Remembering Anne

Anne ( not her real name) gave evidence to the Justice Committee after Baroness Corston in late December  What a great shame the government in all its wisdom have completely excluded the noble baroness from all discussions about how to deal with women in the criminal justice system when she wrote the most holistic review and call for change. Some things are too important to be blue or red about. Purple is such a good color this season.

Lady Corston tells us that Lord McNally told her that a women's strategy to reduce reoffending would be forthcoming in the New Year.

December 2012
Anne was released from prison two and a half weeks ago. A was a victim of domestic violence for a  number of years. Eventually, she couldn't take it any longer and in an act of violence she killed her perpetrator and ex partner. She was convicted of murder and has just completed an 18 year prison sentence. Whilst still serving her sentence, A  was told she would receive extra support from probation, with a back up probation officer  and given a mentor in the community. The prison resettlement department also said they would help with her  resettlement pathways. Nothing transpired. She was released with a £46  release grant. She still has not  received a single payment  for jobseekers allowance and has to apply for a crisis loan and has spent much of today standing in the cold waiting for a food parcel. She is meant to be supported by a Stonham project where she resides  in  Kent however in spite of receiving additional funding for working with and housing Allison who is considered a high risk to the public and has MAPPA status, they are unable to assist with her most basic needs. She had to beg another resident of the project to lend her a tea cup to make a cup of tea on Friday. A  has no money for food. 

Whilst serving her sentence, A  says she was not supported by any of the  offending  behavior management courses or those meant to help her understand why she committed the crime and they were all about apportioning blame. 

Due to the nature of the crime she has had to take full responsibility for her actions in order to  get her parole. This defies any  evidence that it is helpful for women who kill, for reasons of domestic violence should be further punished in an already punitive system. The system forces women into assuming the role of the perpetrator  when in fact they are victims of domestic violence.   If she did not accept it was murder and not the tragic consequence of  a domestic violence situation, she would still be inside. A 's recent experiences, the lack of joined up resources and particularly the denial of any public agency including the prison service and the probation services  to take responsibility and work with her in a holistic fashion demonstrates, right now, how the criminal justice system continues to fail women offenders. A has just been informed her back up probation officer has been reassigned so now she has only one and she is only seeing probation only once a week although she did ask to be seen twice a week. None of the support or services which were promised to her have been made available and she is frankly, quite desperate to get her life back on track.  

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This is just one of the horror stories of women who are being failed by the criminal justice system. A system designed by men, for men, to punish and  mete out retribution. 

The scandal of A4e, an insider's view

Our intern K spent some time at Her Majesty's leisure at HMP YOI Feltham.
Here's his view on the   contracts announced today for learning and skills for offenders in prison and in the community for scandal ridden company A4e.

A4e are a company who are meant to deliver a service which they are  contracted to do with tax payers' money. They should be, and are responsible and accountable to us, the general public, for  delivering the various services which are procured by Government and are trusted and funded with large amounts of tax payers' money to ensure they deliver their services efficiently,  in the very least.

However, it appears this is not the case. A4e cannot clearly be trusted  to deliver contracts  procured by  Government, they are paid to deliver a service which they are not providing efficiently, and it looks like most of the tax payer’s money is just getting pocketed by these fat cats such as Emma  Harrison, the Chief Executive who recently stepped down as Family Tsar and  who  helped herself to £11m in bonuses over the last two years. Whilst she enjoys herself on the loot, living lavish, customers on her company's programs are floundering and are feeling the lack of provision  and witnessing first hand that A4e actually doesn't provide a service which helps them find employment but just make matters worse for them. People are beginning to “feel let down by the service that is meant to help them”. For example, Ms Verwaerde, 25, from Leicester who said that, she was put up for an interview by A4e, as part of the Coalition's Work Programme. The job was in sales, offering £7,000 a year plus commission. But after A4e told her she had been offered the position, she says she was discouraged from asking for written confirmation of her hours and pay; she was told she could have her benefits sanctioned if she did not accept the position, and was then told by two A4e staff that she could "give it (the job) a go" without having to notify the Jobcentre. Ms Verwaerde, whose ambition is to work in the police service one day, said she feels she has been failed by the very service meant to help her. "It felt like I was being pushed into a corner."  If she did not notify the JobCentre, she would be committing a fraud and would have faced sanctions, such as having her Job Seekers' Allowance cut or worse, criminal charges.

This raises serious concerns about whether  A4e are  fit for purpose, to deliver services to prisoners , especially  to   prisoners who are already vulnerable and a target to police because they will be on supervision licenses. Is it safe to allow them to be managed and forced into committing criminal acts, unknowingly by the employees of a company riddled with systemic fraud which is paid to assist them.   As evidenced  in  the case with Ms Verwaerde A4e are relaying the responsibility onto their vulnerable clients.

