The Howard League for Penal Reform

Making prisons work

For more than a decade the Howard League has championed the idea of long term prisoners being given the opportunity to work whilst they are in prison. We have conducted research, we ran a business inside Coldingley jail, we have published and we have campaigned. And, we have been successful in that the Coalition government has made the idea its flagship prison policy. Yet as with all of the best ideas, people never quite carry out what you want them to do in the way you want them to do it.

I welcome the pressure placed on prisons to extend the working day which is having a significant impact across the estate. I have visited seven prisons in the last two months and have been impressed with the enthusiasm and willingness to be flexible on the part of managers and staff to extend the working day and engage prisoners in work. At a training prison last week the catering manager explained how they had moved the main hot meal of the day to the evening and were providing baguettes and packed lunches as some prisoners were working through the day and not returning to their cells for hours at lunchtime as had previously been the case. In that prison every prisoner was involved in work or training for at least part of the day.

Other prisons have appointed staff to liaise with local businesses and are negotiating contracts for carrying out work inside the prison and this involves recycling, packing, engineering and small scale manufacturing. Prisons are discovering that many staff have entrepreneurial talent and that prisoners are keen to work.

The Howard League’s view is that prisons should be opening up to outside businesses to employ prisoners directly, but the changed attitude in prisons is still to be welcomed.

Prisoners coming to the end of their sentence and in open prisons have always been employed outside and hundreds are currently leaving the prison every day to do all sorts of jobs. This helps with safe resettlement, allows them to save for release so they can put a deposit on renting a home and keeps them in touch with families. We pointed out the anomaly of these prisoners being employed by outside businesses when the Prison Service refused to allow prisoners inside to be employed in this way. The Prison Service argued that any prisoner employed by an outside business and paying tax would gain employment rights which would conflict with the governor’s right to govern. But, it ignored the hundreds who worked outside.

It was therefore bizarre that the application of the Prisoners Earnings Act to take up to a 40% deduction from the wages of prisoners in open prisons was suddenly imposed. I had assumed it was the Prison Service fighting a rear-guard action to stymie the whole idea of prisoners being employed, but it appears that the pressure to do something quickly, even if it was counter-productive and possibly illegal, came directly from ministers. This, as I said, is the flagship policy on prisons, and ministers wanted a quick and public gain.

The deductions are now being challenged through judicial review and both the Howard League and the Prison Governors’ Association have provided expert statements to the court.

Our argument is based on our years of experience of running a business inside a prison. We did make deductions from the net wages of the prisoners we employed to reflect the fact that they had no outgoings that someone working in the community would have had to have paid. A prisoner inside a prison does not pay for food, utilities, transport, only a relatively small amount for clothing, and no rent. We made it a condition of employment with the Howard League enterprise that our prisoners contributed 30% of their wages into a fund that was jointly managed by the prisoners, the prison governor and the Howard League to give grants to charities working with victims, as well as educational opportunities for prisoners and families.

However, the Howard League opposes the deduction from prisoners working outside prisons on practical grounds. Many long term prisoners would have to buy a whole wardrobe of clothes to be fit for work. They often have to pay for three meals a day and cannot make sandwiches. They have to pay to travel long distances from isolated prisons at peak times. They are released at weekends to keep in touch with families and have to pay to travel to their homes. They are expected to save for release so they can get housing if they have lost touch with families. In addition, they are usually only working for a few months pre-release so are not able to accumulate much money. They are normally on low wage, low skills jobs, that would attract benefits to supplement and reflect the fact that it is not a living wage for people who live in the community.

For these reasons the Howard League is supporting the judicial reviews and is arguing that the deductions from working prisoners in open prisons should cease. However, when, and if, businesses open inside prisons and pay the rate for the job, we do see deductions as viable, once prisoners have saved for release and have contributed towards their families.

I think the government is in danger of messing up its star prison policy.

