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Tuesday, 10 December 2019

"How Can government get it so wrong and while they dId so there were further deaths. 10th of December, Remembering hundreds of prisoners who lost there life to the injustice of the IPP Sentence. Ministers should look at the impact the whole sentence has caused and continues to cause the families each and every day.



Deaths to be investigated twenty three have dies within a fortnight of being released.
Deaths following release from prison to be jointly investigated by criminal justice """" and healthcare agencies .We need an investigation in the UK into "hundreds of deaths of  IPP  and the deaths after. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-50735550

IPP Campaign https://home.38degrees.org.uk/2016/08/25/ipp-prisoners-campaign-update/


ECtHR rules IPP sentences breach human rights Art 5(1)

Postdate 18 Sep 2012

The ECtHR gave judgment today in James, Wells and Lee v UK ECHR 340 (2012). It held unanimously, that there had been a violation of Article 5(1) (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) concerning the Applicants’ detention following the expiry of the minimum terms in their indeterminate sentences for the public protection (IPPs).

Garden Court North Chambers’ Pete Weatherby QC acted for the lead case of Brett James, instructed by Erica Restall of Switalskis Solicitors, Bradford.

The Court held that the failure to provide sufficient rehabilitative courses led to arbitrary detention after the punishment phase of the sentence had been served.

The Court found that such imprisonment was premised on the understanding that prisoners would be able to rehabilitate, and the suggestion of the domestic courts that this was an aspiration rather than a requirement was incorrect. The Court held that no realistic consideration had been given to the impact of the sentences of IPP when they were introduced in 2005, and this had led to the problems.

The domestic Courts held that the Secretary of State had breached his public law duty to provide courses, but this did not mean that the detention had become unlawful under English and Welsh law, or under the Convention. The ECtHR disagreed.

Mr James was awarded 3,000 euros in respect of non-pecuniary damage for 5 months arbitrary detention.

It is of note that the UK has nearly 14,000 indeterminate sentence prisoners, more than the combined total of all the other 46 countries of the Council of Europe. One in five sentenced prisoners in the UK is serving an indeterminate sentence. The last publicly available figures show that one in three IPP prisoners have not completed a single rehabilitative course. There are currently more than 6,000 serving IPP prisoners a 58% of them have served beyond their tariff dates.

Although the cases decided today relate to the position several years ago, the position remains difficult. A 2012 MoJ report indicates that Parole Board members (who decide whether or not to release IPP prisoners) feel access to courses and resources generally continue to be a barrier to the release of IPP prisoners.

Pete was interviewed for the BBC Radio 4 Today programme and BBC Radio 5 live to explain the significance of today’s European Court ruling. On the Today programme, he commented:

“Although various measures have been brought in in the 7 years since [IPP sentences were introduced in 2005, there are certainly still extremely serious problems and actually a very small percentage of IPP prisoners have been released at all and so the absolute number of IPP prisoners in the system is still going up.”

On the Radio 5 live programme Pete added:

“…it will no longer be open to the government to argue that rehabilitation of these prisoners was an aspiration rather than a required.



Prison Reform
We stand with BIHR - The British Institute of Human Rights and over 100 other organisations on #HumanRightsDay in calling on all party leaders to commit to safeguarding universal human rights.
Read the full letter at https://www.bihr.org.uk/News/human-rights-day-2019

Bad Management of prisons and the  long-ford lecture.
https://www.facebook.com/wearestraightline/videos/573945896755741/UzpfSTE4ODMzMDc0MTE5NzMwMjoyODYzODI0NTIwMzE0NTY0/?__tn__=%2Cd%2CP-R&eid=ARDl1KHkVlOrtMP2-9gcVw0KnTC5Cp6eAYnLsseGQOryxAOrUMjXJA4C5s4I0cYBRPrOESiSLhO4hLi4

Rehabilitation Failings

lack of resources meant that even those convicted of  terrorism offenses  cannot get the best help there due to lack of resources such as courses there put on a waiting list but did not get the help to de radicalize  

Silke, professor of terrorism, risk and resilience at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire, has been into prisons to study deradicalisation and is one of the UK’s leading experts in the field.The the lack of resources meant those convicted of those offences  cannot get the best help.The main deradicalisation programme in prisons is called Healthy Identity Intervention. It is open to those convicted of Islamist terrorism offences and those jailed for extreme rightwing violence.

