Report authors: Jon Clements, Development Director | Sophie du Mont, Strategy and Insight Manager | Manon Roberts, Senior Analyst | Faerlie Wilson, Senior Analyst
Monday 5 March 2018
INTERIM REPORT (PDF): The case for change: Rewiring our system of punishment and rehabilitation
Twenty-five years ago, Tony Blair announced the new Labour criminal justice policy: ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. It was a classic piece of triangulation that included the competing punitive and liberal approaches to dealing with crime and offenders that have long characterised criminal justice reform.
Despite a plethora of reforms and changes to the justice system over the last quarter of a century by successive governments, the system is arguably neither ‘tough on crime’ nor on its ‘causes’. That is the conclusion of the first part of a Crest research project funded by the Hadley Trust looking at our current system of punishment and rehabilitation, analysing each component of the system and the extent to which it meets its objectives.
Recorded crime vs. Prison population in England and Wales 1990-2017:
Key findings
Our justice system is facing very different challenges to twenty five years ago. Crime is more harmful, offenders are more prolific and there is less money available.
But unlike other public services, the justice system has failed to adapt to these emerging challenges. Despite decades of change, many of the assumptions underpinning how justice is delivered have remained unchanged, resulting in too little punishment in the community and too little rehabilitation in prison. As our report sets out, failures remain across the system:
Low level offending is tolerated, rather than challenged;
Punishment within the community is virtually non-existent – meaning prisons are over-utilised;
Prisons and probation are over-stretched and lack the levers to address the social causes of crime, meaning rehabilitation is neglected.
Insufficient reforms, based on outdated assumptions about how to change offenders’ behaviour, underpin these failures through the ‘offender journey’ by:
Prioritising processes over relationships
Treating offenders as a homogeneous, rather than diverse group
Favouring the ‘rolling out’ of off-the-shelf solutions over innovation
Failing to address root causes
The criminal justice system has given up on transforming lives, in favour of processing people through the system.
Next steps
This is the interim report for this piece of work. The stale debate between those in favour of a more liberal/welfare-oriented justice system (focused on rehabilitation) and those in favour of a more punitive system (emphasising punishment) that has characterised justice for decades needs rethinking. Our current system delivers neither. A lack of credible community alternatives means prison remains the only ‘real’ punishment. And although prisons and probation are accountable for rehabilitation, they lack the levers to do the job properly.
We need a new model for justice, which balances punishment and rehabilitation. The solution is not to prioritise punishment or rehabilitation – but to combine both. Over the coming months our aim is to systematically re-think the entire purpose of the system, and design a system fit for the modern challenges we face.
Our principles going forward are:
Devolving power to shift money upstream
Integrating services
Deepening relationships
