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In this month's edition...
The Reducing Reoffending Third Sector Advisory Group (RR3) met on 3rd December 2018. The RR3 is a voluntary sector advisory group to the Ministry of Justice, chaired by Clinks’ Chief Executive Anne Fox. At the meeting, the group provided advice to: the Chief Executive of the New Futures Network, a new arm of the prison service tasked with brokering partnerships between prisons and employers; and government officials on secure schools and probation reform. Full minutes from the meeting are available online here.
Clinks is running three events in February, as part of the next stage of the Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ) engagement with the voluntary sector on the future of probation services. Jess Mullen, Head of Policy and Communications at Clinks, has provided a summary of the MoJ’s latest plans for the future structure and delivery of probation services in her blog.
In a recent evidence session held by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, Michael Ellis MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Arts, Heritage and Tourism, praised the work of the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance (NCJAA) in promoting the impact of arts in prisons across government. The following week, in a House of Lords debate on Sport, Recreation and the Arts, Baroness Bull praised the powerful impact that art can have on the lives of people in prison and referred to NCJAA’s report, Re-imagining Futures.
Clinks, in partnership with Agenda, hosted the latest Women’s Networking Forum. The group received a presentation prepared by the Ministry of Justice on the concordat announced in the Female Offender Strategy and then discussed the proposals. Notes from the Forum will be made available soon. The next Women’s Networking Forum takes place on 19th March in Manchester.
Bidding open for Youth Endowment Fund Sajid Javid MP, Home Secretary, has launched the bidding process to choose an organisation or consortium to run the £200 million Youth Endowment Fund, a 10 year investment that will support interventions preventing at-risk young people from becoming involved in violent crime. The successful bidder will be responsible for delivering a programme of grants and collating and disseminating evidence gained from the interventions. The deadline for proposals is the 23rd January, and the fund is expected to be active from 1st April 2019.
In-cell phones for more prisons David Gauke MP, Justice Secretary, announced that in-cell phones, currently installed in 20 prisons in England and Wales, will be rolled-out to 50 prisons by March 2020. This represents some progress on a government commitment made in 2018 to extend the provision of in-cell phones across the prison estate. The government have said in-cell phones are intended principally to help people in prison maintain contact with their families; citing the 2017 Lord Famer review, which Clinks co-chaired and provided the secretariat for, which found close ties between prisoners and key family members can significantly reduce the risk of reoffending.
First Minister Mark Drakeford announces cabinet Mark Drakeford, the new Wales First Minister, has announced his first cabinet. His own portfolio includes crime and justice policy, community safety, relations with the police and crime commissioners, relations with the UK government over prisons and the probation service and the voluntary sector and volunteering. Clinks have written to the first minister to congratulate him on his appointment and to champion the role of the voluntary sector in meeting challenges within his portfolio. In other notable moves, Julie James AM has become Minister for Housing and Local Government with responsibly for housing provision and homelessness and Kirsty Williams AM has become the Minister for Education, with responsibility for Prison Education. Vaughan Gething AM remains Minister for Health and Social Services, covering healthcare in prison, mental health services and substance misuse.
Prisons
HMP Birmingham inquiry The Justice Committee has held an oral session about the failures of G4S that led the Ministry of Justice to taking over the running of HMP Birmingham last year. The committee heard evidence from Rory Stewart MP, Minister of State for Justice, Michael Spurr, Chief Executive Officer, Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service and Jerry Petherick, Managing Director, G4S, amongst others. Michael Spurr said that the government would continue to operate the prison for as long as was necessary to stabilise it. The session informs the HMP Birmingham inquiry, but also acted as the last session of the committee’s Prison Population 2022 inquiry. Anne Fox, Chief Executive at Clinks, attended parliament to give oral evidence to the inquiry in November 2018, and Clinks also submitted written evidence.
Restoring Something Lost In their evaluation of a pilot dog therapy scheme, the Centre for Mental Health found considerable, measurable, and statistically significant benefits to people in prison who had access to therapy dogs. The pilot, run by Rethink Mental Illness across three prisons in the North East, also recorded participants self-reporting an improvement in their wellbeing, and a statistically significant reduction in intentional self-harm. The Centre for Mental Health has recommended that Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service and prison governors should make therapy dog intervention more widely available across prisons and that providers of therapy dog intervention should consider group-based activity.
Health
The NHS long term plan The NHS has published its long term plan, which sets out their priorities for the next 10 years, including the long-term approach to health and justice. We are pleased to see that Clinks’ response to the consultation has been reflected in the final report, particularly the prioritisation of issues such as the continuity of care, meeting mental health needs and partnership working. The plan also makes a number of commitments which we supported in our response, including the expansion of Community Sentence Treatment Requirements and a full roll-out of the health and justice digital patient record information system across all adult prisons. Other important commitments are made, including the provision for everyone entering prison to receive both an initial health screening on entry and a follow up appointment within seven days.