May 9, 2012 ¡ Frances Crook ¡ No Comments
Posted in: Campaigns, Government policy, Howard League, Inside prisons, Prisons, Uncategorized

Howard League launches emergency judicial review proceedings

The Howard League for Penal Reform legal team has issued emergency judicial review proceedings challenging the finding of guilt and additional days in prison imposed by the Independent Adjudicator for seven children at Ashfield private jail. Of those seven children, five are black or of mixed ethnicity. One of these children is already serving the additional days imposed and would have been released were it not for the punishment. The proceedings are of the utmost urgency, as they concern deprivation of liberty of children and the high court is to hear the case within weeks.

Between January 2010 and the end of April this year, Ashfield awarded 1,892 days or more than five years of additional punishment to boys who are imprisoned there in a total of 269 cases. This equates to more than five years’ worth of additional prison time for misbehaviours such as disobeying an order given by a prison officer. The Howard League estimated that this could cost the taxpayer up to a quarter of a million pounds to imprison the boys for this additional time.

Last week it was revealed that that Black and Mixed Ethnic (BME) young people are more likely than their white counterparts to have additional days added to their prison sentence following an adjudication at Ashfield. Out of a total of 138 boys receiving additional days, 76 were from a black ethnic group (55 per cent), far higher than the proportion of the custodial population at Ashfield, which stood at 29 per cent the last time the establishment was inspected in October last year. Only 32 were from a white background (23 per cent), even though the proportion of young people from a white background make up 51 per cent of the population. The most recent inspection at Ashfield recommended that, “proper governance should be introduced to ensure that the use of single separation is proportionate, fairly applied and non-discriminatory.” This does not appear to have been enacted.

Over-representation of black people in the justice system has always been a problem that the Ministry of Justice has failed to tackle. Prison monitoring already shows that restraint is used disproportionately on young black men in prison. We know that black people are more than 30 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white boys, and now we know that black and mixed ethnic young men are disproportionately given additional days on their sentence. We must address this imbalance.

At best this is adjudication record is discriminatory, at the worst it is scandalous. We are punishing boys in prison, by giving them more prison. Could there be a clearer sign that prison doesn’t work? And as we know that Ashfield makes a huge profit from locking children up, is there not a conflict of interest here? Are they feeding their own profits?

I visited a state run prison housing adult men who had committed serious offences recently that had completely stopped going to an outside adjudicator and was handling misbehaviour in the prison internally. It is worrying that a prison like Ashfield is not able to control the behaviour of the children it is tasked to deal with and has to resort to outside judges and such excessive punishments for children.

A source who attends Ashfield’s Independent Adjudications every month told the Howard League that it was six months before he ever saw a white boy in front of the IA, despite white boys constituting 50 per cent of the population. These statistics come only weeks after the chief inspector of prisons revealed that there was a nine-fold rise in the use of force to restrain teenage boys at Ashfield, from an average of 17 times a month to 150 times a month.

May 8, 2012 ¡ Frances Crook ¡ No Comments
Posted in: Children and young people, Inside prisons, Uncategorized

Daedalus scheme at Feltham YOI

The Howard League has raised concerns regarding Boris Johnson’s Daedalus scheme, based at Feltham YOI, since it was launched in 2009. Although we are supporters of innovation in the penal system, this project always risked cherry-picking young people and that the payment-by-results model would focus on targets rather than providing the holistic approach that many young people need to address their needs when leaving custody.

Unfortunately, the scheme has lived up (or should that be ‘down’?) to our expectations. Last autumn the Mayor came under fire from the UK Statistics Authority and  the Home Affairs Committee for giving false information to the Committee that the scheme had cut reoffending to 19 per cent. He later admitted that it was at least twice this rate. The publication of a preliminary evaluation in March revealed that key targets had not been achieved – only half of the young people went into education, training or employment after release, and just one in six stayed in such an occupation for six months. Prisons minister Crispin Blunt announced the scheme would end in May just days after these revelations. The official reoffending rate will not be known until the summer, but is set to be comparable to main site prisons.