What the Government are doing taking on board A4e when they knew   serious allegations of systematic fraud existed regarding the  company and there have been numerous whisteblowers come forward since the most recent spate of arrests three weeks ago? It’s just as bad as letting an armed robber work as a cashier  in your bank is there a clear risk factor there. A4e have no other interest than to make a huge profit and deliver the service however inefficient it may be,  however how can we have a company with such problems internally be given contracts to help with the ex-offender community who really need help. An ex offender in work is far less likely to reoffend and gets a strong footing on his desistance  journey.

As someone who’s been prison before I want the Government to give out contracts to companies that are reliable, accountable and genuinely want to help me to get employed and not make life harder for me by pretending they are helping when really they are not doing nothing actually and potentially jeopardising my freedom.

But with the latest round of prison education contracts  announced today , others fear that in reality a system already under strain is about to become even more stretched, as ever more unworkable demands are heaped on it and its staff. In its submission to the Making Prisons Work review, the University and College Union told ministers its members were struggling to maintain standards in an environment increasingly hostile to learning, blaming the competitive retendering system. 

Cost-cutting in the pursuit of profits, attacks on staff pay and conditions, instability and bad management practises, including bullying, have resulted from the process, UCU claimed.

Charities subcontracted by the big private providers to deliver the service have warned they face going bust under harsh contracts that only pay out if they get a client into work and keep them there for six months, and last week, analysis by the National Audit Office found that rather than the 40% of people the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) estimates will get jobs via the programme, the figure is likely to be closer to 26%. That, the NAO said, increases the risk that providers might seek to protect profits by favouring those they can get into steady work more swiftly. There are fears that adopting a similar system in prison education will bring the same problems, the distorting effect of targets merely replaced with a similarly problematic focus on outcomes. Alastair Clark, co-leader on offender learning at the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, talks of the "perverse incentive to go for the quick wins" offered by payment by results; 

 "The people you can easily get into a job, and who can sustain it, could probably have done it themselves," says  Maria McNicholl from St Giles Trust. "Who is then helping people like a lot of our core clients? They're just being left as usual; nobody's paying you to help the people who need it most."

Why the Failure of the Rehabilitation Revolution Fails us All, from Inside Time

 By A psychology Assistant at a Southern prison, from insidetime issue September 2011

A prison psychology assistant wonders why all the government’s good ideas about rehabilitation have been shelved

A strain of vindictive stupidity stalks the land. At a time when our public services are being restructured, reduced or cut completely we have been offered a way to make savings that would have had a positive impact on one of the most difficult areas of public policy and possibly even changed the country’s approach to penal justice.

A recent U-turn on sentencing policy is a huge upset to the justice minister Ken Clarke, who had planned to end the rise in prison numbers and begin a “rehabilitation revolution” to reduce this country’s re-offending rate. It seemed like an idea whose time had come, with drastic changes needed to save money and a Tory party in power who wished to disavow their “nasty party” image. Clarke’s proposals were distinctly un-Tory, but they were also clearly welcomed by the party leadership, who would have known exactly what they were getting when they appointed him.

That the Coalition was forced to change its mind on the policy at a time when the argument for economic austerity had been all but won is a sign that public anger towards offenders is the only force sufficiently dangerous to change the mind of a government hell bent on its drive to reduce the size of the state.
Pictures of “Baby P” galvanised the nation’s conscience three years ago and forced the Labour government to address the chronic under-support of child protection services. Since then, this campaign has been more or less forgotten as social services are forced to make job cuts in the wake of massive budget cuts to local government.

In the current climate when the government remains immune to the lobbying of disability rights groups, healthcare professionals and public sector unions, there is much to learn about our priorities. We live in a country where to be “too lenient” is a political problem but to be negligent of the needs of the extremely vulnerable is not. News of cuts to disability benefit, to mental health and social services have created nothing like the furore raised to the suggestion that we reduce the amount of time offenders spend in prison from two thirds of their sentence to a half.

This change would have saved the Ministry of Justice £130m, but now that saving will have to come from other aspects of its work. One of the prime candidates is the probation service, which monitors the behaviour of offenders upon release. It will be a supreme irony that the same vituperative public who demanded a reversal of sentencing policy in the name of their safety will very likely be out at further risk by the u-turn.

A psychology Assistant at a Southern prison

Short sentences. But let's not quibble over the language.

Short sentences do not work, and in fact create  situations which lead to further re-offending.

