Overcrowded Prisons And An Evidenced Based Way Of Dealing With Crime.

This morning I was struck by this presentation by Anne Milgram. When she became the attorney general of New Jersey in 2007, Anne Milgram quickly discovered a few startling facts: not only did her team not really know who they were putting in jail, but they had no way of understanding if their decisions were actually making the public safer. And so began her ongoing, inspirational quest to bring data analytics and statistical analysis to the US criminal justice system.

Anne Milgram is committed to using an evidence based way of data and analytics to fight crime, making sure the right people are in prison.

We Have Overcrowded Prisons Today!

The Howard League for penal reform says about the prison population,

"This week there are 84,633 people in prisons and young offender institutions in England and Wales. The male prison population is 80,741 and the female prison population is 3,892.

There are 110 more people in prison than a week ago. There are 796 more people in prison than a year ago.

The child custody population for September 2013 was 1,250. The number of children in custody has fallen by 60 per cent in the last five years.

There are 68 girls in custody and 58 children aged 10-14.

The current Certified Normal Accommodation level is 75,907 meaning that 8,726 men and women are being held above this level. (The Certified Normal Accommodation is the prison service’s own measure of how many prisoners can be held in decent and safe accommodation).

The CEO for the Howard League of penal reform said today, "About 400 people at my talk to Keele World Affairs seemed to agree that dismantling probation is wrong and too many people are in prison.

The economist and author Vicky Pryce, who as the spent nine weeks in prison for accepting points on her driving licence for her husband, says in The Independant:

"It has been estimated that only some 3 per cent of women prisoners are a threat to society and alternatives to prison, such as community service, are much less costly and tend to reduce re-offending".

The Impact of Transforming Rehabilitation

Writer, researcher and expert in criminology, Russell Webster, writes of how the impact of Transforming Rehabilitation could have a profound impact on the prison population.

He says, "Many expert witnesses who contributed to the recent House of Commons Justice Select Committee report expressed their concerns that TR would increase prison numbers through two main causes:

Firstly, magistrates would be reassured that all short-term prisoners would now receive supervision and support on release and would therefore make more custodial sentences as a way of both imposing punishment and affording the opportunity for rehabilitation.

Secondly, a proportion of those short-term prisoners receiving new mandatory supervision would not comply with their requirements and would therefore be recalled to prison.

Of course, the purpose of TR is to reduce reoffending and the MoJ is confident that the new probation system will have a substantial impact on reducing reoffending in the medium to long-term."

But there are there are still concerns about the impact the Governments plans to dismantle Probation could have on our prison populations.

It's interesting that earlier today the Probation Chief's Association reported that:

"The Government’s statistics show that reoffending for those given community orders who have recieved probation supervision is 34.0%, a drop of 0.2 percentage points compared to the previous 12 months and down 3.9 percentage points since 2000.

This is testament to the high performance of professional staff working in Probation Trusts across the country, achieving year on year reductions in the levels of reoffending to help protect the public.

Evidence Based Way Of Dealing With Crime

Looked at how the Prisons in the USA had a huge proportion of non violent offenders serving sentences, or waiting more over six month just for their trials. Also there were high risk violent criminals who were in the community, who should have been in custody.

While the public and sentencers agreed that prison should be a place for violent and dangerous criminals.

She describes how a gut reaction and intuition is not enough in dealing with offenders and that it should be evidence based.

So she organised a team to design a Risk Assessment Tool which was used in a high crime area, which had dramatic results in reducing crime, protecting the public and saving money from the public purse, by putting violent offenders in prison, and dealing with non violent ones in the community.

Eventually this Risk Assessment tool was rolled out with in the State, and there is now work going on to move it nationwide so that police, courts, etc can use it. Anne Milgram also points out that the risk Assessment tool does not do away with intuition in dealing with people who have offended, but rather compliments it.

There are many case in the UK where non-violent criminal are put into prison at huge cost to the public, when in my opinion there could be more community sentences that involve people who have offended paying back the community in some way, rather than the extremely high cost of keeping them in prison. 

Now I understand that the Government have got a terrible track record with IT - Delius, CNomis - but it seems that there might be a right way, and a wrong way. For me, I found Anne Milgram's presentation to be very thought provoking.