Today the BBC has revealed that criticisms of the project included in a draft evaluation report by market research company Ipsos Mori were removed before the document went public. According to the BBC, the censorship included:

  • The project suffered because City Hall adopted a payment-by-results approached which denied it sufficient money upfront
  • Rathbone, who provided ‘resettlement brokers’ to help young people with their resettlement needs, had to spend too much time on targets and the claims process for payment. The original report said: ‘It was hard for them to invest the necessary funds upfront for some of the innovation. Indeed a number of stakeholders commented on the fact that Rathbone is restricted to some extent by the fact that they are not paid upfront; it was argued that receiving a percentage of their payments in advance of meeting targets may make more sense.’
  • Also removed were ‘concerns whether the resettlement broker approach would be cost-effective’ and how there were too few resettlement brokers to cover the whole of London.
  • Omitted also was the section: ‘It was thought by both parents and young people themselves that Resettlement Brokers may be stretched, and that consequently they did not spend as much time with the young person as was sometimes desired.’ As well as the section: ‘Resettlement brokers said they would at times feel conflicted in their working practice; there was an uncertainty as to whether their key concern at any one time should be meeting targets, or meeting the needs of young people.’

City Hall has refused to say whether it suggested re-writes to the report.

This project has cost nearly ÂŁ3 million of public money.

As the Howard League’s Andrew Neilson tells the BBC, it is disappointing to see a supposedly independent academic evaluation distorted in this way. When projects piloting new approaches and commanding substantial sums of public money are launched it is crucial that we are able to learn from both their successes and their failures.

April 19, 2012 ¡ Frances Crook ¡ No Comments
Tags: ,  Âˇ Posted in: Children and young people, Howard League, Inside prisons

Reflections on the Italian juvenile system

Last week I was in Milan with members of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Women in the Penal System. We were there to look at the Italian juvenile justice system and its approach to girls. Whilst there we met the president of the juvenile and family court in Milan, lay magistrates, social workers and educators who worked with children who had transgressed the law. It was a fascinating two days and we learnt a lot.

The Italian juvenile justice system is very different from our own adversarial system. The juvenile courts deal with both civil and criminal cases. Professional and lay judges are specialists and are chosen for their expertise in understanding children and families. There are opportunities for children who have committed an offence to be pardoned or to have the slate wiped clean throughout the process. The professionals we met recognised that teenagers could be difficult but their behaviour was regarded as part of the normal process of adolescence. The aim of the juvenile justice system is to reintegrate and re-educate children, not to punish them.

The Italian courts recognise that girls and boys often commit misdemeanours as a cry for help. The judge can recommend that social services conduct an investigation of the child’s background and the circumstances that have led to the offence and ensure that a package of support is put in place for the child and also for the parents if necessary. This is expensive but it is recognised that if you tackle the social and welfare problems you save in the long term as the child will not end up in the adult penal system. This is unlike the system in England and Wales where the youth court is separated from the family court and youth court magistrates have no powers to deal with welfare issues.

We sat in during a hearing for a teenage boy who had been charged with a minor sexual offence. He had spent a year in a residential community whilst on probation. Having heard from his lawyer, his social worker and psychologist, the judge was satisfied that he would not commit the same offence again so his crime was declared ‘extinct’ and was wiped clean. He left the court, free to go home with his parents.

I do have some misgivings about a benevolent system which does not always listen to the views of young people or take account of their human rights. However, the reoffending rates for children are extremely low compared to England and Wales. In Lombardy the rate of recidivism is just four per cent. Far fewer children end up in the Italian penal system in the first place and those that do have the opportunity to go forward into adulthood with no criminal record. Far fewer children end up in penal custody with all its tragic and damaging consequences.

April 2, 2012 ¡ Frances Crook ¡ No Comments
Posted in: Uncategorized

Legal rights of children subjected to unlawful force in STCs

The Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE) has been fighting a legal case to obtain an order requiring the Secretary of State for Justice to provide information to children who have been subject to unlawful force while in secure training centres (STCs) about their legal rights and the possibility of redress.

Mr Justice Foskett handed down his judgment on 11 January 2012. The judgment acknowledged that it is highly likely that there are hundreds, possibly thousands of young people who had been subject to unlawful force from the inception of the STCs until at least 2008.

