Justice secretary says move will ensure former inmates complete rehabilitation programmes
Newly released prisoners will be banned from moving around the country when they leave jail to ensure they complete rehabilitation programmes, Chris Grayling has told MPs.
The justice secretary said tougher conditions would be imposed on released prisoners from short sentences so that they could not "move 200 miles up the road for no reason".
He justified the move saying the current situation was "quite chaotic", with newly released prisoners moving around the country fuelling stubbornly high reoffending rates. "I do not think that anybody who has come out of prison and is subject to a supervision arrangement should be free to up sticks and move somewhere else," said Grayling after a Commons evidence hearing.
He told MPs on the Commons justice select committee that he intended to push ahead with his plans for the wholesale outsourcing of the probation service despite warnings from experts that it is being rushed and will lead to fragmentation and the public being put at risk. Consultation on the plans closed last Friday and the justice secretary said a detailed government response would be published in May.
He also hinted that he was prepared to consider radical changes in the imprisonment of female offenders, including the possibility of using secure hostels instead of jail places.
The justice secretary said he could not simply continue with the existing pilot schemes at Peterborough and Doncaster prisons, which are testing the private and voluntary sector provision of "through the gate" rehabilitation and mentoring services. He argued that it would take "much of the rest of the decade" before they would provide a definitive conclusion.
Grayling, during his hearing before the MPs, also urged existing local probation trusts, which currently manage the supervision of 200,000 offenders a year, to team up with social investment partners to bid for the new contracts to supervise low- and medium-risk offenders.
The justice secretary confirmed that the future role of the probation service would be as a smaller, more specialist service, dealing only with public protection and the supervision of the highest-risk offenders.
He said he wanted to learn some of the lessons of the Work Programme, which is designed to get the unemployed into work and which he set up in only one year and 18 days. In particular he wanted to ensure that smaller voluntary organisations took a more commercial approach and did not sign up to deals that meant they actually lost money.
The justice secretary also said big companies would not win the contracts to supervise and mentor medium and low-risk offenders simply by putting in the lowest bids – they would also have to provide their own expertise and skills.
In the face of questions from MPs about the dynamic nature of offenders and how somebody designated "low-risk" can quickly turn into a high risk to the public, Grayling said it would be up to small probation "public protection teams" to monitor when the supervision of an offender should be brought back under public control.
He also confirmed that a 100% system of "payment by results" would not be used in the mentoring and supervision of offenders. Part of it would have to be free to recognise that the sentence of a court was being carried out. Work was still ongoing on how payment by results would work in practice, with questions of how out-of-court disposals such as cautions would affect payments yet to be decided.
The justice secretary also indicated there would be safeguards to prevent private companies and the voluntary sector simply "creaming and parking" the offenders less likely to respond to rehabilitation.
via The Guardian World News http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/27/released-prisoners-banned-moving-country
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