Silke said there was a waiting list for the scheme “I’m absolutely sure. I have seen the case files.

“Some prisoners who have said they are willing, never get on it before their release. Some are waiting a long time.

“It can have a real impact. It could use more resources. It is hard to imagine austerity did not have some impact.”Prisons have been hit by steep cuts and Silke pointed out the impact this has had on the number of psychologists prisoners could access.The scheme is essentially intensive counselling sessions led by a psychologist and Silke said the results are good. “Many interventions involve two to three sessions a week, which are one or two hours long, so it ties up quite a lot of time and resources. It can last several months.

The guardian and the justice system
Austerity is the crucial problem.There has been seven justice
Tory secretaries but none understood  and that their misguided  polices  have ripped apart the country or that austerity has bred the isolating conditions that the have produced violent jhadists9Editorial)


The impact of criminal records on people from BAME backgrounds this being Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (used to refer to members of non-white communities in the UK).

Yesterday (15 July 2019) Unlock, the country’s leading charity for people with convictions, published new research on the impact of criminal records as perceived by people from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds.

This report is based on the survey responses from 221 individuals. It provides new data on the impact of criminal records as perceived by people from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, and it draws on what is known about the over-criminalisation of certain groups. Key findings from the survey include:



Over three-quarters of people (78%) felt that their ethnic background had made the problems they face as a result of their criminal record harder. Around 1 in 5 (22%) felt that it had made no difference. Nobody from a BAME background felt that their ethnicity made things easier.

The overwhelming majority (79%) cited employment as one of the problems they faced. The other most common problems were relationships (34%), volunteering (30%), insurance (26%), travel/immigration (23%) and college/university/education (23%).

The problems persisted for long periods of time. Although the majority were last cautioned/convicted between 1 and 10 years ago (32% between 1 and 5 years ago, with 30.8% between 5 and 10 years ago), 15% had problems between 10 and 20 years later and 7% had problems over 20 years later.

It affects all age groups. The problems people faced because of their ethnicity spanned the full age range, the full range of sentences and a wide range of offences types.

African and Caribbean individuals were most affected. Problems were faced by a range of ethnic groups, but the largest proportions were African (17.8%) and Caribbean (13.4%).

We know from the Lammy Report that people from some BAME backgrounds are disproportionately represented at all stages of the criminal justice system, and this affects both their experience and perception of how ethnicity compounds the difficulties created by a criminal record.

Unlock found that respondents faced multiple difficulties as a result of their criminal record. Most respondents cited employment (79.4%) as one of the problems they faced.21 Employment was cited almost three times as often as any other problem area. The other most common problems were relationships (34%), volunteering (30.4%, insurance (26.3%), travel/immigration (22.7%) and college/university/education (22.7%). A key graphic from the report is reproduced below:






Visible and invisible discrimination

However, whereas ethnicity can be a visible characteristic to employers, a criminal record is not. When looking specifically at those with a criminal record, combining the attitudes of employers towards criminal records with the differences in employment rates between different ethnic groups, it is likely that BAME groups would be better served by widespread improvements in employer practices towards criminal records, such as Ban the Box. If employers did not find out about the criminal record of an applicant until after they had offered a conditional job offer, it would become much clearer whether an employer’s decision not to hire was based on the applicant’s criminal record. It would also avoid many of the connections and stereotypes that were referred to by survey respondents:

“I think that having a fraud conviction and being of an African background feeds into the stereotype held about Nigerians. I have dreadlocks and I’ve had to change my name to afford me a foot in the door, so to speak.”

“The conviction(s) should not have to be disclosed unless employers are going to offer you the new position, and only if it is relevant to the post applied for.”

Conclusion

Most people surveyed for this report believed their ethnicity has made it harder to overcome the problems they face because of their criminal record. The discrimination faced by people from BAME individuals who have a criminal record may not be ‘double’, but the difficulties they face are certainly cumulative.

The perceptions of many of those surveyed were that the way the criminal record disclosure rules operate means that, had they been white, their past offences would have not caused them as many problems. This may be because, for example, they may not have been prosecuted, or the sentence they received would have been lower and therefore spent earlier.

