---

Cutting Crime (Justice Reinvestment)

It must be remembered that that was the response of the previous Government. I found that part disappointing because it got into a circular situation. If we simply look at the present prison population, we are looking at the failures of the past. If we do not change the policy, the situation will continue. I will return to that theme later in my remarks. Catching people early is of vital importance. The people who initially commit relatively minor offences sometimes go on to become those who, through drug dependency or something else, get into more serious offences and become subject to repeat custodial sentences because of the ever more serious or frequent crimes that they commit. In 2007, the Texas state legislature rejected plans to spend $0.5 billion on new prisons in favour of a justice reinvestment approach. Half that money was spent on expanding the capacity of residential and out-patient treatment for substance misuse and mental health, community-based sanctions for offenders and post-release support to prisoners. Parole revocations were reduced, and the increase in the prison population was 90% smaller than had been predicted. Significant savings were made within two years, because the costs of increasing the capacity of treatment and residential facilities were significantly less than the cost of increasing prison capacity. The Committee gave a great deal of detailed consideration to how justice reinvestment approaches could be applied to the system in England and Wales. We believe that the system as a whole should be revisited through a lens that looks at crime as a problem to be managed in a cost-effective way. A longer-term rational approach must be taken to policy and the diversion of resources. That would enable prisons that are currently stretched to deal more effectively with those for whom incarceration is necessary for public protection, and prevent the need for continued expansion in the number of prison places. Few hon. Members in the Chamber will not have visited prisons and seen the pressures under which prison officers work. Such officers desire more time and opportunity to devote to rehabilitative work. Ideally, they would work with smaller numbers of prisoners who need that kind of support, and they are anxious to provide it to them by using the skills that they have built up over the years. We also suggest that probation services should be able to pay greater attention to those offenders who represent the greatest risk to the public. Lurking at the back of that is a problem to which I will refer later. We must find a way other than imprisonment to signify society's disapproval of crime. For some, community sentences can be more demanding than prison. The week before last, we took evidence from four ex-offenders during our work on the probation service. Two of those offenders said that they had committed offences in order to get back inside, because that was easier than the community sentence on which they were engaged. In one case, the sentence did not seem to work well, because the daily supervision requirement prevented the person from taking a job. In both cases, people had committed offences that they knew would put them back in prison, which was the easier option. That is not often recognised by the public, who see prison as the only way of saying that society will not put up with crime. We must demonstrate that community sentences can fulfil that function, as well as reduce the risk of reoffending. A priority for the Government is to find a mechanism to overcome the fact that we treat prison in the system as a ““free good.”” If the sentencer—judge or magistrate—has an offender before them, they may consider whether some form of rehabilitative treatment such as intensive supervision or a course of drug treatment, residential or otherwise, would be the right thing. Inquiries must then be made into whether that is available. If the sentencer says ““prison””, the van pulls up outside the door and takes the person away. The prison system and the National Offender Management Service recognise that it is their obligation to take whoever the court sends. However, there is an imbalance between the automatic availability of prison, and the uncertain availability of an alternative, which might be much better in a given case. We thought that the most promising way to deal with that issue was probably the devolution to local agencies and communities of resources that are spent on corrections. The first step would be to look at how money is currently spent on offenders across the system in Government Departments and statutory agencies. We felt that a business case could be made to move resources from a significant part of the prison building programme, if the numbers entering or re-entering the system could be reduced by a sufficient margin before contracts were signed for new prisons. The Washington State Institute for Public Policy looked at the cost of imprisonment to the state, and developed an alternative model of investment that primarily involved investing in rehabilitation programmes that would break even over five years and yield considerable savings thereafter. It is therefore possible to reap significant rewards by adopting justice reinvestment approaches over a 10-year period. Fundamental change in the pattern of public expenditure is entirely appropriate during times of economic difficulty. When is it more necessary to look at how we are spending money than when we realise that we have not got as much as we would like? That requires the Government to recognise that change must be facilitated by some movement of money and spending in other areas. When changes cut across departmental boundaries and involve transfers between central and local government budgets, it is rarely an easy process. We are looking not only for justice disinvestment but for justice reinvestment. In order to release resources in the medium term by halting the prison building programme, investment is required in the shorter term. We must identify where resources are currently being wasted or duplicated, and where quick wins could be achieved by reducing the prison population if that money were reinvested. The amount required for reinvestment is relatively small when compared with the resources that would have been committed to building and running 96,000 prison places. The Committee's proposals are in line with what the previous Government sought to do—and significantly achieved—in diverting women away from crime. That explicitly linked the reduction of expenditure on women's prison places with the funding of new initiatives to improve community provision. For two years, £7.8 million per year was committed to provide additional services in the community for women offenders who were not a danger to the public. That was an attempt to reduce the female prison population by 400 by 2012, as recommended by Baroness Corston in her 2007 report. Those initiatives have already borne fruit in reducing the number of women in prison. The investment required was a tiny sum in the context of spending on prisons. The previous Government had some similar success in reducing custody for young offenders. We may no longer need a free-standing Youth Justice Board, and it is going, but we should recognise that it helped to achieve a sharp reduction in custody as a way of dealing with young offenders. In both cases, the significant element was that there was a commissioning process, which created the opportunity to change the mix of custody and alternatives to custody that were available to sentencers. We argue that similar approaches should be adopted to deal more effectively with other groups of offenders, including low-level but persistent offenders, who frequently have problems with drugs, alcohol or mental health, or some combination of those things. The severely mentally ill could be dealt with more appropriately in the health care system. Local services such as housing, drug agencies and mental health trusts, which could help to prevent people from reoffending when they are no longer in contact with the criminal justice system, are often under-resourced. Targeted investment in the areas where offenders and victims are known to live could ensure that services were more readily available, without having explicitly to prioritise access to offenders, whom the public would regard as a not particularly deserving target in themselves. The right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth brought to the Select Committee his knowledge of what was happening in Cardiff and the work done by an accident and emergency consultant there. I hope that he will find an opportunity to refer to that in the course of this afternoon's proceedings.