Author: Robbie Cowbury, Back on Track Manchester

The Independent Sentencing Review (ISR) rightly identifies that achieving its aims will involve placing a greater responsibility on “a Probation Service already under great strain”[1], with Chapter 7 focused on this precise challenge.

Back on Track’s 45 plus years of experience supporting adults in the criminal justice system have demonstrated extremely clearly to us how the voluntary sector can achieve what is hoped for in this chapter and reduce re-offending for people in the community. Supporting the aims and taking on the same role as the Probation Service are not the same things however: there is a line between what voluntary sector and state provision in the criminal justice space should cover.

Walking this line appropriately could be the key to unlocking voluntary sector resource and delivering the ISR’s aims. Getting it wrong could just as easily scupper any chances of the system being able to deliver the cost saving, public safety, rehabilitation and victim satisfaction goals which it has admirably set for itself.

There are two important aspects which our experience suggests should inform where this line is:

• How voluntary sector partners providing support based on identity and belonging reduce re-offending
• The difference between market stewardship and New Public Management (NPM) approaches in unlocking voluntary sector resource.

Identity and Belonging in Criminal Justice

The first and most important element to establish is the effectiveness of voluntary sector provision at reducing reoffending for individuals in the community. This outcome is after all the primary way the ISR proposes reducing the ever-expanding prison population and providing better value for money to the taxpayer.

The method we have seen work at Back on Track is based on identity and belonging, the method identified as key desistance factors in the Ministry of Justice’s recent synthesis of evidence to reduce reoffending[2]. For over 45 years, we have offered learning, support and community to adults who experience multiple disadvantages, many of whom have been in the criminal justice system including currently through the GMIRS Wellbeing Service commissioned by the Probation Service and Combined Authority. Education an essential part of our offer, but whether people are accessing our Learning Programmes, getting practical support with things like benefits and debt, or volunteering in our Training Kitchen & Café, the common theme is that they are developing new identities as part of a community which recognises who they are becoming not who they have been.

What we’re talking about here are secondary and tertiary stages of Desistance Theory, and we have many examples from the people we’ve supported of how this works. For instance, following one of our ‘Challenging Negative Thinking’ classes provided for members of the GMIRS Wellbeing Service recently, a member remarked to their key-worker that they’d “never felt able to talk about their feelings before”. In this class, with people who’d had similar experiences, and the opportunity to learn about these things and then practice them safely, they started doing precisely that. With encouragement from a trusted key worker, they carried that into their other interactions at our Wellbeing Hub. This maximised the impact of additional therapeutic support that was available, began improving their emotional wellbeing, which in turn improved their relationships with family members so they could maintain a stable living situation.

Beyond the straightforward practical impact was the deeper change which comes from seeing themselves as someone who can talk about their feelings, and having this recognised by others who don’t define them by offences or past behaviours. In their case and in many others, we’ve seen how this shift in identity, bolstered by community connections which sustain hope, fuels long-term change in ways which are hard to achieve in other environments.

If the criminal justice system is to achieve the aims of the ISR then it needs more of this sort of transformation. It is what the HM Inspectorate of Probation’s  submission to the Review described when suggesting “relationships should be central and take precedence over processes”, and it is the approach which is the default for the voluntary sector. It is by no means resource neutral, but in comparison to punitive approaches it is overwhelmingly more affordable as well as more impactful long term. Voluntary sector providers are of course not the only agencies who are able to do this, but they are where the most skills, experience and capacity to do so currently exists. As the recommendations in Chapter 7 recognise, there is a great deal of “support that can be more effectively provided by the third sector, with the Probation Service maintaining oversight”[3].

Creating the conditions to realise this

If the argument above is accepted, then commissioning more voluntary sector partners to provide rehabilitation support to people on community sentences will be required. In doing so, there will be a need to consider the founding principles of the ISR aside from reducing re-offending, the ones about punishing offenders or protecting the public. That is where walking the line becomes tricky.

We’ve all seen the journey before: the outset of a new commissioning process is full of promise and excitement, exploring innovative ways to reduce re-offending and connecting to the partners who are eager to do it. Then pressure starts to build to give maximum reassurance that public money is being spent efficiently and effectively. The emphasis starts to switch to contract conditions, and what responsibility commissioned providers have to take on for monitoring and supervising of people on community sentences. By the time it goes out to tender, the effectiveness and impact of the service has been consumed by other considerations, and the pool of providers with the appetite or ability to deliver it has been well and truly muddied.

Happily, we have positive examples of commissioning that doesn’t follow this path too. This includes the current commissioning arrangements we have through the GMIRS Wellbeing Service. The service is a devolved version of the national Commissioned Rehabilitative Services programme, and as such has been able to adapt to our local circumstances (a positive feature referenced in the ISR itself, no less[4]).

From a commissioning point of view, all of the positives of that project (and others which we would consider favourably) are related to the dynamics of market stewardship as defined by the Institute for Government’s 2013 ‘Making Public Service Markets Work’ report.[5] In contrast, nearly all of our negative commissioning experiences come from practices rooted in New Public Management. Its emphasis on comprehensive specifications, competitive tendering, process-focused key performance indicators and in-depth monitoring has an obvious appeal for public sector commissioners eager to demonstrate they are providing value for money to the taxpayer. However, in doing so, it has time and again deprived the voluntary sector of what makes it special by boxing it into a becoming a shadow of the public or private sectors. Market stewardship is the opposite, and much more akin to how the GM IRS Wellbeing Service has developed. It treads the line, recognising where the voluntary sector’s strengths and involving it appropriately in sentencing and public safety responsibilities.

We have shown in Greater Manchester that we can tread this line in a way which achieves all of the ISR’s ambitions, and we are certainly not the only place in the country to have demonstrated this. If the implementation of the ISR’s proposals are approached with similar bravery and a collaborative spirit, we stand an excellent chance nationally of seeing those results play out across the country.

[1] Independent Sentencing Review, p5

[2]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/680101e3da5bb2fc4a681fcb/Final_PDF_Reducing_Reoffending_-_Evidence_Synthesis.pdf

[3] ISR, p118

[4] ISR, p117

[5]instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/Making_public_service_markets_work_final_0.pdf