Unlock summarises its findings:

“Black and Asian defendants have consistently been given the longest average custodial sentence length since 2012. Harsher sentences take longer to become spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, if they ever do, meaning a criminal record will cause more difficulties for longer. This is an additional penalty for Black and Asian defendants. What David Lammy refers to as the double penalty can in fact be a triple penalty – the ethnic penalty, the criminal  
penalty and then the disclosure penalty.”



"How Can government get it so wrong and while they do there are further deaths.

EDS, not the new IPP

I tend to just mind my own business and not let things bug me and it is only politicians that make me mad with their ignorance, but lately, these mad arses with EDS (Extended Determinate Sentence) have been scratching my last nerve.
For a start, EDS is NOT the new IPP (Imprisonment for Public Protection).  It’s nothing like IPP and you need to get a grip on yourselves lads.  Because you could not even comprehend what IPP does to the human psyche, and that’s a fact.
I hear you sulking about dossiers and Parole Boards, like you’ve been hard done by.  As far as I’m aware, and correct me if I’m wrong, but with EDS you do two-thirds of your sentence and if you behave you get a parole hearing every 12-months until your release date.  You go home, no matter what.  IPPs don’t get to have that luxury and would give their right arms to swap IPP for EDS. EDS is what IPP was supposed to be.
When you bitch and moan to people who haven’t even got a release date, you just look weak and foolish.

IPP prisoners being deferred and getting worse that solicitor  are questioning whats going on.
How often have we criticized government departments regarding IPP prisoners being deferred over and over  solicitor  are questioning whats going on one   commented  on Tweeter  my client has been deferred 3 times.

And to often people with complex and challenging needs end up in prison because it’s the only service with no waiting list, a mental health expert has said. Minor criminal charges often operate to contain people while the crisis in their care goes unresolved.
A former director general of the Prison Service has said rehabilitation of offenders in jail does not work and should be scrapped.
Sir Martin Narey will say in a speech on Tuesday that research to establish a causal link between rehabilitation and reduced reoffending is lacking and short courses cannot fix problems caused by difficult childhoods.
“The things we did to prisoners, the courses we put them on, the involvement of charities, made little or no difference,” he will tell the International Corrections and Prisons Association conference in Buenos Aires.
Instead, the best the prison estate can offer prisoners is an environment where they are treated with “decency and dignity”, he will say. “Decent prisons in which prisoners are respected seem to provide a foundation for prisoner self-growth. Indecent, unsafe prisons allow no such growth and further damage those who have to survive there.”
A Prison Reform Trust briefing based on government statistics shows that reoffending rates overall are at about 50%. A House of Lords briefing in 2017 said that despite various rehabilitation initiatives in prison, reoffending rates remained too high.
Mark Leech, the editor of Prison Oracle, welcomed Narey’s comments. He said: “Expecting our prisons to reform those we throw into them from high-crime inner-city housing estates, with their school exclusions, unemployment, poor opportunities, poor parenting and where gangs, guns, drugs, alcohol, violence and crime are embedded, is an impossible ask when the living experience in so many jails is one of disrespect and often abuse, violence and filth. It’s like asking an A&E department to reduce accidents and then blaming the doctors when car crashes increase.”










Nov 14, 2019

Supreme Court rules ‘slopping out’ a violation of prisoner’s rights

Man was exposed to ‘distressing, humiliating’ conditions in Mountjoy Prison, says judge



The Supreme Court has awarded a former prisoner €7,500 damages over violation of his constitutional right to protection of his person by having to ‘slop out’ in prison, and endure “substandard” cell conditions, over almost eight months in 2013.
The five-judge court’s unanimous judgment allowing Gary Simpson’s appeal has implications for more than 1,000 cases taken over “slopping out” in prisons and sets out principles of general application to such cases.
Mr Justice John MacMenamin stressed the €7,500 award to Mr Simpson cannot be seen as a “benchmark” when other cases may differ on the facts. It must be “open to question” whether it would always be necessary to have a High Court hearing, he added.
In a concurring judgment, Mr Justice Donal O’Donnell agreed with his colleague it was not permissible, at least in the way advanced in Mr Simpson’s case, to seek to blend decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on prison conditions with a claim for damages for breach of an Irish constitutional right.
The case arose from slopping out, a practice condemned in 1993 by the European Committee on the Prevention of Torture and criticised in several other reports, including by the Inspector of Prisons in Ireland. “Slopping out” refers to the manual emptying of human waste from a bucket or other container when prison cells without toilets are unlocked in the morning.
In 2010, the State began a programme of prison refurbishment with a goal of single cell occupancy and in cell sanitation.

