GOVERNMENT PLAN TO CUT CRIME

 Commenting today on the government’s five year plan to cut crime, Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said:
 
The government is torn between its well thought out work to support vulnerable families, reform youth justice and get drug addicts into treatment and tough, populist talk to win votes. It would be tragic if electioneering rhetoric undermined careful work to reduce re-offending.
 
Sweeping ‘yobs’ off the streets and into an overcrowded prison system is no way to build a safer society or to prevent the next victim. So far anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos) have diverted scarce resources from effective youth crime prevention schemes and intensive supervision in the community,
increased the children’s prison population by 11 per cent since January and ensured that large numbers of young offenders become the old lags of the future.
 
The detail shows that government is working to fuse the Carter (Correctional Service Review) reforms and the SEU’s (Social Exclusion Unit) social policy analysis in its action plan “Reducing Re-offending”.
 
This five year strategy does however have the feel of a hastily pulled together report. Massive structural (Noms) and legislative (Criminal Justice Act 2003) changes are in the pipeline. Without well resourced, carefully planned and staged implementation they could seriously disrupt plans to resettle and rehabilitate prisoners and those on community sentences.
 
The Correctional Services Review did recognise the problems posed by a chronically overcrowded prison system and silted-up Probation Service. It proposed a layered approach with low risk and minor offenders being either diverted from the criminal justice system or subject to ‘day fines’. This and better targeted community penalties would free up prisons to concentrate on serious and dangerous offenders. Government has been noticeably quiet on both diversion and income-related fines.
 
The strategy has some glaring omissions. Yet again government has failed to commit itself to implementing its own recommendations for improving the employability of ex-offenders, drawn together in ‘Breaking the Circle’. There are improvements to discharge grants, but the power to pay direct to housing providers is accompanied by worrying caveats. Above all, there is no commitment to divert large numbers of people with mental health and substance misuse problems from the criminal justice system.
 
Throughout the plan, offenders are depicted as passive recipients of services. This is a fundamental flaw, which undermines the potential value of volunteering, community service and active citizenship. To exploit its potential would require a huge culture shift in the penal system and a change in the mind set of Ministers and officials. John Stuart Mill’s concept that with freedom comes responsibility is echoed by the Prime Minister, who interprets it in a narrow, restrictive sense. A stark example is government’s resistance to the recent Strasbourg judgment on enfranchising sentenced prisoners. Responsibility for voting would give prisoners a stake in society and be an important building block for their rehabilitation.