We must find better ways to rehabilitate offenders

Oct 9 2009 Agenda, Birmingham Post

We must reform our prisons to offer effective rehabilitation, argue the organisers of the Churches Criminal Justice Forum.

According to the Prison Service website, another 450 places have been added to Birmingham prison recently as a result of a multi-million pound investment programme.

It now holds over 1400 men. Like many prisons across the country, it is expanding to cope with the ever increasing number of men being sent to jail by the courts.

The prison population has increased by around a third since Labour came to power promising to be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’.

Today, there are over 84,000 people in British prisons, which are overcrowded and facing massive funding cuts, reducing work designed to aid rehabilitation. Whilst funding to reform prisoners is being squeezed, hundreds of millions of pounds are being found to build big new prisons, including one for the West Midlands region, and to pay for expansions on the Birmingham model.

So, is prison working? Well that depends on what you think prison is for. If the purpose is to hold people who offend in giant warehouses for a while, to satisfy the public’s sense that some of justice is being dispensed, then yes, they do their job.

But if we want a criminal justice system that seriously addresses the underlying causes of offending, and reduces crime, then, well, the facts speak for themselves. Over six out of ten men leaving prison are re-convicted of another offence within two years of release. For young offenders the failure rate is even higher. If the system worked, we would be closing prisons down rather than building more. Instead of multi-million pound investments into Victorian jails, we could be spending the money on health or education.

Crimes committed by ex-prisoners cost society an estimated £11 billion a year, and untold misery. At the Churches Criminal Justice Forum, a national Christian network of people involved in frontline work in prisons and with ex-offenders, we think its time for a different approach.

Whilst the National Offender Management Service has focused on ‘reducing re-offending’, the reality for the majority of prisoners on release is that they walk out of the prison with a £46 discharge grant, and no support from the State in terms of their resettlement or rehabilitation. The rhetoric is simply not matched by the reality. The Probation Service used to be a relatively well-resourced service, focused on supporting ex-offenders with training, jobs, rehab, housing, family relationships; in short, all the things that are proven to have an impact on reducing re-offending. Successive governments have stripped Probation of its resources and it now focuses almost exclusively on ‘public protection’. Of course, this is a vitally important role; like everyone else, I want my family to be protected from the most dangerous offenders. But society also suffers enormously as a result of the almost total lack of support for the vast majority of offenders who are released from prison every day, People like Robert.

Robert had served ten prison sentences the last time he was released after a six month spell. He had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

The chaplain who knew him well believed that his condition had been triggered by the appalling childhood abuse he had suffered at the hands of his father. We don’t really know the full story. What we do know is that he had run away from home, started using drink and drugs to numb the pain he felt inside, and had become homeless. On the street, he had become delusional.

He had been prescribed powerful anti-psychotic drugs, but as a homeless person, he wouldn’t take them. He said they made him sleepy, and that was dangerous on the streets. So he heard voices, and got involved in fights and petty theft. Two weeks before his latest release from prison, he had been found a hostel place for a fortnight. He had also been found a doctor to give him his prescriptions. He didn’t want to go to the hostel, and was worried about what would happen when his two week stay came to an end, but it was an alternative to the street, and he needed an address in order to get his medication. Three days before release, and there was a bombshell. The hostel closed for repairs. On the day of release, a charity based at the prison helped him find a bed and breakfast, miles from anyone he knew. He left the prison with a £46 discharge grant. That was it.

How surprised are you to learn that he is back in prison? He admitted himself to a mental hospital as he recognised his condition was worsening. Whilst in there, he assaulted a nurse. But instead of being treated as a mentally ill patient, he was recalled to prison.

Whichever party wins the next election has a clear choice to make. Does it decide to address the needs of those many chaotic, damaged people, who are addicted and often mentally ill, by putting them in prison, only to release them to minimal support and see them offend again? Or does it decide to spend what money there is on alternatives, such as community chaplaincy schemes, therapeutic communities, and community-based treatment programmes?

This is not a criticism of the Prison Service. They work extremely hard to run decent, safe prisons, and to cope with the daily influx of very challenging and sometimes vulnerable people. Many prison officers, together with charities, prison chaplains and community chaplaincy schemes, are delivering schemes across the country to support ex-offenders. People from churches are leading the way at many prisons, plugging the gaps left by the State. With more government support, we could do more.

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We have the passion and the conviction, and increasingly, we have the skills and expertise. But we need the Government to invest in us.

The public needs to play its part and tell politicians that the system isn’t working, and that we want an rational and humane approach to solving the problem of crime. Simply locking up more and more people in expensive new prisons will fail. Like motorways, as soon as they are built, they will fill up.

Robert went from being victim to villain in a few sad, short, chaotic years. We all want justice for victims. But let us also demand that our politicians give us a justice system that recognises that many of those who offend are themselves victims. On October 28, church groups, prison chaplains and Christians from across the country are gathering in Birmingham to call on the Government to think again about the use of imprisonment.

Andy Keen-Downs, Prison Advice & Care Trust & Churches Criminal Justice Forum
Paula Harvey, Quaker Peace & Social Witness
Reverend Christopher Jones, Archbishops Council, Church of England
Philipa Gitlin, Caritas Social Action Network
Rev. Sheila Foreman, Methodist Church
Bruce Chilton, Unitarian Church