Question 2: Rehabilitation and Transforming Rehabilitation

Mere som dette

Youth justice: A brief history

af Gillian Dickinson

Spain Political Organization

af Ana Mayor

Morality and Law

af Gillian Dickinson

Assessment and Evaluation and Digital Literacy

af Brenda Schepper

Despite the decline of rehabilitation during the 70’s and 80’s, the approach has been extremely beneficial insofar as it has encouraged the development of new programmes within the prison and probation service.

Rehabilitation

The question covers a number of central concerns. These are:

The use of rehabilitation within the administration of punishment both historically and contemporarily

The purpose of punishment that is rehabilitation

The difference between a constructive and deconstructive criminal justice system

Analysis and evaluation of the use of rehabilitative treatments within current examples of punishment

CONCLUSION

Main points of evaluation

Main points of analysis

Objective

Subtopic

Aim

Recap

INTRODUCTION

Reasoning

Content

What/Which research, studies, philosophies, theories, evidence have you analysed, evaluated, explored, discussed in an attempt to answer the question.

Context

In what context does the question relate to?

Objectives

How might you answer the question?

Aims:

What is the question asking?

DESCRIBE

Decline in Rehabilitation

From the mid 1980’s, the U.K. government tried to fashion a cost-effective justice system

Nothing Works

high level of media coverage, resulted in an overall acknowledgement and acceptance across international jurisdictions of program failure.

What Works?

The negative findings of a study conducted by Martinson (1974) entitled “What Works?” brought about the decline

The Use of Rehabilitation Historically

the use of rehabilitative punishment declined during the 1970’s and 80’s, which brought an extreme rejection of the ‘treatment model’,

A ‘Deconstructive’ justice system

in the administration of legal sanctions, to deprive offenders or take something away from the offender such as freedom.

A ‘Constructive’ justice system

to adopt approaches to punishment that focus on the offender in an attempt to bring about some beneficial change.

The purpose of punishment that is rehabilitation

What does it aim to achieve in terms of an expressive function of punishment?

CRITICALLY EVALUATE

Unnecessary

Unnecessary resort to short prison sentences, instead of introducing the costly community supervision of those given short prison sentences?

Prevent people going into prison for short periods, with all the inevitable disruption and harm it causes to them and their families.

People coming out of prison often need help and support to: find accommodation; secure benefits to which they are entitled; find a job; enrol in education; access health services,

Risky and Costly

TR has been a risky and costly upheaval of the Offender Management arrangements.

According to Transforming Rehabilitation what is needed is: 'a system where one provider has overall responsibility for getting to grips with an offender's life management skills, coordinating a package of support to deliver better results.' There was such a system already in place. The Probation Service was directly responsible for the supervision of the vast majority of individuals serving sentences in the community. It also undertook the supervision of those who received prison sentences of more than 12 months.

Importance of Piloting

This is all evidence pointing to PbR needing to be thought out carefully and a phased approach.

Pilots should have ran for 6-7 years

The NAO (2015) report suggests that piloting can help commissioners manage risks by testing their scheme and enabling design weaknesses to be corrected prior to full-scale roll-out.

Yet, there are many examples of PbR schemes where implementation has been rushed, with very few being piloted or phased in advance of full roll-out.

CRITICALLY ANALYSE

Impact of TR Policy

Through-the-Gate

Some of the new services proposed in the bids for contracts had not been implemented

None of the prisoners in their sample (86 cases) had been helped into employment by Through the Gate services

Too many prisoners reached their release date without their immediate resettlement needs having been met or even recognised.

Inspectors found that overall, services were poor and there was little to commend.

Inspection Findings: Between 2014 & 2016, 5 separate inspections noted some areas of progress but highlighted persistent concerns.

There was a lack of Through-the-Gate support

There was a lack of compliance to complete unpaid work.

less rehabilitative work was being done under new probation system.

CRC’s need to pay more attention to the quality of work they are delivering.

What is Payment By Results (PbR)?

National Audit Office (2015) evaluation of operational PbR Pilot Schemes between 2010 and 2015 (precursors to Transforming Rehabilitation), which were suspended due to the national roll-out of TR:

HMP Leeds

MoJ tendered contracts for a pilot offender rehabilitation programme but closed the competition without a successful bid after all but 1 of the 6 potential providers decided not to compete.

This was despite MoJ taking steps, before tendering, to understand providers’ appetite for risk in taking on a PbR contract, including  engaging  in  a  process  of  competitive  dialogue  with  potential  bidders.

The firms reported that the model for the pilot was unworkable.

- HMP Peterborough

- HMP Doncaster

Completion of these initial pilots could have revealed the areas of contention and concern we are now seeing, before the national roll-out.

The MoJ undertook the pilots to inform later decisions about a possible nationwide scheme yet they decided to roll the scheme out nationally before the pilots’ results were fully known.

An 'Outcome-based-payment Scheme'

Payment only for achieving demonstrable results, with clawback available for underperforming and higher payments for further improvements over minimum requirement

Large financial deductions / termination for increase in re-offending rates

Webster (2017) argues,“the MoJ made it clear from the outset that the primary purpose of TR was to reduce reoffending and that contracts would be let within a payment by results approach."

Basis for PbR requires CRC's to:

Deliver other interventions

Deliver an Accredited Programme

Deliver an Unpaid Work Requirement

Deliver a Supervision Requirement

Manage the sentence for a Community Order and Suspended Sentence Order

Examples in Practice

Integrated Offender Management

'Payment by Results'

Breaking the Cycle (2010): defining how we will pay providers for rehabilitating offenders- these will manage 236,000 low and medium risk offenders.

Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014 (ORA): After coming into force on 1 February 2015. The most significant change under the ORA is to extend statutory supervision after release to the 45,000 offenders a year who are released from short prison sentences of less than 12 months.

Before the changes, this group receive no statutory supervision after they are released. Despite the fact that this group of offenders have the highest reoffending rates of any group:

Almost 60% of adult offenders released from short prison sentences in the year to March 2013 went on to reoffend within the next 12 months: a total of 16,719 re-offenders committing 85,047 further offences.

presently enforced during incarceration, in the form of training programmes and more recently- cognitive skills courses (Reasoning and rehabilitation: Enhanced Thinking Skills) (Clarkson, 2001).

Effectiveness of rehabilitation in reducing recidivism

A range of studies show that rehabilitative programmes can only be effective if the prisoner wants to participate.

Desistence Paradigm

This shift of lenses has become a core element of the desistance paradigm and one of the major contrasts to the correctional or ‘medical model’ model of change (see Bazemore and Stinchcomb 2004).

McNeill (2006: 46), for instance, explains this ‘desistance paradigm’ thus: ‘Put simply, the implication is that offender management services need to think of themselves less as providers of correctional treatment (that belongs to the expert) and more as supporters of desistance processes (that belong to the desister).’

Likewise, Porporino (2010: 80) writes: ‘The desistance paradigm suggests that we might be better off if we allowed offenders to guide us instead, listened to what they think might best fit their individual struggles out of crime, rather than continue to insist that our solutions are their salvation.’