The unlawfulness of the methods in question is not an issue. The order CRAE sought was in relation to children who had been subject to two specific categories of unlawful force: first, restraint techniques which were used for “good order and discipline” and, secondly, so called “distraction techniques”. The three distraction techniques available (nose, thumb and rib distraction) allowed officers to inflict bursts of pain to the specified area on the child.

The tragic consequences of such brutal treatment can be seen in two examples in particular, to which Mr Justice Foskett referred specifically in his judgment. Gareth Myatt was 15 when he died of asphyxiation at Rainsbrook STC whilst being restrained by staff, and Adam Rickwood killed himself at Hassockfield STC at the age of 14 after being subject to nose distraction. I have written about both of these cases on this blog, and their stories have been reported elsewhere. However, as the judgment recognises, it is likely that there are huge numbers of unreported instances of children and young people experiencing such distressing abuse.

We welcome Mr Justice Foskett’s statement that until the deaths of Gareth and Adam and the subsequent investigations, none of the agencies in place to monitor STCs, primarily the YJB (who had demonstrated “confused thinking” in relation to what was lawful or otherwise), had identified and/or acted to stop the unlawful treatment.

Unfortunately, Mr Justice Foskett rejected CRAE’s application. He concluded that the court should be wary that the case would be used as a “springboard” for other claims relating to disclosure obligations. He also held that while access to justice was not being actively promoted by the Secretary of State, neither was it being specifically impeded. He pointed to the availability of information on the subject that is already in the public domain. This is very disappointing. Although the cases of Gareth and Adam did receive coverage, these issues are not currently making front page headlines. Are we really expected to believe that the vulnerable young people affected, who may still be in custody, will have access to all of the information that may be available, or will be keeping track of legal developments? The YJB was allowed to maintain its confused thinking for over a decade, yet these vulnerable children are expected to be able to determine the merits of any legal claim they may have without any guidance.

The Howard League has long been concerned with restraint procedures in prisons – indeed I have used this blog many times to highlight what continues to be worrying trends and practices. We agree with Mr Justice Foskett in his praise of CRAE who have “served well the interests of those for whom it is concerned by shining a light into a corner that might otherwise have remained in the dark” but we regret that the necessary action to remedy the wrongs done to these children has not been taken.

All four STCs in England are operated by private companies, namely G4S Care and Justice Services (UK) Limited and Serco PLC, who were both interested parties in this case. I have commented on the practices of these companies and expressed how appalling it is that these private companies run prisons for profit. I cannot imagine any other circumstances in which a private company could operate a money-making business which regularly inflicts unlawful force on children and young people and not face prosecution. Why and how have these companies been allowed to avoid legal proceedings for so long and for such serious offences? It must be time for this to change.

We understand that CRAE is considering appealing this decision. When CRAE was initially granted permission to challenge the Secretary of State’s refusal to notify the young people affected, they were granted a Protective Costs Order to enable them to do so. We hope that the appeal does go ahead and that those involved are not allowed to avoid responsibility for unlawful practices through maintaining the ignorance of the victims.

March 26, 2012 ¡ Frances Crook ¡ No Comments
Posted in: Uncategorized

Traumatic brain injury and violent crime

Staff Sargeant Robert Bales is facing 16 charges of murder for the atrocity on families, including children, carried out in Afghanistan. The media reporting the killings and his transfer back to the USA over recent weeks has often referred, usually in passing, to the fact that he had experienced brain injuries whilst on tours in Iraq.

There has been very little research, interest or recognition of the issue of traumatic brain injury and its link with violent crime in this country but in the USA the level of knowledge is much higher. A recent paper looking at traumatic brain injury among prisoners indicated that it could be as high as 83% of the population who have had one or more head injuries during their lifetime.

The academics say that traumatic brain injury often results in cognitive, social, emotional and behavioural problems, including aggressive and violent behaviour. It is known to result in irritability or aggressiveness, including explosive outbursts which can be set off by minimal provocation or occur without warning.

