Just before the turn of the year the Ministry of Justice and Department for Work and Pensions produced a joint analysis of the criminal records of benefit claimants. This was the first joint report of its kind. If you missed it, some of the headline stats went as follows:
•33% of JSA claimants have a criminal record;
•26% of all claimants (just under 5m) have been cautioned or convicted in the last decade;
•75% of people convicted in 2008 had claimed out of work benefits during the last two years;
•50% of those released in 2008 were still claiming benefit two years later.
In addition, analysis of re-offending rates continue to show more than 50% of offenders reoffend and end up back in prison. If we are going to tackle this problem - and other public service challenges - this 'joined up' data and analysis across departments is essential. Only by considering the total system are we are going to get better public services, delivering better outcomes, at higher quality and lower cost.
Prevention of reoffending is an issue that is important to me. As A4e has developed, we have often employed people who have criminal records. Six years ago, when we started working on education initiatives in prisons, we wanted to employ an ex-offender on the team but due to the security requirements of the contract with the government, could not. I understand the risks but if we cannot show through public programmes how ex-offenders can re-engage with business, what example do we set to other employers?
More needs to be done and last year when I was at the Koestler Awards I talked frankly with a manager there about her problems in finding work with a record for white collar crime. The challenges she faced were significant. The links between stable employment and the impact on reoffending have been understood for a while. In 2002, the Social Exclusion Unit produced a study indicating that stable employment reduced reoffending by 30-50%. However, 'stable employment' requires a number of other support structures around the individual to assist in meeting that objective.
The media often focused on the willingness of employers - or lack of - to consider ex-offenders in various employment opportunities. This is a barrier that can be overcome. Many businesses will actively engage to work with ex-offenders - sure it needs more work yet, but some of the UK government's reforms will enable that. I want to highlight some other issues which need to be part of the UK 'rehabilitation revolution' if we are going to reduce recidivism significantly and for the long term.
Many departments/agencies of local and central government impact on the lives of an offender on their journey out of prison and back into society. My experience of A4e's work in providing employment and skills services to offenders on release as well as being a provider of education (not employment) services inside prison has highlighted a number of areas where various problems manifest in trying to develop coherent approaches to preventing reoffending. If we are going to introduce payment by results models, based on reducing re-offending - and we should - then we also need to find a way to commission services that will allow these issues to be addressed.
•Employer access: enabling employers who are willing to do so (and there are plenty) to come into prison to meet prospective employees and ensure training meets their needs. Similarly, prisoners need to be escorted by a guard to meet employers within the prison structure and, as resources reduce, this makes another potential barrier to supporting rehabilitation.
•Housing: given the movement of prisoners around prison estate throughout their sentence (which could see a London offender moved 200 miles away to the North West, then a week later shipped 100 miles east), finding them a secure place to live close to a prospective job is incredibly difficult. The reality is that an offender's 'home' location is, in the majority of cases, many miles from the prison they are held in. Therefore, the join up of housing benefit, finding somewhere, securing any other benefits pre-employment start and interfacing with probation services and other services is overly complex. It can also means that there is very little incentive for 'local' providers delivering with any proximity to a prison to provide in-reach support - the vast majority will be dispersed all over the country on release.
•Health needs: mental health difficulties in particular continue to be a very significant barrier to employment for many ex-offenders. The support in prison and the support on release requires much more coherent integration. Tackling mental health problems can be crucial in supporting people back into work- and more importantly sustaining it -so we must do more on this.
•Finance and debt support: the scale to which debt problems get worse for offenders whilst in prison and the challenges in dealing with finance on release are still very much underestimated. There are many ways to support this from current initiatives but agencies are insufficiently joined up and prisons are often unaware or unable to take advantage of plentiful available support.
•Social networks and family support: a key part of rehabilitation focuses on social networks and family engagement (often reengagement) to enable changes to previous behaviour. There is a proven and positive correlation between the number of social visits an offender receives whilst in custody and their outcomes on release. Again, this is an activity that is fragmented across the geographies of local government, service providers and the prison estate.
•Demand led training and employment in prisons: the activities in prison are too often focused on 'productive activity' - keeping people busy and not sufficiently aligned to the labour market prisoners will face on release. Much more needs to be done here. However, the reforms to prison education which will begin taking effect in Summer 2012 should finally address this.
My organisation delivers a range of these services inside and outside prison. However, even with that expertise, trying to join this up for prisoners and ex-offenders we have worked with is incredibly difficult. The requirement to work across multiple agencies in government, who are not tasked with integrating their service as part of a more holistic approach to keeping an ex-offender out of prison, means organisations in this space fail to make enough sustainable impact.
The implications of this are obvious. The longer it takes to sort out benefits or financial problems, the more likely the risk that someone might reoffend to resolve that issue. Similarly, with no stable housing or family support, and with the tendency to fall back into the same social networks which resulted in the original crime, the risk of reoffending increases. If mental health issues remain untreated or undiagnosed, this impacts on any chance of getting back to work and again, falling back into old habits of offending can easily happen.
So, what can we do?
The 'rehabilitation revolution' is the right strategic direction. Payment by results is the right direction, with providers and partnerships measured and rewarded on the impact they make in reducing reoffending. Joint working between MoJ and DWP is a great start, as is structured, focused work on early entry into employment & training programmes for offenders on release.
This 'join up' is only the start. I know it is hard - I have worked across more than 20 departments and agencies trying to deliver a coherent service to the same consumers. However, the issues I have touched on above cut across many agencies. The costs are high - to society, to the public purse and in human terms. Whilst social investment approaches - such as the Bond in Peterborough - provide the freedom to tackle these issues, they do not yet provide a framework for joining up existing services more effectively or reducing the system wide costs of offending. Most importantly, we are still a long way from integrating the support needed to fundamentally shifting the scale of reoffending.
The initiatives launched by the MOJ and DWP are an excellent start. However, we must explore how to better engage with other agencies and spending departments, for example via things like Community Budgets. This needs more innovation, more research, more pilots and we will have to take some risks in order to radically reduce reoffending. Make significant inroads in the UK and many other countries are keen to learn from our experience.