‘Degrading treatment’

In his 2017 High Court judgment on Mr Simpson’s case, Mr Justice Michael White found slopping out over seven and a half months in Mountjoy Prison in 2013 breached his constitutional right to privacy and his dignity but not his right not to be subject to inhuman and degrading treatment.


Those findings were made in the context of the particular circumstances of Mr Simpson’s imprisonment. He was a protected prisoner doubled up in a single cell with no in-cell sanitation and on 23-hour lock-up.
Mr Justice White refused damages because of his finding Mr Simpson told some untruths and grossly exaggerated some of his evidence.
He also refused Mr Simpson his legal costs, estimated at more than €1 million, against the State. He did not order him to pay the State’s costs because of the court’s criticism of matters, including limited access to showers for prisoners on 23-hour lock-up.
Mr Simpson appealed to the Supreme Court. The State did not appeal the finding concerning his right to privacy/dignity but disputed his unenumerated constitutional right not to be subject to inhuman and degrading treatment was also breached.
Giving the Supreme Court’s main judgment, Mr Justice MacMenamin said the case was brought under the Constitution and ECHR but, as the Constitution is the primary law of the State, it takes precedence over the ECHR issues.
The conditions to which Mr Simpson was exposed were “distressing, humiliating and fell below acceptable standards in an Irish prison in the year 2013”.

Human dignity

A deprivation of liberty must be in accordance with law and any limiting of prisoners’ fundamental rights must be proportionate and not fall below identified standards to protect human dignity. Conditions of detention must comply with national and international standards which Ireland has “pledged to uphold”.
The legal protections applicable are reflected in national law, court decisions and the Prison Rules and are based on values enshrined in the Constitution.
Issues concerning liability for the substantial costs of the case, which ran for 30 days in the High Court, will be decided later unless agreement on costs is reached between the sides.
Mr Justice MacMenamin said, while not describing this as a “test case”, the substantial legal issues had to be explored and submissions on costs would be necessary in light of the court’s judgment.










Why do so many people keep dying on probation though this is also happening to IPP prisoners. 
More sad reading
Last year, in my analysis of government statistics about people who died whilst under probation supervision, I found that the number of people dying increased at a faster rate than the caseload. The latest statistics were published last week (31 October) and I decided to take a look to see what has changed in the last year. In this post I explore the extent to which the data published by the Ministry of Justice can be used to compare the mortality rate of people over time, and with the general population. I also look at what has happened in terms of self-inflicted deaths.

Comparing mortality rates over time

In 2017/18 there was a slowdown in the increase in the number of people dying whilst under probation supervision. I had hoped that this would turn into a downward trend. Sadly, this appears not to be the case, with a jump in mortality for people under probation supervision in the current year.
In 2018/19 1,093 people died whilst under probation supervision – up from 964 in 2017/18. At least one third of those deaths were self-inflicted (one third are, as yet, unclassified and so may include further self-inflicted deaths). When we break that down by gender, the proportions remain similar. One point which stands out is the number of men dying as a result of homicide: this number increased from 27 in 2017/18 to 47 in 2018/19 giving a homicide rate amongst men on the probation caseload of 204 per million; almost ten times that of the highest risk group in the general population.
If we calculate the mortality rate – and so take into account changes in the number of people on the caseload – we can see that the crude mortality rate has increased for both men and women in recent years.


There has been a steady increase in the mortality rate since 2015/16 when the caseload increased as a result of the introduction of post-sentence supervision (PSS) for people leaving prison following short custodial sentences. Although the mortality rate – shown in the chart above – takes account of the increased numbers of people on the caseload it does not account for a more qualitative change in the caseload. One would expect people serving short sentences – who are now under probation supervision – to face different risks around mortality than those serving longer sentences. For example, people serving short sentences may be more likely to use drugs and alcohol – which is linked to increased mortality – but they may also be younger, which changes the nature of people’s risk of dying. More work needs to be done around investigating the qualitative changes to the caseload which have occurred in recent years in order to fully understand why the mortality rate has been increasing.


