Today saw the publication of the report of the Commission on Women Offenders, chaired by Professor Dame Eilish Angolini’s, formerly Scotland’s Lord Advocate (Chief Prosecutor). It’s well worth reading in full: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2012/04/womenoffenders17042012

One particularly interesting recommendation — for me at least — concerns the fate of criminal justice social work. For those not acquainted with the Scottish system, we abolished our probation services at the end of the 1960s, wrapping them into generic social work departments. The Commission’s recommendation to create a national Community Justice Service (still social work led, and separate from the prison service) arises from their frustration with what they see as the cluttered and fragmented landscape for Scottish community justice. 32 local authorities, 8 community justice authorities, however many sheriffdoms (court areas), etc… it does seem hard to sustain these structures (and the variable service delivery that they permit) in a country of five million, though the jury is out on exactly what difference organisational structures make in supporting desistance.

As a former social worker turned criminologist, the recommendation provokes a sort of dissonance in me. I’m delighted that they have recognised that social work knowledge, values and skills remain central to supporting desistance; but they also recognise the need for more specialist knowledge and skills (in their case linked to women offenders, but the argument holds across criminal justice) to supplement the generic basis.

The question of the local authority locus of these services is a separate but complex one. Though I have always liked the idea of probation being a local authority function — because it ought to support joined up services and to allow the necessary connections to be made to education, housing, leisure, health etc., — as a practising social worker in the 90s, I have to admit that criminal justice social work seemed pretty marginal in social work itself (which was perhaps legitimately dominated by concerns about child protection and community care), never mind in the local authority. Making connections to other local authority services seemed no easier from inside the council than it might have been from outside it. Too many of my local authority colleagues seemed happy to see the ‘offenders’ on my caseload as my problem, not theirs.

Meanwhile, criminal justice social work also lacked a career structure (since serious advancement in social work meant becoming a generic manager and leaving probation specialism behind) and community justice lacked a powerful voice in Scottish politics and in the penal system. There was no Director of Probation to stand alongside (and where necessary toe-to-toe) with the senior judges or the Director of the Prison Service, or the Lord Advocate for that matter. While going under the political radar might perhaps have been helpful pre-devolution, it’s seems to me that it is simply not possible now to carry on without this sort of senior leadership and powerful representation at the centre, in Edinburgh (a hard thing for a Glaswegian to admit!).

If the Commission’s report has been challenging for social work, it seems to have soft pedalled a little on the judges. The SCCJR’s recent analysis of the criminal justice processing of women over the last 10 years (http://www.sccjr.ac.uk/view_pub.php?id=307) finds little or no evidence that the doubling of the population of women in prison owes anything to increases in the frequency or seriousness of women’s offending, or even to increases in the numbers of women being prosecuted. Judges are sending more women to prison and for longer. And yet, there is little in the report on sentencing reform — just the familiar indirect attempt to make the community alternatives better and hope that this (alongside improvements in judicial education) persuades them to sentence women differently. I can’t help feel that we’ve been trying that trick (unsuccessfully, with all offenders) for the last 30 years. The volume of community sentences has risen dramatically, but to no apparent effect whatever in terms of reducing the use of custody. My conclusion: if you want to change sentencing, bite the bullet and change sentencing. The Scottish Parliament has already passed legislation to establish a Sentencing Council that, if it was established could set guidelines to delimit the circumstances in which and the offences for which custodial sentences should be passed — for women and men — but the Commission stays silent on this vital question.

Returning to the positive aspects of the report — the Commission’s vision of local Community Justice Centres staffed by multi-disciplinary teams, and with a key role for mentors in intensively supporting women’s compliance with diversion, bail and with community sentences, and offering a one-stop shop where complex needs can be met, is a compelling one. But making those centres work will cost money — lots of it — and we know where that money is being spent — our public investment is locked in the wrong places; behind bars. It’s a true for men as for women. If we are going to get serious about supporting desistance and building safer and fairer communities; if we are going to ditch the puerile tough/soft on crime binary and develop the smart justice that a mature democracy requires, then we need to get the money out of jail — and realise the potential of social work and other services to work with offenders and ex-offenders to produce constructive justice. Better justice, better lives — for offenders, families and communities. There’s a manifesto worth voting for.

