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Offender Management Bill

It is not just that they are professional. Believe, for example, is run by a former Army officer with a lengthy history of working in such projects, but people are also incredibly passionate and dedicated. The caricature that presents people as embarking on such work solely for profit is completely wrong. The voluntary sector has notified me of some concerns which I hope the Bill will address. There is, for instance, a fear that the commissioning process may favour larger charitable organisations, which are seen as less of a risk. Some of those groups do excellent work, but it has been suggested to me that some may have lost the desire for innovation and the passion that I mentioned earlier, and may not create genuinely new solutions. There is also a fear that funds will be given to quasi-voluntary sector organisations emanating from probation or to the private sector, which might also be seen as less of a risk. If a commitment is made to funding a voluntary sector organisation, the funding must be on a sufficiently long-term basis to ensure that the organisation is given a chance to succeed. Small organisations simply do not have the reserves to survive constant changes in commitment. It would be hugely damaging if they started to work successfully with groups of offenders only to have their budgets cut, so that they could not continue their work. There needs to be a clear commitment to funding innovation. The acceptance that there will be some risk must be accompanied by the understanding that profoundly better solutions to seemingly intractable problems will emerge. I myself feel that it is important for voluntary sector organisations not to become completely absorbed into the mainstream. I think that one of the key reasons for their success is that offenders do not see them as part of the establishment. Finally, I want to mention a family with whom I came into contact many years ago. I have kept in touch with their progress over the years. There were nine boys in the family. Both their parents were alcoholics, and anyone would describe their home lives in a tiny council house as dysfunctional. Only one of those nine boys remained clear of crime and drugs throughout his life. The other eight, one by one, grew up to acquire lengthy criminal records and hard-drug habits, fathering children and wrecking the lives of young women along the way. Two are already dead through heroin overdoses. I cite that family not as an example of something that has gone wrong—although something has obviously gone incredibly wrong throughout their lives—but because two of the brothers eventually got their lives together. One is actually studying to become a probation officer. It would have been easy to write off the whole family and dismiss them as a lost cause that the criminal justice system could only punish, not rehabilitate. But two of them managed to pull themselves out of the depths into which they had sunk. The reason they give is not anything that happened to them during their passage through the penal system or their support from probation, but the support that they received from others outside the establishment—people who they felt really cared about how their lives turned out. I believe that many such individuals could be helped in a similar way through involvement with the voluntary sector, as opposed to state institutions. This is not about being soft on crime or criminals. It is not in any way about excusing their actions, or giving greater priority to them than to the victims of their crimes. It is simply a hard fact that if we want to bring down crime rates, protect the public and make our streets and communities safer, the temporary incapacitation of criminals is not the solution. Protection of the public is best achieved by ensuring that those who are released from prison will not offend again. We must look beyond what we have tried to do in the past, and think of imaginative ways of achieving that aim.