Monday, January 24, 2005

House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Rehabilitation of Prisoners

UK: We have carried out an inquiry into the rehabilitation of offenders as law-abiding and useful members of the wider community.

The best way of reducing re-offending is to ensure that prisoners on their release have the ability to get into work and a home to go to. We focus especially on ways of delivering these aims.

As a result of recent official reports and government initiatives, a basic policy framework is now largely in place which could make possible the more effective rehabilitation of offenders. However, implementation has been patchy. Progress has been made in developing more credible and effective sentencing, and in reviewing sentencing guidelines.

The merger of the Prison and Probation Services to form a National Offender Management Service (NOMS) is a step towards 'end to end' management of prisoners from sentence to resettlement, but NOMS is still in its early stages and much remains to be done.

We welcome the Government's publication of a National Action Plan on reducing reoffending,but are disappointed at the elementary nature of many of its action points. We recommend that it should be reissued in a revised and more detailed form, and that the Home Office should report annually to Parliament on progress made in implementing the Plan.

Despite a welcome recent decrease in re-offending rates, the scale of the problem is massive---it remains the case that nearly three in five prisoners are reconvicted within two years of leaving prison.

We support the use of reconviction rates as a measure of re-offending, and therefore of the success or otherwise of rehabilitation, but we criticise the current 'two-year post-release snapshot' as a blunt measuring tool, and recommend the adoption of more sophisticated measures. We regret the decision by the Home Office to reclassify its PSA Target (of reducing re-offending by 5%) as a 'standard' (committing it not to allow re-offending rates to deteriorate), and call for the reinstatement of the target.

Overcrowding is having a hugely damaging impact on the delivery of rehabilitative regimes across the prison estate, both in terms of quality and quantity of appropriate interventions.

We express scepticism about the Home Office's projection that the prison population will stabilise at about 80,000 by the end of the present decade, exactly matching estimated capacity. This projection depends on very large assumptions about the net effect of sentencing changes.

Regrettably, overcrowding is likely to remain a feature of our prison system for the foreseeable future. It should not be used as an excuse for ignoring the issue of rehabilitation and failing to follow examples of good practice.

The Prison Service has repeatedly failed to meet its target of providing an average of 24 hours' worth of purposeful activity for each prisoner per week. The situation may be even more serious than the official figures suggest. We carried out a 'Prison Diaries Project' which investigates prisoners' own experience of rehabilitative regimes.


First Report of Session 2004--05

By Just Us posted 24 January 05

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