Prisonomics (25 page)

A full dress rehearsal for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
was held in the private crescent at the front of the house. All the neighbours came, bringing their own chairs and umbrellas as it rained a bit at times,
but it was brilliant. I could hear my daughter’s voice loud and clear while sitting by the front steps of my house which was as far as I was allowed on my curfew days after 7 p.m. The neighbours loved it and the company took the play and
As You Like It
round the country. I caught it in a matinee at Russell Square Gardens two weeks later with lots of other friends, getting back home just in time for curfew that night.

A difficult decision to make: would I have enough time to get to Oxford and back to watch my son, who is studying there, act in the Jez Butterworth play
The
Winterling
? Given I had to consider the tag, the only chance to see it was on the Saturday matinee on the last day of the show. I agonised about the logistics: should I leave at the interval? After Act 3? How hard would it be to escape unnoticed without interrupting the play? We discussed it all week long and my son was petrified that I might get stuck in traffic on the M40 and miss my curfew time. In the end I chickened out on the grounds that the last thing I wanted to do was have a son possibly worrying more about me than his performance. To make up for my absence, I sent lots of family members instead, including my brother who had come especially from Greece.

This afternoon my son and I went to watch Chelsea in their last game of the season. The game started at 4 p.m.; we beat Everton and finished safely in third place, so Champions League again next season. There were lots of handshakes from the other fans, the odd kiss and I got a warm welcome back – and
we forgot all about timing. We got stuck in a
terrible
traffic jam trying to cross Albert Bridge and got home with one-and-a-half minutes to spare before curfew.

Back to business and my first public speaking engagement was arranged to take place at the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF), a financial sector think tank, at the Armourers’ Hall in the City of London. I was to be the respondent to the Croatian central bank governor, who was to explain his country’s thinking in advance of them joining the EU on 1 July, the first new country to join since Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. There was much frantic brushing up on recent developments, based on little idea of what the governor was likely to say. The talk was so very important for my reputation and I was keen to go back to what I was doing before prison as quickly as possible. I survived it (just) and without incident; it was great to work on familiar ground again and everyone was so very kind and supportive.

Kristiina Reed, who was helping me with my research, and I met with Gill Arupke, the CEO of Penrose, a charity which runs a number of projects which rehabilitate and reintegrate ex-offenders, drug users and people with mental health issues back into the community and help them to stop reoffending. I was keen to discover what charities in general were doing to help offenders and more specifically to see whether there were any lessons to be learned from Penrose’s experience in Lewisham, where the charity is paid by
results for keeping offenders (many of whom are also arrested and charged by the police for illegal drug offences) out of prison for more than twelve months. In particular, I wondered how evaluation actually worked in this field.

It turns out that the first problem the charity faced was that the full number of offenders with a
drug-related
problem was not known; unless they were already in treatment there was no data shared by the various agencies involved in helping offenders. The police are also reluctant to share the information they have with partner agencies as they see it as strictly confidential. This, Penrose argues, makes it very difficult for any agency to map out the required staff structure needed to meet whatever demand there may be for the service.

Penrose runs a number of residential units varying from the pretty open to the quite restrictive
depending
on the court orders the residents have received. In their first evaluation Penrose found that the
reoffending
rate of those helped by the charity was some 5 per cent – and this was without the charity doing what I feared, which is creaming off the easiest cases and ignoring the rest. So this is encouraging.

Whether you would achieve similar success rates if rehabilitating services for offenders were contracted out to private companies or charities (operating within a pay-by-results scheme), as proposed by Chris Grayling in his Transforming Rehabilitation agenda,
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depends on a number of things which may just not be available.

First, you need baseline data so you can actually measure the improvement you are effecting, which in itself faces the aforementioned problems. Second,
you need to be able to calculate proper attribution; in other words you need to have an agreed concept of ‘additionality’, an economic term that calculates the actual extra impact of the intervention that has achieved the result. Yet if the economy improves at country or local level and offenders are now able to get jobs, which wasn’t the case before, the chances of reoffending tend to reduce and the problem becomes one of identifying the extra impact of the intervention in improving reoffending rates outside the effect of the general improvement in economic prosperity. Third and most important, there is the issue of who can in fact provide the service. Payment by results requires charities to have a large cash flow so, as they can’t borrow much from the banks, except on mortgage, they need to have large reserves if they are to play a significant role in looking after offenders on behalf of the government if probation services are cut.

The fear is that it will only be the large private firms that can raise cash easily while the smaller specialist firms, often with the most innovative ideas and greatest effectiveness, may not be able to compete to take on this job. The trick would be to negotiate, if possible, with the government, an upfront payment to cover costs of providing the service while the payment by results based on reduced reoffending rates becomes a ‘bonus’, or alternatively to try to imitate the experience of St Giles Trust, a similar outfit to Penrose, through the issuing of a social impact bond. This is a social fund for which returns are based on results, in the case of St Giles, for example, by reducing reoffending in Peterborough.

There is a lot of excitement about the potential
availability of finance for this purpose and on 26 June, nearly a fortnight after my meeting with Penrose, I chaired a big conference on social finance organised by employment charity Tomorrow’s People. The discussion at the conference, however, reinforced my view that charities, especially small ones, will struggle to raise enough funds to compete with the bigger private firms in looking after large numbers of offenders and ex-offenders. And they will also need to improve their own competences if they are to manage large projects of the sort envisaged by the government, something organisations have been trying to help with. City livery companies like the Worshipful Company of Management Consultants and others who work closely with the Centre for Charitable Effectiveness at the Cass Business School provide pro-bono assistance to charities in various areas of their operations. Pro Bono Economics, a charity of which I am a patron, was set up to provide expert economic evaluation support to other charities and provides them with free economic input by drawing resources both from private organisations and from the Government Economic Service.

