EXAM CONTENT COMMUNITY JUSTICE

• Probation: Where did it come from?

  Nellis (2007)

  • Myth of Victorian beginnings
  • 'Seedbed' for probation was long tradition of preventative justice; bind overs, judicial reprieves & recognisances to keep the peace used to ensure good behaviour without punishment
• Probation: Where Did It Come From?

  19th Century Philanthropic views

  • Mathew Davenport Hill (1792-1872) Lawyer & penologist: supported informal, extra legal ways of dealing with young offenders: Supervision by responsible adult
  • Church of England Temperance Society: With donation from Frederick Reiner persuaded magistrates to allow missionaries to supervise drunkards; 70 by 1892
  • Howard Association emulated US 'probation' scheme initiated in Boston by shoemaker John Augustus to 'watch over' juvenile offenders
• Outcomes of Privatisation

  HMI Probation Annual Report 2017

  Transforming rehabilitation aims not met

  • Preparation for release - merely signposting, form filling
  • 'Through the Gate' - work not operating as expected

  NPS Performing (received greater resources)

  Payment by results ineffective

  • Services - required significant increases in funding
  • Government - did not penalise failing organisations

  Voluntary sector involvement not on scale anticipated
• Outcomes of privatisation 2

  HMI Probation Annual Report 2017 cont.

  CRC performance criticised, multiple problems

  • Senior management – lacking control & focus, poor oversight
  • Staff – faced changes, redundancies, replacement by junior professionals; inexperienced officers; unmanageable caseloads – high sickness & agency use 
  • Supervision – Some via phone calls, meetings not held in private spaces
  • Offenders – differing needs hard to manage – high recall rates – 20% rise in probationers charged with serious further offences
• The changing role of the probation officer

  • Unique role within justice system as ally of offender transformed by ideological & political challenges 
  • Professional discretion & autonomy eroded from 1980s via national objectives, standards, accredited programmes, performance indicators
• The changing role of the probation officer

  • Probation officers social work trained until 1990; Labour Party introduced new system of training in 1998 that removed social work element (Mair, 2016)
  • ‘What works’ agenda & penal populism consigned one-to-one casework model to the past; replaced by standardized approaches, with assessments based on actuarial risk tools: loss of ‘peoplework’ nature of role in favour of more managerialist or correctional approach (Annison, Eadie & Knight, 2008)
• Carceral Clawback & Net-Widening

  Cracknell (2018) reforms to supervise individuals sentenced to less than 12 months resulted in:

  • Carceral Clawback (drawing on Carlen, 2002): Post-release reforms give legitimacy to these sentences, re-imagine the prison as place of something other than punishment 
  • Net-widening (drawing on Cohen, 1985): Judges & magistrates use short-term sentences to access offender supervision in the community, rather than using community option; widens net of punitive prison sentences & lengthens supervision 
• What are the Alternatives to Punishment ?

  Approaches to Non-Punitive Offence Resolution

  • Responding to offenders & their crimes differently: via resolution, restitution, reparation
  • Offender should be seen as an active part in the justice process and offence resolution, and this may also  include the victim
  • Deal with immediate issues and achieve solution here and now (Offence Resolution)  
• What are the Alternatives to Punishment ?

  Two distinct approaches

  1. Prioritise  offender = minimise consequences of offence to avoid labelling

  • Diversionary interventions – diversion from formal criminal justice practices to avoid criminal charges (especially young, first-time, offenders); sanctions such as community service, restitution, education 

  2. Prioritise victim/community = strategies to make amends & put right harms

  • Restorative Justice (RJ) – identifying & addressing harms as a group (including anyone involved in, or affected by, offence) to heal rift & restore bonds
• Why do we punish?

  Key Justifications for Punishment (Hudson, 2003)

  • Retribution: social revenge; an eye for an eye; law-breakers deserve punishment
  • Deterrence: prevention of future crime via disincentivizing of offender; general & individual 
  • Rehabilitation: prevention of future crime via reform of offender
  • Incapacitation: social protection; prevention of future crime via restriction of offender
• What is Diversion?