The evidence in the USA indicates that prisoners’ TBI was caused by assaults, car accidents and sports injuries and for women it is often linked to being victims of domestic violence.

A screening programme for prisoners in this country would be very expensive, but it might be more expensive not to do it. The cost is not simply financial as the violence linked to people with TBI has an incalculable human cost.

March 23, 2012 ¡ Frances Crook ¡ No Comments
Tags:  Âˇ Posted in: International, Mental health

Shaped up but shipped out

The Howard League relies on volunteers to carry out its work and this includes our Trustees as well as students and prisoners. For years we have benefitted from prisoners who are in open prisons because they have been assessed as not representing any risk. They work in our offices as volunteers as part of their transition from closed prisons to open conditions. In order to qualify to be permitted to seek paid employment prisoners must spent a few months helping out in a charity. This eases them into the work environment and I suppose it also is a way of paying back into the community.

For nine months we have had a young man coming into our office from Blantyre House prison three days a week. He has been a joy to work with and has made a very special contribution to the charity. He has helped with administration and has developed his computer skills and done some membership recruiting on the phone, delightfully and successfully. He has moved boxes and helped to reorganise. We have supported him by paying his fares, reimbursing the cost of his food and we had to buy him clothes because after years in prison he only had prison issue floppy jogging bottoms, not appropriate for a professional office environment. We were so pleased with the relationship and his contribution we were discussing how we could pay for additional skill training for him because he was finding it hard to get a paid job.

And then it all ended. One day he just didn’t turn up. No one from the prison had the courtesy or competence to phone us to tell us that he had been moved to a closed prison. He obviously could not contact us directly.

If prisons want to move into the real world of paid work they have to behave with more maturity. I am given to understand that the young man did not go through any formal adjudication process for doing anything wrong but was simply shipped back into a closed prison, and we have yet to have a proper explanation or apology.

March 16, 2012 ¡ Frances Crook ¡ No Comments
Tags:  Âˇ Posted in: Howard League, Prisons, Uncategorized, Work in prisons

Chemical castration

The first and most important thing to say is that our aim is to reduce the likelihood of people committing more sex offences once they have been released from prison.

It has been widely reported in the media that Whatton prison has been using pharmaceutical interventions with prisoners who have been convicted of sex offences. I have done radio interviews and was widely quoted as being sceptical as to the efficacy of this intervention and concerned about the ethical issues.

There are more than 10,000 men and women (although less than 10% are women) serving prison sentences for sex offences in England and Wales. This has doubled since 2003 and is going up year on year for three reasons: people are given long sentences, victims of historic, often inter-familial abuse, are coming forward in significant numbers, and people are being caught for internet pornography.

In addition there are more than 1,000 men in prison on remand awaiting trial or sentencing for sex offences. The numbers on remand and under sentence will continue to rise. We now have whole prisons full of sex offenders, so I am sympathetic to the search for appropriate treatments and responses that help people live law abiding and safe lives on release and prevent future victims.

However, I have serious concerns about the use of chemical interventions.

This is not a clinical or epidemiological trial but an experiment on prisoners. Whilst the prison service is claiming that prisoners are volunteers for this experiment, that can never truly be the case as the pressure to consent to undergo this treatment will be huge, particularly as it will affect chances of parole and release.

I have heard nothing that indicates that support will be put in place for when the men are released. It is all very well to provide chemical treatments whilst the men are inside but that offers no confidence that they will continue to take the medicines on release. It may sound trite, but these men are not going to commit sexual assaults on children or women whilst they are inside and the point is to make sure they don’t do it when they are released. Of course we know that sexual assaults take place by prisoners on prisoners, but from what I have heard this experiment is not monitoring that.

Most sex offending on adults is more closely related to violence and domination than lust. I am not convinced that a pharma intervention gets to grips with the psychological triggers for offending. I recently visited a prison holding hundreds of adult male sex offenders and heard about the complex and lengthy programmes delivered to the prisoners in an effort to change attitudes and behaviour. This is a lifelong change that requires skilled work by professionals, and, most importantly, it cannot stop at the prison gate but must continue sometimes for years afterwards.

