'Law and Order 2.0', Total Politics Magazine

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

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Following the Ministry of Justice’s controversial criminal justice reforms, James Silver examines the ramifications of favouring community orders over custodial sentences for repeat offenders

For nearly two decades, Steve was a one-man crime wave. A serial shoplifter and burglar, he notched up 157 convictions to feed a remorseless drug habit. He sits beside me in the corner of a Liverpool café, a slightly-built, softly-spoken man with a pinched, thin face. “I was shoplifting, robbing cars, doing burglaries,” he says. “I never really spent much time out of jail. A typical week was pretty chaotic, to be honest. You’d just go out and you’d steal. Then you’d sell what you’d got. You’d go and buy drugs. You’d take drugs. Then you’d go out and repeat it all over again.”

Steve’s criminal days may be behind him – he’s now off drugs and out of trouble – but until recently he epitomised the kind of low-level repeat offender who pinballs between courtrooms and prison or probation, to the streets and back again.

To the fury of many grassroots Conservatives and others across the political spectrum who believe in Michael Howard’s mantra that “prison works”, justice secretary Ken Clarke is setting out to slash Britain’s record high prison population of more than 85,000 (which has more than doubled since 1993) by replacing short-term sentences – of the sort Steve found himself on, all too frequently – with ‘community orders’, wherever possible. These are community-based punishments, which include at least one of 12 requirements, ranging from unpaid work and curfews to drug rehab or supervision by a probation officer.

As part of a cost-cutting drive that will see the Ministry of Justice’s £9bn annual budget reduced by £2bn, there will be 3,000 fewer prison places by 2014-15. The reduction will be achieved in part, Clarke hopes, by a “rehabilitation revolution”. The MoJ green paper, published last December, argued that high rates of reoffending by those on short sentences (61 per cent of those locked up for less than 12 months reoffended within a year in 2008) can be cut by “developing better community provision aimed at halting persistent, low level offending”.

Justice minister Crispin Blunt told Total Politics that while Michael Howard, as home secretary, successfully turned the tide on crime by locking up 66,000 people, the rehabilitation element to the justice system has been woefully lacking ever since. “What we have at the moment is a system that is stuffed full of prisoners living in overcrowded conditions, which is not very good at rehabilitating them while they’re in expensive custody.

That’s the part of the equation we’re addressing. We’ve got to make sure that, for those people who are on a cycle of crime, we break the cycle.”

But with about a quarter of community orders breached, what is the evidence that even ‘beefed up’, supervised community sentencing will help do so?

One rain-soaked afternoon, I met the affable, silver-bearded Liverpool magistrate John Thornhill, chairman of the Magistrate’s Association of England and Wales. Thornhill has news for the justice secretary and his team: he and his fellow magistrates are already handing out community orders wherever possible. But he estimates that more than 80 per cent of the offenders he sends to jail are jailed for breaching or reoffending while serving community sentences (or after failing to complete them in the past).

“A number of the offenders that we send to prison are those who have been given community orders, but have failed to comply two, three or four times, so we end up in a position where we have no choice as magistrates but to send them to custody,” he says. Thornhill would like to see tougher community orders for repeat offenders like Steve. “We’re ready to use them,” he tells me. “Then we’ll see how effective they are.”

There is some evidence that properly resourced, intensive or “tough” – as Thornhill puts it – community orders can be successful, and Liverpool has one such scheme. A 20-minute drive east of the city centre lies Old Swan, home to North Liverpool Probation Service. It’s one of six areas around England and Wales currently running a pilot project known as an Intensive Alternative to Custody (IAC). The scheme (introduced in 2008) provides offenders, who would otherwise face a short prison term, with a 12-month community sentence that combines a number of requirements. These include up to 100 hours of unpaid work, a curfew for 12 hours per day for the first four months, and three hours a week of mentoring.

Previous community orders – and, indeed, a jail term – had failed to stop Lynsey committing a catalogue of crimes fuelled by her binge drinking. She was sentenced to an IAC order for her third offence of drink-driving. She says that on the other orders she’d served she only had to “go in every three or four weeks” to meet her probation officer, a box-ticking exercise essentially.

“On the IAC, I had to do something new every day for the first few months,” she says. “It kept me on the straight and narrow. I cut down on my alcohol.”

Why did this work for her while previous community schemes didn’t? “The threat of jail. I know that if I mess this up, I’ll be in prison.”

But while IACs are the Rolls-Royce of community orders, and have notable successes, even projects like these have their limitations. For one thing, dependent alcohol and drug users – more extreme versions of Lynsey, who are responsible for a large proportion of everyday crime – cannot take part for health and safety reasons. “We don’t expect them to comply [with an IAC] and we don’t set people up to fail,” IAC probation officer Nicola Pennington explains.

For another, these pilot schemes came to a halt at the end of March and now face an uncertain future. An MOJ spokesperson says: “We are currently evaluating the pilots to look at ways to mainstream IACs within existing resources, and linking them to existing schemes.”

