24.05.16
Offender management should be devolved and made competitive
Rehabilitation of offenders would be improved if the system was locally devolved, according to a new report.
In their report, ‘Local offending, local solutions: devolving offender management’, Kevin Lockyer, a former prison governor and senior official at the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), and Richard Heys, an economist and former Ministry of Justice official, say that prisons and probation services in each local area should be replaced by local rehabilitation trusts.
The report, published by think-tank Reform, also says that the greater autonomy for prisons announced in the Queen’s speech isn’t enough.
Instead, Heys and Lockyer recommend replacing the National Probation Service with local, competitive commissioning of prison and probation services, led by Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs), to provide end-to-end management of offenders.
They suggest that since PCCs would be motivated to keep down the prison population in order to reduce costs, the new system would lead to reforms including increased mental health services for prisoners and increased use of bail with electronic monitoring.
The report also recommends replacing the system of multiple criminal justice regulators with a single body.
When the government first announced the Prisons Bill in February, P J McParlin, the chair of the Prison Officers’ Association, told PSE that the reforms could not be implemented without more action on issues such as prison closures, overcrowding and drug abuse.