Judge warns 'short prison sentences lead to reoffending' A judge yesterday attacked short jail sentences designed to ease prison overcrowding warning that they create a “revolving door” of reoffenders. A judge has criticised short sentences, warning they lead to re-offending Photo: REX By Murray Wardrop Judge Anthony Goldstaub QC said he had little choice but to let a repeat burglar walk free from court because prison had failed to curb his o ffending. He said the case of David McKenzie, 37, was “a strong counter to the argument that prison works” because the alcoholic thief's previous jail sentences provided no rehabilitation. McKenzie, 37, instead escaped with an 18-month community order, although, as a third time convicted burglar, he could normally have expected a minimum sentence of three years in jail. The case threatens to inflame the row over the Government’s prisons strategy after David Cameron signalled an embarrassing U-turn on Kenneth Clarke’s plans to halve sentences for criminals who plead guilty. The Justice Secretary – who has also called for tougher community punishments rather than jail sentences – has faced demands by fellow Tory MPs to resign for damaging the Conservatives’ reputation as the party of law and order.

Time to turn feminist Mr Justice Secretary? Theresa May get your Marigolds on.

More tosh ( nasty internal spinning from MoJ policy resistant wonks) about what The Justice Secretary is meant to have said about women and incarceration.

It doesn't tally at all with what he says privately, he conceeds women are "far more messed up than men" when they get to prison and the the prisons "don't know what to do with them". So how does that justify locking them up , when diversion sentences are more successful in cutting reoffending and clearly more cost-effective?

Released from behind the Times paywall.

Mary Bowers and Richard Ford

Last updated June 3 2011 12:01AM

 

Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, is set to reject calls to speed up the closure of women’s prisons, in a blow to penal reformers who want thousands of female offenders to be spared jail. He is also to ignore demands to appoint a “women’s justice champion” with the task of ensuring that the specific needs of female offenders are at the heart of his department’s work.

Mr Clarke’s rebuff to penal reformers will fuel their fears that women offenders are being marginalised in sentencing reforms to be outlined later this month.A report to be published next week is to call for far-reaching reform of justice, with a switch of emphasis away from imprisoning women to developing community-based alternatives.

But Mr Clarke’s insistence that there will be no swift moves to close women’s prisons and his robust response to penal reform groups will delight those Conservative MPs who believe he is soft on crime.
Cuts in police numbers, along with sentencing reforms intended to stabilise and then reduce the prison population, are provoking fears that the coalition is soft on law and order.

David Cameron will seek to reassure the public and his party that the Government has a tough approach to crime when he makes a speech on law and order later this month. He will speak shortly before Mr Clarke unveils proposals to overhaul sentencing, including plans to divert men and women suffering from mental health, drug and alcohol abuse away from the criminal justice system and to health facilities for treatment.
Penal reformers claim that thousands of female criminals currently jailed for non-violent crimes should not be sent to jail but punished in the community.

The latest figures show that just under 45 per cent of women sent to jail in 2009 were convicted of theft, fraud and forgery offences, compared with 21 per cent of men. Just 14 per cent of women jailed were convicted of violence against the person, compared with 21 per cent of men.

Andrew Neilson, assistant director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said that Mr Clarke could take steps to reduce the number of women in jail without alarming the public.

“He could target this area as a way of reducing the prison population. Cutting the number of women in prison is much easier to sell to the public than men, particularly as so many women are in prison for non-violent crimes.”

Penal reform groups believe that the momentum for reforming the way women are dealt with in the justice system has slowed since Labour lost the general election. Under Labour, there was a female prisons minister who also championed women’s justice.

There are also fears over the future funding for a network of pioneering centres set up to help overhaul the way female offenders are treated. They were seen as the core element of a strategy to keep women out of prison and able to remain in their communities.

The Government gave £15.6 million over four years to trial centres around the country when they were piloted in 2007. Last month, the Government added £1.7 million to the £1.5 million provided by charities to ensure the survival of 26 centres, after fears that several were facing closure.

Crispin Blunt, the Prisons Minister, made clear that the Justice Ministry contribution was a “one-off” and there are fears that charities will be unwilling or unable to bear the financial burden of keeping the centres open.
Early findings from the centres suggest that they have a better record of turning women away from a life of crime. Anawim centre in Birmingham reported last year that 3 per cent of women using the unit had reoffended, compared to 54 per cent of those in jail.

The centres also represent a much cheaper and more effective way of dealing with female offenders. It costs, on average, about £54,000 to keep a woman in prison for a year compared with between £10,000-15,000 for a community order.

A Ministry of Justice official said last night that the Government remained committed to developing policies addressing the particular needs of women offenders.

THE TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE SLEEPING

In spite of lots of promises and a wad of cash from the Justice Secretary and the Minster for Health, Andrew Lansley,  who signed up to divert mentally ill patients from the criminal justice system for proper health care to meet complex diagnosis, it appears, in that same old time-honoured fashion, not much is happening on the ground.

It took the tragic death of a son of a member of the Women's Institute to bring about this awareness.
How many more deaths is it going to take to actually do something about it? This isn't justice this is barbarism and didn't Hitler do something similar?

.Mentally ill treated like criminals