Support services that reduce reoffending are not an optional extra – Karyn McCluskey
I watched online news on Thursday as prisoners were released in England and Wales to ease overcrowding. It’s a Hobson’s choice for governments, there and in Scotland. What’s the least bad thing they can do? Choices must be made.
One man questioned said the system was setting him up to fail. Asked whether he’d be back, he said: “One hundred per cent. If my probation officer hasn’t got me anywhere to live, I’ll be getting recalled to prison because I’ve nowhere to get my tag put on.” Another found out he was being released that day. A third, who had served 78 days for shoplifting detergent, said prison was awful, locked up 23 hours a day, and that someone there had recently taken their own life.
One man said he was going for a kebab. There were the usual pictures: joyful men, arms aloft, as if thumbing their nose at the justice system and the victims. Sometimes a picture tells a thousand words, and sometimes it doesn’t. We shouldn’t mistake a moment’s elation at escaping horrific conditions, nor dismiss how those pictures land for victims who feel the system has failed them.
For those with homes and families, the picture looked rosier. For those going into homelessness, freedom was likely to be measured in months, weeks or even days.
We learned from early release in Scotland: who could be safely released and who couldn’t. Prison governors had a veto, using staff experience to judge who should not be on that list. We built throughcare services, forming relationships before release and meeting people at the gate. It’s far from perfect, nothing is, but people talk to each other and try to head off the situations above.
I spent Thursday with lived experience mentors from the charity Aid & Abet, people who have been through it, many in recovery. To aid and abet is a phrase used to describe helping someone into crime; this organisation has spent a decade helping people out of it.
Work like theirs reduces reoffending and keeps the public safer, yet it survives on year-to-year funding when it should be treated as part of the infrastructure of community justice, not an optional extra.
That’s the choice in front of every justice minister. The reflexive answer to overcrowding is more prisons, more cells, more capacity, a headline about bricks and mortar. Parkinson’s Law says work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Prisons have their own version: build them and we will fill them.
The harder answer is investing in what works: throughcare, mentoring, housing on release, organisations like Aid & Abet given security beyond next March. It is less visible, takes longer to show results and no politician gets to cut a ribbon on a mentoring scheme.
Being the justice minister is never a popular role: no cuddling of babies (although are they still allowed to do that?), no thanks from the public, no accolades, no days when the inbox is light and decisions easy. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, but that is the job – and where the money goes is a choice.