Comparing mortality rates with the general population
Because the age profile of the probation caseload is very different to the general population (see below) it is not possible to compare the mortality rate of people on probation with the general population. Thus, whilst we would expect the mortality rate amongst people on probation to be different to the general population (we might even expect it be higher, as recent analysis in the US has shown) we cannot calculate this accurately with publically available data.






Self-inflicted deaths
These changes in the caseload make it difficult to compare rates over time, especially if we go back to before the implementation of the Offender Rehabilitation Act and the effect this had on the caseload. Taking this into account, the following chart shows the rate of self-inflicted death amongst people on probation between 2015/16 and 2018/19. The crude self-inflicted mortality rate for both men and women under probation supervision has increased. The rate for women increased from 146/100,000 to 200/100,000 and the equivalent rate for men went from 104/100,000 to 125/100,000. Again, we need to be careful about making direct comparisons with the general population but it is worth pointing out that the suicide rate in England and Wales is 5.4/100,000 for women and 17.2/100,000 for men













We need to know more
Imade the call last year for more in the way of investigation and scrutiny when people die under probation supervision. I should stress that this is not about pointing the finger at individual practitioners: high workloads, constant structural reform, staff shortages and many other factors going on in peoples’ lives means that probation officers are unlikely to be directly responsible for someone’s death.
However, probation services hold a statutory obligation over peoples’ lives (and are obliged to assess and manage ‘risk to self’). Moreover, being on probation brings with it certain pains and adverse consequences. Thus providers should, in my view, take some responsibility for finding out what occurred in the run up to someone’s death, and whether anything could have been done to prevent it. My guess would be that if more investigations took place when people died we would uncover a pattern of inadequate mental health provision, poor housing, low staffing levels and high workloads (similar issues to those we find in the prison). These investigations will shed light on what is contributing to people dying in increasing numbers and then we can start to work out what to do about it.

………………………………………………………...


The latest MoJ ministerial line-up














Who’s who at the MoJ


This post was updated on 11 September 2019 following the appointment of Chris Philp as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State to replace the promoted Edward Argar.
Just 11 weeks after the last ministerial changes at the MoJ, we have yet another new team at Petty France. The two senior figures who were positively regarded by the sector at the start of the year, David Gauke & Rory Stewart, have now returned to the back benches.
There was some relief among commentators when Robert Buckland was promoted from Prisons & Probation Minister to Justice Secretary; he is a barrister and Recorder by trade and at least was starting to get his head round the Justice brief since his move to the department in May.
Lucy Frazer also did a quick double shuffle. She was in charge of Court Services until May, was briefly Solicitor General for less than three months and now returns as Minister for State,  with responsibility for prisons and probation.
Paul Maynard only stopped at the MoJ for less than three months before moving to the Department of Transport; he is replaced by Wendy Morton.
Given the persistent crises in our prisons and probation systems, it’s hard to see that the frequent ministerial merry-go-round does Justice any favours.
The role of Justice Secretary was only created in 2007 and there have been 9 incumbents in that 12 year period: 













Here are my traditional short profiles of the Ministers alongside their roles and responsibilities. 

Robert Buckland QC – Justice Secretary

Mr Buckland was born in Llanelli in 1968. He went to Hatfield College, Durham, graduating in Law in 1990. He attended the Inns of Court School of Law, where he was a prize winner for Advocacy and was Called to the Bar at Inner Temple in October 1991. In 1997, Robert married Sian, whom he met at university. In 2002, their twin children Millicent and George were born. They live in Wroughton. Mr Buckland’s interests include music, wine, political history and watching rugby and cricket.
He returned to practice in Wales, most recently being a member of Apex Chambers in Cardiff. Robert is a door tenant at 23 Essex Street Chambers, London. In 2009, he was appointed as a Recorder of the Crown Court, sitting on the Midland Circuit.
After three unsuccessful attempts to become an MP, Mr Buckland won South Swindon for the Conservatives in the 2010 election. He was previously Solicitor General, a post that he occupied from July 2014 until his promotion last night. Mr Buckland obviously has a detailed understanding of the criminal justice system and sat on the Justice Committee for three months in 2014 and the the Human Rights Committee between February 2013 and March 2015.