Even so, the overwhelming majority of offenders don’t get anywhere near an IAC at present. At his solicitor’s office, a short walk from Dale Street Magistrates’ Court, I meet Phil, another repeat offender. Over 17 years, much of it spent behind bars, he built up a rap sheet encompassing theft, burglary, robbery, drug dealing and fraud.

Addicted to cocaine and cannabis, Phil, a pale-looking man fizzing with nervous energy, explains that most so-called ‘hardened criminals’ view community orders as little more than a minor irritation. “I took no notice of community sentences at first,” he says. “I’d turn up, just give my name and that’s it. I made it known through my body language that I didn’t want to know. I was breached on several occasions, and put back in prison.”

Now reformed, he adds that many offenders won’t turn up for community-based work orders, such as street-cleaning, because they don’t want to be heckled by all their friends. Phil fared little better in drug rehab than he had with probation, partly because he had no intention of coming off drugs at that stage. “If you don’t want to [come off], you’re not going to. You’d rather be out there on drugs than sitting around a table.”

In his office, close to Liverpool docks, Kieran Fielding, a criminal lawyer with 20 years on the clock, knows all about men like Phil and Steve. Their files pass across his desk countless times. Fielding describes a criminal justice system fraying at the edges, and not least Merseyside’s Probation Service, which, from his vantage point, is under considerable strain. And that’s before the looming cuts and burgeoning caseloads.

“I think it’s at capacity now,” he says. “When a court needs a report, which would have been prepared on the same day, it now takes two or three days. Everything is at breaking-point. Merseyside is rumoured to be losing 85 positions in the Probation Service. It’s difficult to see how they can cope with the work they’ve got, let alone more.” Fielding’s picture is borne out nationally, too. Freed criminals, supposedly under strict supervision by the police and Probation Service, were charged with almost 200 serious offences last year, including rape and murder.

Harry Fletcher of probation union Napo believes that contact time between probation and offenders can already be as little as 15 minutes a week. But the combination of cuts to the service and the increased caseloads implicit in the rehabilitation revolution will result in even shorter slots.

“Contact time will be cut to 10 minutes a week,” he claims. “That’s meaningless – offenders just turning up and being asked a few questions before they go away again.”

Fletcher also disputes the MoJ’s figures on reoffending rates, published in the green paper, which claim that only 36 per cent reoffended after community sentences. According to research by Napo, the reoffending rate following probation with no special requirements was around 50 per cent, only dropping to 34 per cent for intensive, costly programmes.

Not only is the jury out on the effectiveness of community orders, but there are also question marks over the justice secretary’s claims, in a speech last summer that it costs “more to put someone in prison for a year than it does to send a boy to Eton”. According to Thornhill, it’s not clear-cut that money will be saved.

“On average, it costs about £49,000 per annum to keep somebody in custody,” he says. “Therefore, we’re talking of less than £1,000 a week. So if an individual is given a four-week sentence, we’re talking about £4,000, but of course it’s only £2,000 at most, because they only serve half that sentence. A long, strong community order could actually cost between £6,000 and £9,000.”

Blunt is quick to concede the point. “Of course [the saving] isn’t clear-cut,” he says, “but the point remains that we need to move the system as a whole towards driving down the dreadful level of reoffending.” To this end, the way will be opened for voluntary groups and the private sector – alongside the Probation Service – to steer as many offenders as possible away from crime.

“Effective rehabilitation should send the message that if you want to get clean of drugs, if you want to go straight, the system is here to help you. But that doesn’t mean we’ve suddenly forgotten about punishment. Of course we haven’t.” Of the notion that the coalition risks looking soft on crime, Blunt says: “I’m not spending my time signing executive release orders.”

But another magistrate, who runs a busy courtroom in the South East of England and asked not to be named, says that serious questions remain over whether the threat of community orders, of whatever variety, will deter offenders, particularly hardened criminals, from breaking the law. “Many who get community orders will end up back in front of me and land themselves in prison anyway, because they simply won’t do the orders,” he explains.

“The problem is that a very large group of defendants either are incapable, or don’t care, or lead such chaotic lifestyles because they’re off their heads on drink or drugs [that they won’t complete them],” he says. “Community sentences do not protect society from the worst repeat offenders, as they are insufficient as a deterrent.”

His words are echoed by shopkeepers on a crime-blighted north Liverpool estate, a world away from Westminster. Community sentencing is a soft option, I was told. Speaking from behind a thick Perspex screen, a weary off-licence cashier said of the hoodies who plague her, and the man who kicked her window in when she asked him not to smoke inside the shop: “They have no shame. They’re just not worried about getting caught.”

Tags: Ken Clarke, Ministry of Justice, Sentencing

(Read the original article HERE.)

(Total Politics magazine, 24th May 2011)

Posted by James Silver - On Tuesday, May 24, 2011

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