Evidence of everyone’s hardwork at our first discovering desistance workshop, held in Glasgow on 10 April 2012.  Thanks to everyone who contributed with so much energy, enthusiasm and commitment to do things better. It was wonderful to meet everyone and look forward to seeing you again on the 16 May.

We (Fergus McNeill, Steve Farrall, Shadd Maruna and myself) have produced a summary of the evidence about how and why people stop offending.  This gives an overview of the evidence and discusses the implications for both practice and the wider criminal justice system.  Following the link will take you to a web version of the summary, from this page you can also download as a pdf or order hardcopies if you wish.  Note those of you attending the workshops which form part of this project will be able to get copies there.

Visit: How and why people stop offending: Discovering desistance.

We’d be very interested to hear your views about this, both in terms of the content and whether presenting it in this way is helpful/useful for you.

Here’s a post mainly for the MSt students at Cambridge that I’m teaching today and tomorrow (though I hope others will find it interesting too…). What follows is the conclusion of chapter that Gwen Robinson and I wrote for a book on Legitimacy and Compliance in Criminal Justice, edited by Adam Crawford and Anthea Hucklesby (published soon by Routhedge).

In a recent book which has attempted to conceptualise and evaluate prisons using a framework informed by prisoners’ and prison staff members’ views about the aspects of prison life which they value, Alison Liebling introduces the notion of ‘moral performance’ (Liebling 2004). The concept of moral performance brings together a number of dimensions of prison life, among them justice, fairness, safety, order, humanity, trust, and opportunities for personal development. Liebling presents this notion of moral performance as an alternative and more meaningful measure of ‘what matters’ in the prison context, and of the quality of prison life, than those measures which have arisen from the managerialist ‘performance agenda’ of the 1980s and 90s.

Although the specific measures of ‘moral performance’ developed by Liebling do not translate unproblematically to the community sanctions context, we nonetheless think that the concept of moral performance is a potentially very useful one, and it is one which chimes with the limited research which has, to date, been conducted on offenders’ views of statutory supervision. Like good sociologies of prison life (most recently Crewe, 2009), studies of offenders’ experiences of community sanctions reveal that structures and systems are only part of the story of how justice or punishment works out in practice. The narratives of supervision collected for the oral history study discussed above, for example, ultimately reveal the extent to which the meanings and natures of such sanctions are negotiated between the people involved (McNeill, 2009).

As we noted at the outset, if community sanctions have a definable form or architecture it is much less obvious than that of the prison. It is not just that legitimacy can ebb and flow for all of the reasons discussed above; the shape of the sanction itself is malleable. It is true that there are places and times where those on such sanctions must be and, perhaps more importantly, where they are expected to do something (whether unpaid work or participation in programmes or individual supervision) or even to be a particular kind of someone (a willing worker paying back, a remorseful offender making good, a recovering drug user staying clean). There may be no locks and keys, but there are borders and checkpoints to negotiate here, each of which opens up the possibility of interactions perceived as legitimate and illegitimate (Rose, 2000). The sentencing process is the first of these, in which the would-be subject of such a sanction must yield to (or better still facilitate) their construction as a suitable subject for a community sanction (perhaps even a suitable subject for leniency) – and hence for passage into the community sanction and, by implication away from the prison door (McNeill et al., 2009). Once in the process of the community sanction, there are important and subtle forms and rituals to be observed in the numerous disciplinary passages through which the subject must pass in the process of supervision. The supervisor is the ‘key-holder’; each point of passage involves them in disciplinary judgments about the offender’s successful negotiation of assessment, intervention and review processes.