You can visit his website here and follow him on Twitter @RobertBuckland.


Lucy Frazer – Minister for State

Lucy Frazer (born 17 May 1972) studied  at Cambridge where she was President of the Cambridge Union. She worked as a barrister in commercial law, and went on to become a QC at the age of forty. She won the South East Cambridgeshire seat in the 2015 general election with 28,845 votes (48.5%), a margin of victory of 16,837. and was elected to sit on the Education Select Committee in the same year. She also sat on the Policing and Crime Bill Committee in 2016. Ms Frazer was also David Lidington’s (a previous Justice Secretary) Parliamentary Private Secretary before getting her first ministerial appointment at the MoJ in January 2018 when she was responsible for court services. After 11 weeks as Solicitor General, she returns to the MoJ with responsibility for Prisons and Probation. Her full set of responsibilities include:
  • Prison operations, policy, reform and industrial relations
  • Probation services, policy, reform and industrial relations
  • Public protection (including Parole Board, IPPs and Serious Further Offences)
  • Offender health
  • Female offenders
  • Transgender offenders
  • Veterans
  • Foreign national offenders
  • Extremism
  • Electronic monitoring



Wendy Morton – Under Secretary of State

Wendy Morton is responsible for:
  • Family law and justice
  • Domestic abuse and violence (MoJ lead)
  • Youth justice
  • Legal aid
  • Legal support
  • Court and tribunal fees
  • Mental capacity and the Office of the Public Guardian
  • Race disparity in the justice system
  • Coroners, burials, inquests and inquiries
  • Miscarriages of justice
  • Lawfare
  • Parliamentary Minister (scrutinising SIs)
Born in 1967, Ms Morton has been the MP for Aldridge-Brownhills since 2015. She was born in North Yorkshire where she attended local primary and secondary schools. She later gained an MBA with the Open University.
Her career began as an executive officer in HM Diplomatic Service at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office before working in the business sector, in sales and marketing. She then set up an electronics company, with her husband, designing and manufacturing electronic goods for the agricultural industry.
In the summer of 2016, she was appointed a Parliamentary Private Secretary at the newly created Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
At the 2017 General Election, Morton increased her majority to 14,307 and gained 65.4% of the vote. In the government reshuffle following the election Morton was promoted to Parliament Private Secretary to Priti Patel at the Department for International Development.
She was made an assistant government whip during the reshuffle on 9 January 2018
You can visit her website here and follow her on Twitter @Morton_wendy



Chris Philp – Under Secretary of State

Mr Philp was promoted to the MoJ on 11 September 2019;  he is responsible for:
  • Cross-cutting Criminal Justice System issues
  • Victims
  • Criminal law
  • Sentencing
  • Court and tribunal services and reform
  • Administrative justice
  • Devolved Administrations and devolution
  • Human rights
  • Supporting the Secretary of State on EU exit and international business
  • Supporting the Secretary of State on departmental finance
Chris Philp has been the MP for South Croydon since 2015. After taking a degree in physics at Oxford, he worked for McKinself before setting up a number of businesses, including a HGV trainign provider with former MoJ Minister Sam Gyimah,  and the Next Big Thing charity.  He was a member of the Treasury Select Committee between July 2015 and May 2017.


ou can visit his website here and follow him on Twitter @CPhilpofficial

Lord Keen – Advocate General for Scotland and MoJ spokeperson for the Lords

Richard Sanderson Keen has a long-standing involvement in the law having been an advocate (the equivalent of a barrister in England and Wales) in Scotland since 1980. He was chairman of the Scottish Conservative Party in 2014 and was ennobled in June 2015 when he became Advocate General for Scotland. He was the Lords spokesperson for the Home Office from April 2016 until moving to the MoJ later that year.
As an advocate he was involved in many high level cases representing Rangers Football Club and Andy Coulson among others.
Lord Keen is not on Twitter.

David Lidington  after just 7 months as Justice Secretary was replaced by David Gauke.It’s 2018, that makes him the fourth Justice Secretary in less than two years, or the fifth Justice Secretary in less than three years. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty sorry indictment of the quality of previous Justice Secretaries or the value and importance they place on the role.