  Any strategy that seeks to prevent the formal processing of an offender by the criminal justice system

  • Typically result in the person being given a reprimand or warning, paying a fine, or compensation to the victim, or directed towards a treatment, educational or reparative intervention  
  • Police & prosecutors play a crucial role in the use of diversion strategies; police discretion regarding diversion must be applied on a lawful, transparent & principled basis 
• Restorative justice

  Restorative Justice works to resolve conflict and repair harm. It encourages those who have caused harm to acknowledge the impact of what they have done and gives them an opportunity to make reparation. It offers those who have suffered harm the opportunity to have their harm or loss acknowledged and amends made.
• Restorative justice

  • Empowers victims by giving them a voice: meeting or communicating with their offenders within controlled environment to explain real impact of crime
  • Holds offenders to account & helps them take responsibility & make amends
  • Government research: RJ provides 85% victim satisfaction rate, & 14% reduction in frequency of reoffending 
• General Criticisms of Restorative Justice

  Morris (2002) ‘Critiquing the Critics’

  • Unduly lenient; easily manipulated by offenders
  • Only useful for certain offenders & certain crimes
  • Results in inconsistent, sometimes discriminatory outcomes
  • Expands social control & widens net of CJS
  • Poorly evaluated: how should success be measured?
  • ‘True restorative justice’ only takes place outside the CJS
  • Ineffective: fails to ‘restore’ victims or offenders or provide ‘justice’
• Braithwaite's 'pessimistic Case' (1999)

  • Victims: may increase fears of revictimization; may feel obliged to take part, become mere ‘props’; may find terms like ‘reconciliation’ & forgiveness value-laden, preachy (see also Umbreit, 1994)
  • Offenders: may be ‘back door’ to incarceration; may worsen stigma, become ‘shaming machine’; lynch mob (see also Retzinger & Scheff, 2000)
• Braithwaite’s ‘Pessimistic Case’ (1999)

  • Culturally inappropriate in modern industrialised societies
  • No awareness of structural problems (unemployment, poverty)
  • Women bear ‘gendered burden of care’
  • Can be captured by dominant groups & used to shore up their power – Canadian example 
• Restorative Justice: Risks

  Victims

  • Burden of meetings that may be traumatic, intimidating, or unnecessary
  • Pressure to participate
  • Safety
  • Confidentiality
  • Re-victimisation
  • Feelings that support received is inadequate or disproportionate compared to support offender(s) receive
  • Concern for lack of consequences for offender
• Restorative Justice: Risks

  Offenders

  • Potential for disintegrative shaming to occur
  • Fear of consequences for not following through
  • View of RJ as ‘easy way out’
  • Pressure to participate
  • Potential for ‘lack of due-process protection’
• Restorative Justice: Risks

  Community

  • Extent to which RJ can ‘restore’ or ‘heal’ communities
  • Tension over involvement of community residents
  • Potential difficulties getting communities involved and sustaining that involvement
  • Lack of community strength
  • Used incorrectly, RJ can ‘exacerbate power imbalances and tensions’ 
• Restorative Justice: Risks

  Meeting

  • Domination by certain participants (i.e. victim might place ‘vindictive demands’ on offender)
  • ‘Inclusion of inappropriate persons’ 
  • Manipulation of meeting by offender
  • Threatening behaviour from one party to another (i.e. offender towards victim)
  • Power imbalances
• Restorative Justice: Risks

  System

  • Widening net of CJS
  • Domination of process by CJS professionals
  • Bureaucratisation of RJ processes
  • Referral of inappropriate cases
  • Insufficient training
  • Lack of safeguards and due process protection
  • Overstating potential impact
  • Failure to rehabilitate offender
  • Increase workload of CJS
• Thinking about parole

  What should parole be about?  

  • Has the prisoner been punished enough for the offence they committed?
  • Would release be acceptable to public opinion?
  • What are the views of the victims?
  • How has the prisoner behaved in prison?
  • Should everyone have some hope of release?
  • Should we demonstrate society is merciful?
  • What is the risk the prisoner will commit a serious further offence if released?
  • What level of risk is acceptable?   
• Remit of the parole board

  Deciding whether to release indeterminate sentence prisoners, including life sentence prisoners and prisoners given indeterminate sentences for public protection (IPP prisoners) after their minimum term of imprisonment has expired

  Deciding whether to release some categories of determinate sentence prisoners – EDS and offenders of particular concern

  Deciding whether some prisoners who have been recalled to prison can be re-released
• Remit of the parole board

  Advising the Secretary of State whether indeterminate prisoners can be moved from closed to open conditions

  Advising the Secretary of State on any release or recall matters referred to it

  Not responsible for the release of most prisoners serving determinate sentences released on licence
• Padfield (2019) and the changes in parole

  • Both in terms of professionals on the panel and offenders brought before it. 
  • Clarity needed on the purpose of parole. 
  • No longer criminologist on the board and a loss of research
  • Changes to parole and the cases they hear
  •  The ‘human face of parole’ p.7 – who is involved a key area of emerging research and interest – not representative of the community 
  • Board more bureaucratic and risk adverse
  • But less individuals make a panel – sometimes decisions by just one person
  • Parole board only now decides when sentence has gone beyond the ‘norm’
• The Risk Test

  Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment Offenders Act 2012:

  When considering the release of prisoners who come before it, the Board is required to determine whether it is 

  'satisfied that it is no longer necessary for the protection of the public’ 

  that the prisoner should remain detained
• key questions

  • What led to the offending behaviour?
  • Has the prisoners worked to address those issues?
  • How will the offender manage in the community?
  • What is their relationship with their offender manager?
• The IPP issue

  • The indeterminate sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection created in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and implemented in 2005. Curtailed in 2008 and finally abolished in 2012. 
  • Sentence consists of the ‘tariff’, the minimum time that must be served, but then can only be released when Parole Board decides it is safe to do so
  • Intended to ensure that dangerous offenders were detained until their risk was manageable in the community 
• The IPP issue

  • Sentence used much more widely than had been originally anticipated 
  • Until 2008 there was no minimum tariff so some IPPs were imposed with extremely short tariffs (the lowest period to be served was just 28 days)
  • Release rate was low. In 2010-11 the Board released just 140 IPPs
  • At the point of abolition in December 2012 there were 6,080 IPPs in prison 
• The IPP Issue

  1,227   IPP prisoners on 31 December 2023 (not including recalls)

  80%   reduction since the IPP sentence was abolished in December 2012 

  99%   of those remaining in prison were post tariff (1,210 of 1,227)

  15   had not yet served their tariff

  48   of those remaining in prison had  tariffs of over 10 years

  206   of those remaining in prison had tariffs of less than two years

  1,625   IPP prisoners were in prison having been recalled
• What is multi agency working?

  Inter-agency, multi-agency, partnership working… 

  • ‘Joined-up but fragmented’ (Crawford, 1999) 
  • ‘Joined-up justice’ (McLaughlin et al., 2001)
  • ‘Joined-up worrying’ (Lieb, 2003)

  • For criminal justice agencies = response to multifaceted nature of crime & crime control

  • Involvement of wide range of non-statutory organisations in crime prevention

  • Aim = Improving outcomes for ‘service users’ with complex & multifaceted needs
• Multi-Agency Partnerships (HMIC, 2015)

  Provide a more joined-up & effective criminal justice system by:

  • Bringing together different perspectives on complex problems
  • Ensuring better shared understandings of issues
  • Ensuring greater efficiency & related cost-savings
  • Increasing capability to focus on justice for victims & offenders

  ’The underlying rationale is that, by working together, agencies can provide services which are more efficient & effective than they would have been if those agencies acted alone. Put simply, the whole is expected to be greater than the sum of the parts’. [p.5]
• Why Multi-Agency Criminal Justice?

  Working in silos can have distressing & costly consequences:

  • Poorly supported witnesses & victims who may withdraw co-operation
  • Offenders evading justice & committing further crime
  • Communities losing confidence in the system & refusing to work with it

  National Audit Office (2012) Improving the Criminal Justice System – Lessons from Local Change Projects: A Joint Report by HMIC, HMCPSI, HMI Probation & the National Audit Office
• Multi-Agency Work in Criminal Justice 

  • Child Protection Conferences 
  • Safeguarding Adults meetings 
  • Community Safety Partnerships (formerly Crime & Disorder Reduction Partnerships) 
  • Multi Agency Risk Assessment Conferences (MARAC)
  • Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) 
  • Youth Offending Teams (YOT) 
  • Channel panels 
• Evaluating Partnership Working

  Transforming the CJS (2013) Importance of national & local partnerships in delivering key government objectives (improving support for victims, Transforming Rehabilitation)
• Evaluating Partnership Working

  HMIC (2015) Working in Step? Local Criminal Justice Partnerships (LCJPs)

  • Little evidence of sets of agreed priorities: agencies pursuing own aims
  • Lack of collective focus on vulnerable victims
  • Limited evidence of impact: no agreed frameworks for measuring success & managing performance
  • Barriers to effectiveness: different forms of accountability & performance targets; competing objectives;  different ways of measuring & recording success
• Successes and tensions

  SUCCESSES

  • Communities responding to local issues
  • Agencies working together to be more effective
  • Face to face meetings = better communication
  • Better service to victims & offenders
  • Public are/feel safer

  TENSIONS

  • Poor understanding of each other’s organisations & roles
  • Tensions between organisations –  particularly when disagreeing
  • Poor communication; sharing & quality of information 
  • Differing budgets, available resources
  • Another layer of bureaucracy
  •  ‘Too many cooks’?