Probation law or ‘rules’, like prison law or ‘rules’, may represent other forms of ‘code’ (Lessig, 1999) or architecture (Jones, 2006) that lend a certain form to the experience of community sanctions. In any jurisdiction the law may determine the formal parameters of obligations (and perhaps entitlements) that community sanctions create. But beyond this legal scaffold, community sanctions have remarkable malleability and thus vulnerability in their character; whereas the prison physically frames the lived experience of imprisonment, the community sanction has no such obvious ‘frame’, except in the interactions between its executor (the probation officer) and its subject (the probationer). Thus it is in these interactions that such sanctions are continually invented and reinvented. The physical locus of such interpersonal engagement is important, but it is not in and of itself definitive of the experience of the sanctions that these actors co-construct (however equally or unequally).

But equally importantly, the probation officer or social worker is influenced in their crucial contribution to the construction of the sanction by the political, social, cultural and professional worlds that they inhabit. As we have noted throughout, where these conditions generate pressures to pursue external legitimacy or credibility (e.g. McNeill et al, 2009), they may impact adversely on the internal quest for those same qualities (cf. Ugwudike, 2010 forthcoming). A key message of our analysis is that, particularly where sanctions aim to elicit change, the skills of the practitioner in bridging the social distance between the ‘punished’ and the ‘punishers’ are likely to be critical to the process. However, the conditions under which the ‘punishers’ labour can create countervailing forces, driving the parties apart. Especially in this context, the quality and the authenticity of the practitioner’s moral performance seem likely to lie at the heart of the matter, since these moral qualities will profoundly affect the meaning, nature and experience of the sanction. Within this context, the legitimacy of the practitioner – on which his or her influence depends — is hard-won, easily lost, and almost impossible to recover. Put another way, it is as difficult to enable legitimacy to flow into a community sanction as it is easy to let it ebb away.

Our colleague, Shadd Maruna, has been busy this month talking about desistance at Safe Ground’s Symposium held at the House of Lords.  Click here for further information and to listen to his talk.

He is clearly too modest to post this himself or to point out how clear and interesting this is.

Shadd begins by talking about the importance of aging for the desistance process. He goes on to explore how desistance is associated with feelings of self-efficacy and hope. Further, he highlights the importance of having a sense of being ‘better’ than one’s offences or more than just an ‘offender’.  However, Shadd argues that people are being released back into a community where perceptions of prisoners are overwhelmingly negative, which is likely to create an additional obstacle on the road to ‘going straight’.

hi everyone,

Like all good rock and roll outfits (and a few less good ones!) we’re adding extra dates! Wembley arena was booked, so these will be hosted by the London Area probation Trust.

The London dates are:

May 11th and June 11th.

All those who are from the London/Southern area will be invited to ‘switch’ to the London seminars (we’re not just going to transfer people as we’re aware that some people may have other committments which mean that May/June 11th won’t work for them). Any one who has been confirmed as having a place at the Sheffield seminars will still be able to come to Sheffield if they wish.

This is all around fab news; it means that we’ll be able to invite more people from the London area (which means more policy makers and pressure groups etc) and therefore we’re expecting to be able to offer more places to those who are currently on the Sheffield reserve list.

Lisa Burns will be in touch with people to see if they’d prefer to switch to the London dates ad then with those on the Sheffield reserve list.

Thanks to everyone who has sent us supportive comments and been patient whilst we’ve tried to fix up the London dates – and thanks also, of course to LAPT for agreeing to host us.

Looking forward to Easter and lying down in a darken room.

Steve

I recently received this email (punishment, it is proposed, be included in every community sentence). (This following on from Fergus’ recent post …).

All the best,

Steve

The Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has today set out proposals to strengthen community sentences and improve the probation service.

The plans will ensure community sentences are a tough and credible punishment that better tackles reoffending, supported by modernising reforms to probation to cut crime. We aim to make better use of the innovation, capacity and diversity of voluntary private providers, in partnership with the probation service.

