present with. 2

3 There is a widespread perception, reinforced by some media headline reports, that the public is simply in favour of harsher sentencing and backs ever-increasing use of imprisonment. In 2011, in the wake of the disturbances in a number of English cities, PRT commissioned ICM to conduct a public opinion poll which would elicit people s views on dealing with theft and vandalism and effective ways to prevent crime and disorder. Key findings were: An overwhelming majority of the public (94%) want people who have committed such offences to be required to do unpaid work in the community as part of their sentence to pay back for what they have done. Nearly nine out of 10 people (88%) agreed that victims of theft and vandalism should be given the opportunity to inform offenders of the harm and distress they have caused. Work to improve parental skills, better mental health care and treatment to tackle drug addiction also scored far more highly than prison as measures that the public considered to be effective in preventing crime and disorder. I do just want to say a brief word about restorative justice, by which I mean victimoffender conferences, and I should mention that I am a trustee of the Restorative Justice Council. For many years devotees of RJ have been expecting a breakthrough given the solid evidence that victim satisfaction is greatly increased and there is an proven impact on reoffending rates. A steering group, jointly chaired by the MoJ and RJC is currently setting out the infra-structure that would be required to support a step change in provision. RJ delivered to a high standard and rolled out to scale should be available to victims at each stage of the criminal justice process - pre-sentence, as a requirement of community sentences and during or after a custodial sentence. The development of restorative justice has implications for all who work in the criminal justice system. I hope that Napo will support these changes and work to ensure that, for everyone s sake, RJ is always organised and delivered to a high standard. Earlier this year I helped prepare PRT s response to the MoJ consultation paper on Effective Probation Services. This resulted in articles in both the Guardian and Interface, the Probation Association magazine. The consultation suggests that certain functions should reserved for the public sector. It recognises that advice to the courts, including assisting with the identification of the most appropriate sentences for offenders and prosecuting their breaches, has to remain free of any potential conflict of interest. The public sector would also retain responsibility in the case of all offenders for initial assessments of risk. Finally, supervision of higher risk offenders would also remain the direct responsibility of Probation Trusts. The Prison Reform Trust maintains that proposals to compete the offender management of lower risk offenders is misguided and not in the public interest. PRT, along with the Probation Chiefs Association and others, argues that prime responsibility for the supervision of each offender who is subject to statutory supervision, whether it be a community sentence or a post-custody licence, should be held in the public sector. 3

4 This would ensure clarity of accountability to the courts and Parole Board, as well as to those who pay for and commission the work. It would also and most importantly maintain a coherent infra-structure for service delivery. Additionally, it would provide a reliable information base for commissioning decisions to supplement what I still prefer to call the probation officer, as opposed to offender manager, role. My understanding is that Government is very much in favour of instilling, or developing a greater sense of responsibility in those who have committed offences. The expression offender management places the subject in a passive role. With this in mind, it would be timely to re-emphasize the importance of the word Probation. As the Justice Select Committee said in its report on The role of the Probation Service: The derivation of the word probation is from the Latin probatio a time of testing, or proving. That derivation remains relevant because, at their best and most robust, community sentences run by the probation service will test offenders, challenging them to change their offending lifestyles and to confront difficult issues. To return to my central argument: the proposal in the Government consultation for the supervision of only high risk offenders to remain the responsibility of Probation is fundamentally flawed. It sees risk as a static concept and fails to recognise that levels of risk for some individuals can change dramatically in a short period. Supervision by staff who are not trained or equipped to recognise such changes and their potential implications, together with the bureaucracy involved in transferring supervision under pressure to the high risk service, would create unnecessary and indefensible public safety concerns. Probation has a long track record of outstanding partnership work with other agencies. Probation is the lynchpin of multi-agency public protection arrangements (MAPPA) and the many well organised integrated offender management services, drawing together Probation, police, prisons, local authority services and community resources, have an impressive record of impacting on recidivism by prolific offenders. The Justice Select Committee s thorough examination of the role of the Probation Service, published just over a year ago, concluded: We believe that responsibility to the courts and the community for offender management must remain with a publicly accountable probation service. However, there is plenty of scope for specific services and facilities that support offender management to be offered by a range of providers. Examples include the provision of (nonapproved premises) accommodation, electronic monitoring, curfews, mental health support, drug and alcohol treatment, learning and training, and family support. These services should be delivered by 4

5 whichever provider can facilitate them most effectively with the greatest economy. The current proposals would result in arguably the most significant changes to the Probation Service in more than 80 years. They ignore MoJ research which shows that community sentences for year olds currently outperform prison sentences by 12.8 percentage points in reducing reoffending. Even when offenders of all ages are closely matched in terms of criminal history, offence type and other significant characteristics, the performance gap between community sentences and short prison sentences remains a robust 8%. So why not build on this evidence base by investing in and further strengthening the delivery of community court orders, rather than creating a fragmented system that places the public at risk? Napo has been effective as both a trade union and a professional association for many years. It and the Probation Service have many friends and supporters. The recent experience of the Youth Justice Board shows what can be achieved in the face of a destructive political imperative. I wish you all well with the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Geoff Dobson OBE Company Secretary Prison Reform Trust 5