Justice Reinvestment

A report of the Consultation will be available shortly. What follows is the backing paper written prior to the Consultation:

Justice Reinvestment (JR) is a term originally coined by George Soros's Open Society Institute to describe a wide range of initiatives to divert spending on imprisonment into more productive community based measures in US states.  Recently JR has been proposed as a way of developing a more sustainable criminal justice policy in the UK through which the seemingly incessant rise in the number of prisoners is halted by way of targeted initiatives to reduce crime and prevent reoffending in the most deprived neighbourhoods. In January 2010 the House of Commons Justice Select Committee published a report of a two year inquiry into the relevance of the approach in England and Wales - Cutting Crime: the Case for Justice Reinvestment.

The Committee concluded that the government should aim to bring about a substantial reduction in imprisonment by 2015 by prioritising measures to divert potential offenders from crime, improving the effectiveness of community sentences with low level persistent offenders and encouraging the judiciary to play a greater role within the local criminal justice system as part of a strategy to ensure prison is used more cost-effectively and as a last resort. Underpinning these approaches would be better local mechanisms for linking relevant resources outside criminal justice - principally the health service, housing, education and personal social care - with the prison and probation services; and a new central mechanism to assess and report on the effectiveness of rehabilitation measures.

The problem

The starting point for the Justice Committee - and indeed for other organisations that have looked at the potential of JR - has been the sharply rising prison population in England and Wales which has almost doubled since 1992. The 84,231 people in prison at the end of 2009 represented 153 per 100,000 of the population which compares to 96 in France, 90 in Germany and  72 in Sweden. Only Spain (162) has a higher prison population rate among major countries in Western Europe. The government plans to build 12,000 more prison places to accommodate 96,000 prisoners in England and Wales by 2014 - a rate of 169.

Three quarters of the rise in prison numbers since the mid 1990's is accounted for by an increase in the numbers sentenced to immediate imprisonment and 16% by a rise in those recalled for breaching the terms of their release. A recent Ministry of Justice analysis suggests that the reasons lie in tougher sentencing and enforcement outcomes (which are not in question) and a more serious mix of offenders coming before the courts (for which the evidence is more contested). Rising prison numbers represent the costliest tip of a criminalisation iceberg which has seen a large extension of the reach of the criminal justice system, during a period of falling crime. The creation of over 4,000 new criminal offences, the development of hybrid forms of social control such as Anti Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) and the introduction of indeterminate sentences form a pattern in which social problems are increasingly treated by way of punishment and control. Overseas observers express surprise that this trend should have occurred under a Labour government. Indeed as recently as 2002, in the White Paper "Justice for All" Labour listed the record prison population, with its costs and poor outcomes as something that "is not working".

Meanwhile there are indications that money for local partnerships, in particular crime and disorder reduction partnerships and community safety partnerships, will be reduced as a result of efficiency savings at a time when they have a new statutory remit to reduce reoffending.

What does Justice Reinvestment involve?

The key ideas in the JR approach fall into three categories. First it focuses attention not only on how much is being spent on imprisonment but to what alternative uses the public money consumed by prison could be put if demand for prison places could be reduced. Second it draws attention to how people going to and returning from prison (and those on probation) are disproportionately drawn from the poorest neighbourhoods and how targeted investment in these areas could help develop more initiatives both to prevent crime and improve reintegration of ex-prisoners. Third, the combination of concerns about the cost effectiveness of prison and about "places as well as cases" inevitably raises questions about what are the most appropriate mechanisms for organizing and funding criminal justice. JR approaches encourage elements of financial responsibility to be devolved with locally based agencies able to make use of the resulting savings if they find ways of bringing down prison numbers and high probation caseloads.

JR developed in the USA where exceptionally high and costly use of prison  (there are more than 2.3 million prisoners representing 760 prisoners per 100,000 of the population), concentrated zones of deprivation and shared  federal, state and county responsibility for incarceration has made it an attractive approach particularly for cash strapped states. Notwithstanding important differences, JR has attracted growing interest in the UK with a range of policy proposals drawing on its ideas produced in recent years. These include proposals for locally driven primary justice (LGIU 2009, Howard League 2009); extending locally based Youth Offending Teams to adults (LGA 2005, Allen and Stern 2007); making local authorities responsible for meeting the costs of placements in the juvenile secure estate (PRT 2008); localising the management of the prison system by abolishing the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) and replacing it with a network of Community Prison and Rehabilitation Trusts (CSJ 2009) and using funds earmarked for prison expansion to strengthen measures in the community such as restorative justice (RCP 2008). The Justice Committee report thus builds on a corpus of work urging changes not only to the direction of criminal justice policy but to the machinery which develops, sustains and implements it.

A number of practical initiatives have drawn inspiration from aspects of JR, most notably the Diamond Districts initiative in six London boroughs in which multi agency teams are located in neighbourhoods with high numbers of people returning from short spells in prison in order to offer enhanced resettlement support, although should it prove successful in reducing reoffending there is as yet no obvious mechanism by which savings to the prison system will be recouped into the community. In addition, other pilots which have demonstrated success in reducing crime or costs to the criminal justice system have not been financially sustainable once the initial funding dries up. 

Questions of principle and practice

While there appears to be considerable support among criminal justice stakeholders for a reduction in imprisonment and a more locally based focus to the organisation of the system, important questions remain about how JR might work in practice and what machinery will be needed. There are more principled questions about whether it is right for the system to be organised locally, particularly if this gives rise to greater "justice by geography". How much local variation is justified in the use of custody for example? Such variation - already considerable of course - might be mitigated by the creation of a criminal justice equivalent of the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) proposed by the Justice Committee but a consensus does not yet exist on the proper balance of central control and local discretion. Moreover there are large question marks over the way in which the independent judiciary should fit into a JR model and the extent to which their discretion and responsiveness to local issues should be limited by central guidance. Indeed at a higher level still, there are important issues to explore about whether and how the demands of cost effectiveness should interact with decisions about criminal justice.

Assuming answers can be reached to these questions, there is an important "bottom line" question. Would JR changes deliver the reductions in the demand for prison places in order to kick start the virtuous cycle of less spending on prison and more on alternatives? As Jack Straw told the Justice Committee "so far I have seen no evidence that says 'if you spend this amount of money, then we can guarantee that there will be fewer crimes committed, and therefore the demand for prison places will drop accordingly'".

JR does not rely solely on more successful prevention and rehabilitation to reduce the candidates for prison. There are more direct ways of shrinking demand. The emphasis of JR is on the development of locally based strategies which would need to be informed by detailed local analysis of who is going to prison and why; and the development of relevant credible alternatives informed by evidence and sustained by greater levels of  judicial involvement . There is promising evidence that this can work from Washington State and the Council of State Government's Justice Centre work with other states.

Obstacles to reform

Finally there will remain questions about the level of interest in the approach which is taken by criminal justice bodies and perhaps more importantly local agencies outside the system. With many fearing substantial cuts to come from 2011 is this the best time to be inviting them to take greater responsibility for some of society's most difficult and challenging people? Will the prize of new resources reinvested from criminal justice be enough to offset the risks involved? In part this will depend on climate of opinion among the media, the public and the political classes. Will this allow the kind of system engineering which JR entails or are we in a straitjacket of penal populism that makes reform of this kind impossible?

Conclusion

The St George's House Consultation will seek to address the above issues through debate and discussion over a twenty-four hour period, bringing together experts in the field; these will include policy makers, senior figures from the prison and other relevant sectors, academics, heads of NGOs and opinion formers.