Preventing the causes of crime

19 June 2008

Publication: Local Government Chronicle

The current problems in the criminal justice system are well-rehearsed. Within two years of release, almost two-thirds of former prisoners re-offend. This rises to three-quarters among young offenders. The cost to the taxpayer is an estimated £11bn each year.

Improving public services by listening to those who use them is not a new concept in fact, it is commonplace. Yet marginalised groups are almost entirely missing from user engagement strategies of most local authorities this is definitely true of current and former offenders.

The Aldridge Foundation, which focuses on educational underachievement and social exclusion, in partnership with ex-offender and policy adviser Mark Johnson, recently organised a seminar to listen to 35 current and former offenders. Between them they had experience of 200 years of incarceration.

The seminar and subsequent report, The User Voice of the Criminal Justice System, indicate a disconnection between service providers and current and former offenders - the service users.

What offenders told us was that crime is often a secondary factor of other circumstances or pre-disposing conditions, including violence, abuse or neglect in childhood, mental health problems, poverty and consequent desperation, drug use in the childhood home and special educational needs.

This is supported by the statistics: 2% of the general population is taken into care yet those previously in care make up 27% of the prison population; 2% of the general population is excluded from school compared to 49% of the male and 33% of the female prison population; and 5% of men and 2% of women in the general population suffer from two or more mental disorders compared with 72% and 70% of the male and female prison populations respectively.

These are stark and telling facts. They suggest the key to reducing offending is to redirect resources to address these predisposing factors. Rather than criminalising young people and compounding these factors, they need to be given the necessary support through schools, social services, and healthcare.

Local authorities have a central role in this. Through the services they provide day in and day out, councils are best placed to know where many of these young people or troubled families most at risk are. Maybe they do already, but intervention strategies are clearly not working. What is now required is for local authorities to focus on meeting this challenge and to offer the support that is needed before these people fall into the criminal justice system.

On release, it is well-documented that without housing and employment the likelihood of re-offending is greatly increased. However in reality, how many local authorities would employ someone with a conviction on their CV? Equally, the silo management of local government and public bodies generally means that those affected either pass from one department to another or simply slip through the cracks entirely. A holistic approach needs to be taken, in which all the relevant local agencies provide a joined-up service in order to support offenders. There needs to be a framework for the sharing of data between the police, social housing, medical agencies and social services; strikingly obvious but for bureaucratic reasons, difficult to achieve.

If this system were a business it would have gone bust long ago. The fact that it isn't is no reason to pour more public money into something so clearly broken.

Now is the time to take evidence not only from service providers but also to consult with offenders and hear their voice to redress the balance. Can local government take the lead in achieving this?