The consultations propose:

Community Sentences:

• Intensive Community Punishment sentence – a rigorous new community order for criminals who deserve a serious penalty but can be sensibly dealt with in the community. It will include a package of punishments including unpaid work, significant restrictions on liberty through a curfew with tagging, exclusion from certain areas, a foreign travel ban, driving ban, and a fine.

• At least one form of punishment element in every sentence – for the first time every community sentence will include one form of punishment from the list outlined above;

• Greater and more creative use of electronic monitoring – using technology, such as GPS, to monitor offenders’ compliance with their sentence and to track their movements.

• Seizing criminal assets – a new power for bailiffs to seize criminals’ possessions.

• Alcohol bans – new power to trial a scheme to ban offenders convicted of alcohol-fuelled crime from drinking as part of a community sentence or suspended sentences using new monitoring technology.

Probation:

• The Public Sector Probation Service will retain control of the management of offenders who pose the highest risk, including the most serious and violent criminals to protect the public.  They will continue to provide advice to court, and take public interest decisions over all offenders including initially assessing levels of risk, resolving action where sentences are breached, and decisions on the recalls of offenders to prison.

• Greater effectiveness and quality in probation services – extending competition, including for lower-risk offenders, to ensure that probation services are delivered by those best equipped to tackle crime and reoffending, and encourage the most effective rehabilitation measures, whether they are in the public, voluntary, or private sectors.  Where possible we will pay providers by measured results

• Devolving accountability and responsibility – giving Probation Trusts control of local budgets, including, for example electronic monitoring of curfews, so they can deliver programmes targeted at local needs and reducing reoffending.

The Community Sentencing consultation also includes proposals to improve the use of fines by getting better, more accurate information about offenders’ means, to empower offender managers to deal more swiftly with minor breaches, and to encourage greater use of restorative justice and more effective use of compensation orders, which are paid to victims of crime.

Extending the partnership between the Probation Service and the private, public and voluntary sectors, and giving Probation Trusts more control of local budgets of offender management services like electronic monitoring of curfews and joint commissioning for drug and mental health treatment, will help cut crime by driving down reoffending. This will better support the Government’s priorities for wider reform of the justice sector, including the development of payment by measured results in cutting reoffending.

The proposals set out in the two consultations build on the reforms already being taken forward in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, which include extending the maximum length of a curfew from 12 hours a day to 16 hours a day, from six months to 12 months and introducing foreign travel bans. They are a significant extension of the policy launched by the Offender Management Act 2007 and will speed up the use of the legal powers in that Act.

To view the consultation documents, please follow the links below:
• Community Sentences
• Probation

So, David Cameron has plans for ‘toughening up’ community sentences (see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/24/community-sentences-tougher-david-cameron).  He’s not the first and he won’t be the last to tread this well-worn path, but does it make any sense?

To be fair, listening to Crispin Blunt on the BBC the other day, I discerned something a bit different about the latest plan. Pressed about the potential costs of satellite tracking of offenders on community sentences, the Minister for Prisons and Probation said he expected the new electronic monitoring contracts to cost less than the old ones, as a result of technological advances. But, more significantly, he said he expected a satellite tracked offender to think twice before committing new crimes, since the new technology would create a record of where she or he was all of the time. Similarly, I suppose the sobriety bracelet is supposed to make someone pause for thought before taking a drink.

Last week, I presented at the IMPACT conference in Bristol — and tried to link the practice of Integrated Offender Management with compliance theory, which seeks to explain why people (sometimes) comply with authority and with the law. Tony Bottoms has suggested there are four main mechanisms in play in compliance — instrumental compliance involves us being incentivised to comply, or deterred from non-compliance; habitual compliance is where we comply unthinkingly from long-established habit or routine; constrained compliance is where we have no real choice, being physically compelled to comply; and normative compliance is where we are somehow morally persuaded to comply — because of attachments and commitments, because of the legitimacy of the authority involved, or because we agree with the norms and values underlying the rule.