The great success in the field is Circles of Support. Trained and supervised groups of community volunteers support sex offenders to live safe lives. In Hampshire, for example, more than 100 circles of local volunteers have been successful with only one person being reconvicted. It is therefore disturbing that some of the centres, for example the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, that are providing expert and proven support in the community are facing budget cuts.

Each individual person convicted of a sex offence has a different story and we make a big mistake if we think we have a simple medical answer. There are ways of intervening to change lives but they are human, complicated and take time.

March 14, 2012 ¡ Frances Crook ¡ One Comment
Posted in: Uncategorized

Restorative justice in action

The Howard League is a victim of crime. Our credit card was used to pay for stuff for someone who clearly had got hold of the details fraudulently. We think what happened was that when we had a supplier in to do some work on the building (I am not being too specific here for obvious reasons, but telling the story as a warning to others) they phoned through the details to an associate. The details were used several times and we would have picked it up at the end of the month, but the fraudster got over-confident and used it for a sum of over ÂŁ1,000 and the bank noticed and put a stop to it. We are going to be reimbursed so the charity will not be out of pocket.

Naturally we told the police who issued us with a crime number and so far it appears have done little else. It would be pretty easy to pick this person up as they paid for their MOT on their car with the card and we phoned the garage which has the registration details. So it wouldn’t take Poirot or Morse to find them. I am not advocating severe sentencing, you will be relieved to hear. However, we all know that the best way to deter wrong doing is the fear of getting caught and it would appear that there is widespread fraud and people know they can carry on with impunity. This affects us all through corroding social trust as well as the financial penalties in higher insurance and bank charges.

A sister charity reported a similar crime to the police and the same thing happened, or rather, nothing happened. That time it was known who the perpetrator was because he was a member of staff, who went on to do the same thing to the next charity he worked for.

I quite often get accused of being on the side of the criminal and ignoring the needs of victims and nothing could be further from the truth. Our work aims to find the right response to wrong-doing so that it doesn’t keep being done. That does mean prompt and proportionate action, but the prompt bit is really important. I want the person who defrauded the Howard League apprehended and I would like to meet them in a restorative process. I don’t want them to keep doing it to other organisations or individuals.

March 8, 2012 ¡ Frances Crook ¡ No Comments
Posted in: Howard League, Uncategorized, Victims

We need a more appropriate response to teenage girls’ behaviour

Today, the All Party Parliamentary Group on Women in the Penal System is publishing a briefing as part of its inquiry on girls. Its findings reveal that very few girls commit crime. Furthermore, the number of girls brought into the penal system has fallen by 60 per cent since 2007/08 according to the latest statistics from the Youth Justice Board. Common perceptions that girls are committing more crime and are more violent are not borne out by the evidence.

How should we respond to girls who commit minor misdemeanours? Girls’ troublesome behaviour is often a one off or an example of typical teenage behaviour, which can include testing boundaries, taking risks and behaving impulsively. The use of criminal justice interventions to deal with adolescent behaviour is disproportionate, expensive and counterproductive.

The Chief Constables of Hampshire and Gloucestershire are encouraging their officers to use their discretion and resolve issues in situ, without arresting and charging girls. They have shown that public safety can be maintained and confidence in the police enhanced without the use of formal sanctions. If every police service followed the examples of Hampshire and Gloucestershire, it would lead to a significant reduction in number of girls needlessly arrested and avoid the negative consequences associated with criminal justice interventions.

For some girls, their troublesome behaviour may be an indicator of significant welfare needs including poverty or abuse. The argument that criminal justice agencies are best placed to support these girls, however, is misguided. The outcomes for children brought into contact with the penal system are poor.

When the criminal justice system intervenes in children’s lives, it is costly. At best it is ineffective and at its worst, creates more problems for communities.

The briefing, ‘Keeping girls out of the penal system’ can be downloaded here.

March 7, 2012 ¡ Frances Crook ¡ No Comments
Tags: , ,  Âˇ Posted in: Children and young people, Police, Uncategorized, Women in custody