One Whitehall charity that has been reaching out to help the prison community is the Whitehall & Industry Group (WIG), run by my ex-colleague Mark Gibson from the BIS. WIG offers a range of opportunities to bring business, government and the not-for-profit sector closer together. The idea is to share expertise, broaden networks and develop talent. WIG tells me that it has recently placed civil service fast-streamers with charities such as RAPt, Revolving Doors, Catch22 and the Irene Taylor Trust, all of whom provide rehabilitation support to offenders
and ex-offenders. These are all very interesting charities. The Irene Taylor Trust, for example, has been delivering its music-in-prisons programme since 1995 whereby music is used to inspire change in individuals. In the past eighteen months it has extended its work to include ‘through-the-gate’ support to
ex-prisoners
and delivers projects with young people at risk of offending in the community. Interestingly WIG has recently been working with the trust to appoint a business development manager to look at the income stream from its music-in-prisons programme.

What most charities working in this sphere need help in is how to measure the returns they are getting – and the measurements are inevitably ‘soft’, in other words qualitative rather than ‘hard’ quantitative ones, but soft outcomes also matter and are important. Dan Corry of New Philanthropy Capital, a
consultancy
providing services to the charity sector, told me that in his view it is a myth that you can calculate a social cost by comparing £1 spent on, say, mental care with £1 spent on preventing drug abuse. Indeed there are surprisingly few such evaluations around. This is not a view shared by all. An impact evaluation carried out for the charity Penrose shows that ‘for every £1 invested in support-focused alternatives to prison, £14 of social value is generated to women and their children, victims and society generally, over a ten-year period’.
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But other evaluations are much softer though no less important for that. A 2008 report on music in prisons for the Irene Taylor Trust, for example, based on a series of interviews concluded: ‘The findings thus far show that the music in prisons project has beneficial effects on well-being, relationships, learning
capacity and motivation.’
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The authors argue that further work does need to be done, and the project extended but the impact on prisoners is real. Significantly they draw a link from their work on the impact of music courses on other aspects of a prisoner’s behaviour which is particularly important in terms of setting prisoners on the path of
improvement
and ultimate rehabilitation and reduced
reoffending
. The report draws on earlier research which points to ‘a relationship between an individual’s sense of self-efficacy and confidence to participate in educational activities’. They therefore concluded that the ‘project clearly does impact on individuals’ feelings of self-efficacy, as well as engaging those individuals with limited or undeveloped educational skills who may not have succeeded in a traditional education setting. This leads us to surmise that the music project creates a pathway for some inmates to engage in the skills training that they so obviously need.’ The conclusions are useful in that regard but even here the authors are suggesting that there needs to be a lot more work and that of course generalising is difficult as clearly not all prisoners are right for this kind of approach.

So what will happen next? So far the Ministry of Justice proposals to outsource most of the prison probation system have been greeted with guarded optimism by charities. I have no idea how it will all pan out in the end but the charities I spoke to hoped that it would work better than the Work Programme, which contracted out Jobcentres to private firms and paid them by results. This concluded with scandals of providers fiddling the results and creaming off the easier-to-place jobseekers, ignoring the rest in
the process. But it looks like opinion in the charity sector remains highly divided. Clive Martin, director of Clinks, the umbrella body for criminal justice charities (and not to be confused with the Clink restaurant charity) discusses in the influential
Third Sector
magazine the possibility of some voluntary sector organisations becoming the prime provider of those services rather than being sub-contractors to large private companies as has been mostly the case with the Work Programme. However, Andrew Neilson, director of campaigns for the Howard League for Prison Reform, says: ‘The MoJ wants to drive down costs, improve quality, and introduce a new system, all on a tight timetable … It has bitten off more than it can chew.’
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The justice select committee has moved into that debate, too, arguing in its 13 July report that the problems of payment by results may lead to perverse incentives, particularly in the provision of
appropriate
gender-specific services as women ‘are often classified for probation purposes as presenting a lower risk of reoffending or harm, but have a higher level of need requiring more intensive and costly intervention’. The committee is in favour of ‘commissioning services for women offenders
separately
, and for applying other incentive mechanisms to encourage not just a reduction in reoffending, but also diversion from crime’.
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My hope is that both the third sector and the government have learned important lessons from the Work Programme and that they can put these lessons to good use to help women. It is crucial that the Ministry of Justice initiative succeeds for charities, prisoners and the public purse. If charities can
form consortia to bid for contracts, the expertise they are able to bring to their work will only bring better outcomes for the criminal justice system.

Today’s
Observer
featured an article by Yvonne Roberts, a journalist but also a trustee for Women in Prison who had spent time after my release filling me in on the work of the various charities
operating
in this field. The article discussed the death of a mother who hanged herself after going to prison for a second time rather than sell her home and dislocate her children in order to pay back some £17,000 she had embezzled from her employers to help her repay loans. Roberts was making very strongly the case that vulnerable women should not be sent to jail but that a community service with a later opportunity of being able to work again and pay money back slowly may well have been hugely preferable for all concerned in that instance. And it probably would have been a much better answer for her daughters, who are just two of the tens of thousands of children a year affected by mothers going to jail.