The latest ‘toughening up’, it seems to me, is not just about make community penalties hurt more (i.e. giving them more ‘punitive bite’) to satisfy offended public sensibilities, it is also about the lure of imposing external controls on difficult people’s behaviours. A while ago Mike Nellis noted that although electronic monitoring is often sold as a constraint on people’s behaviour (as in ‘the virtual prison’), the reality is that it doesn’t physically constrain at all. The fact that someone is wearing a tag does not, in and of itself (at least not yet…) incapacitate. Rather, if it works to produce compliance, it does so through instrumental mechanisms; i.e. by making getting caught (for example, breaking a curfew) more likely, it makes people calculate that compliance makes sense. In Blunt’s argument, satellite tracking is supposed to takes this inhibiting effect further —  electronic monitoring is supposed to alter the decisional balance not just in relation to compliance with the order, but compliance with the law more generally. It’s not just, so the argument goes, that people won’t break curfews or exclusion zones, they won’t commit crimes due to greater fear of detection.

But is there any evidence that this is actually how compliance can best be generated? It is true that there is evidence that increasing the likelihood of detection is a better strategy in general for deterring crime that increasing the severity of punishment. But that’s a finding from research on crime rates in the whole population, not so much on the specific population of ‘persistent offenders’ that find themselves the focus of IOM schemes, or of community sentences more generally. The research on the effectiveness of EM tends to suggest (unsurprisingly) that it works best with people who are rational calculators — not those whose offending is linked to chronic underlying problems or complex criminogenic needs.

For this group, the available evidence is interesting, and perhaps a little surprising. There is some evidence that EM can be a constructive measure, but only in certain circumstances. For example, in a Scottish pilot of Intensive Support and Monitoring Services for young people involved in persistent offending (see: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2008/08/05131241/1), it was the combination of support and monitoring that best accounted for positive outcomes, not the restrictions of the tag itself. Trying to impose external controls without addressing the underlying social and personal problems is always going to be a flawed strategy.

So how can community sentences best generate and support compliance? Tony Bottoms’ framework of the four compliance mechanisms allows for interaction effects between them, and developments in what underlies compliance over time. Let me give you a concrete example. In a recent study of compliance with community sentences, Pamela Ugwudike found some evidence that probationers did not comply initially because of the threat of enforcement (disincentive based instrumental compliance) so much as because of the hope of help (incentive based instrumental compliance). More tellingly, if help was forthcoming, attachments ( to supervisors) formed. When attachments formed, probationers were more likely to be influenced by their supervisors in terms of their attitudes and values; they were more likely to comply for normative reasons.

Why does all of this matter? Firstly, because we all want people to comply with sentences and with the law. But secondly, because we’re all better of if people come to comply willingly, having been persuaded to do so by the example that others (like their supervisors) set them. If compliance is merely constrained or instrumental, it’s only as reliable as the maintenance of the constraint, or the maintenance of belief in the threat (or the bribe). And this is where, finally, we get back to the question of desistance. Secondary desistance (not just behaviour change but a shift identity linked to the shedding of a criminal past) is the most secure basis for long term compliance with the law. Ultimately, long term change is the most secure basis for public protection, but politicians tend to miss that point — and to search for technical fixes to compliance problems.

And here’s the rub… if the way that we impose and manage sanctions relies too much on threats and bribes, or on the adequacy of technological fixes, if it diminishes rather than building the legitimacy of authority, if it undermines moral communication, then the best that it will produce is grudging instrumental compliance. Rather than bringing out the best in people, that strategy condemns us to being left to manage their baser instincts, by making sure that the threats and the bribes stack up in favour of compliance. But ultimately, that’s not just a criminal justice problem — it’s a social justice problem. When compliance stops stacking up, when it stops making sense, then we’re all in trouble, as we found out last summer.

The Long-Term Impacts of Probation Supervision: Is Impact Detectable After 15 Years?

Presentation available here by Stephen Farrall, Gilly Sharpe, Ben Hunter and Adam Calverly looking at the long term impacts of probation supervision. I particularly found the final section about what encourages/ discourages impact – very interesting.