Conclusion

Clearly, Cabinet reshuffles are drive by politics but it seems a great shame that the cause of prison and probation reform is necessarily set back by the appointment of a new Justice Secretary who will need time to get to grips with a very demanding brief.


Last month (October 2019), the probation inspectorate published another in its new series of specially commissioned research papers aimed at exploring the evidence base underpinning probation practice.
Authored by Professor Ioan Durnescu from the University of Bucharest, who specialises in comparative probation, this paper focuses on the Eurobarometer – a way of measuring people’s experience of being on probation.  

The context


Professor Durnescu starts by summarising the development of probation across Europe:
In the 1960s the penal legislation in many European countries introduced obligations and conditions that probationers needed to fulfil during the probation period. This is how different behavioural conditions (e.g. to attend school, to attend programmes, undertake treatment etc.) or restrictions (e.g. not to meet certain people) have appeared in the penal arena.
Once these transformations took place, the nature and the character of supervision took a more punitive turn and increasingly practitioners and scholars recognised that community supervision is not just an alternative to custody but a real punishment that is served in the community. Some even went so far as to call probation a ‘virtual prison’.

Alongside these changes in the configuration of offender supervision, scholars started to explore the differing dimensions of this supervision, e.g. the impact on reoffending, perceptions of staff, risk assessment etc. One of the most important conclusions of these studies was that the way offenders experience supervision influences the outcome of probation. In other words, those who perceive their probation officer as reasonable, knowledgeable and empathic are more inclined to attribute positive change in behaviour to probation supervision. Moreover, supervision was considered to be positive when the probation officer had a good relationship with the offender or when supervision was described as helpful in solving problems or when client’s welfare was taken into account.

The professor goes on to describe the develop a new tool – the Eurobarometer on Experiencing Supervision (EES) – to capture the subjective experience of supervision and help measure the success of probation.

The barometer

The Eurobarometer on Experiencing Supervision was designed as a comprehensive tool BOTH to capture the subjective experience of supervision AND measure the success of probation. This EES tool now includes the following questions:
  • six questions are used to assess supervision as a general experience (e.g. the meaning of supervision, primary and secondary stigmatisation)
  • six questions deal with the service user’s perception of the supervisor (e.g. the understanding of the supervisor’s role, the number of supervisors in the last 12 months)
  • the quality of the relationship is evaluated in one question with 14 items (e.g. positive, tense, distant)
  • practical help is assessed in one question with 13 items (e.g. my supervisor helped me find a place to live)
  • compliance is evaluated through three questions (e.g. motivation, likeliness)
  • breach is measured through four questions (e.g. number of times the probationer failed to turn up, the possible reaction of the supervisor to one vignette)
  • rehabilitation is covered in three questions with multiple response options (e.g. the severity of supervision, the meaning of supervision in relation to moving away from crime)
  • co-production and involvement of the service user is dealt with in four questions (e.g. my supervisor works with me when drafting the sentence plan).
Each question or item is assessed from 1 to 5 where 1 is ‘totally disagree’ and 5 is ‘totally agree’.
The questionnaire was translated, adapted and piloted in eight different European jurisdictions including England. Although not representative, the results were indicative of how offender supervision is experienced by the recipients. 
The barometer can be used for a range of different purposes including the perception of individuals under supervision at one point in time. By re-applying the barometer, probation services can track progress (or lack of it) or the impact of any new approaches or interventions. 
Another important use of the tool is in comparing two or more separate probation offices or even probation services. Examples are set out below from Professor Durnescu’s own work comparing different probation systems from eight jurisdictions:

All you need to know about offender equality. http://www.russellwebster.com/diversitycompendium

https://www.gardencourtchambers.co.uk/news/indeterminate-sentences-are-a-breach-of-human-rights-under-article-51-echr
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/supreme-court/supreme-court-rules-slopping-out-a-violation-of-prisoner-s-rights-1.4082852?localLinksEnabled=false+men+and+a+woman+arrested+over+Kevin+Lunney+kidnap+and+torture&mode=amp
http://www.russellwebster.com/moj719/?utm_source=ReviveOldPost&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ReviveOldPost
http://www.russellwebster.com/probationdeaths19/
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/dec/03/prisons-put-terrorists-on-waiting-list-to-receive-help-to-deradicalise
 https://insidetime.org/eds-not-the-new-ipp/
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