Women
Broken Trust: The rising numbers of women recalled to prison The Prison Reform Trust has published a report which attributes the sharp increase in women being recalled to prison as an outcome of both the 2014 Transforming Rehabilitation probation reforms and the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014. The report was informed by a study of 24 women who had been recalled to prison, who described facing complex issues on release from custody, such as accessing appropriate accommodation, drug misuse and domestic violence, whilst receiving limited support from their responsible officer. The report makes recommendations including that the government establishes a national network of women-specific community services to deliver the Female Offender Strategy and provide the practical support women need and the provisions in the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014 to be repealed.
The Women’s Mental Health Taskforce The Women’s Mental Health Taskforce has released its final report which outlines the key principles that should ensure women access gender and trauma-informed care across services. It encourages commissioners, providers and practitioners to promote best practice in their organisations while taking into account women’s individual, gender-specific needs. Membership of the Taskforce included key national organisations responsible for policy, commissioning and delivery of services including NHS England, Public Health England and a number of voluntary organisations. The report draws on women’s lived experience of mental ill-health heard through a number focus groups, one of which Clinks was commissioned to run. The Women’s Mental Health Taskforce was set up in 2017 to tackle evidence of deteriorating mental health among women and poor outcomes experienced by those using support services.
Courts
Renewing trust: How we can improve the relationship between probation and the courts In this report, the Centre for Justice Innovation has found that there has been a 24% decline in the use of community sentences in England and Wales over the last 10 years. The report’s findings suggest this is in part due to a decline of trust in the delivery of community sentences, with sentencers highlighting concerns on the limited information on the services provided by Community Rehabilitation Companies and a lack of transparency about the Rehabilitation Activity Requirement. It makes a number of recommendations, including calling for more consistent probation staffing in courts, making training of the functioning of community sentences compulsory for new magistrates, and giving sentencers opportunities to review the progress of people serving community sentences.
Youth justice
HMIP Expectations Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons has published the fourth edition of its Expectations for children in custody – the criteria it uses during inspections to assess the treatment of children and the conditions in prisons in which they are held. The criteria is structured around four tests of a healthy prison- Safety, Care, Purposeful Activity, Resettlement- and within each test is an extensive set of expectations.
National protocol on reducing criminalisation of looked-after children The Department for Education has produced a new national protocol on reducing the criminalisation of looked-after children and care leavers. The protocol provides a framework of multi-agency working to develop local arrangements to reduce the criminalisation of looked-after children and care leavers. Some of the key priorities it identifies includes restorative and diversionary approaches to offending; better understanding amongst front-line professionals of the impact of trauma and abuse on a young person’s development; and in custodial settings, planning for resettlement from the start of a young person’s sentence. This protocol is aimed at local authority children’s services, local care providers, police forces, Youth Offending Teams, the Crown Prosecution Service, Youth Panels and health services.
Sex offences
Sexual offending: victimisation and the path through the criminal justice system The Office for National Statistics, in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice, Home Office and Crown Prosecution Service, has published an article on the prevalence and nature of sexual assault and the journey of the victims, and people who have committed offences through the criminal justice system. The data is primarily drawn from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, and estimates that approximately 700,000 people were victims of a sexual assault in the last year. The data shows that the majority of these cases will not enter the criminal justice system- less than one in five people who are victims of rape or assault by penetration reported their experience to the police.
How protected are people with protected characteristics in prison? In December, two government reports were published that focussed on the experience of people with protected characteristics in the criminal justice system- the Offender Equalities Annual Report, published by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, and Women and the criminal justice system 2017, published by the Ministry of Justice. Lauren Nickolls, Policy Officer at Clinks, has written a blog on what these reports indicate about the experiences of young people, women and people from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities. She highlights how young people between the age 18-20 are the most likely to self-harm in prison, that BAME people continue to be overrepresented in the prison population and that women continue to receive very short sentences for often minor, non-violent offences.
Independent Review of the Mental Health Act published Make Every Adult Matter (MEAM), a coalition of Clinks, Homeless Link and Mind, have responded to the final report of the Independent Review of the Mental Health Act. The Review, chaired by Professor Sir Simon Wesseley, was set up to look at how the legislation in the Mental Health Act 1983 is used and how practice can improve. MEAM welcome the review’s recognition of the need for more accessible and responsive mental health crisis services and community-based mental health services. It particularly welcomed the recognition that current opportunities for early intervention are being missed, leading to people’s first contact with services through the police, and that police cells should not be used as a place of safety and that health-based places of safety should be commissioned instead.
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Written monthly by...
Will Downs and Lauren Nickolls
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