by Pryce, Vicky
Academic research also suggests that higher levels of education tend to reduce crime and can not only yield a significant benefit to society but can be a key policy tool for achieving reductions in crime rates. The UCL and LSE academic economist Steve Machin worked with colleagues to link crime data from the Offenders Index database to education data from the annual Office for National Statistics General Household Survey. Their conclusions are very interesting: for every 10 per cent increase in the average school leaving age convictions drop by 2.1 per cent. Further still, every 1 per cent reduction in the proportion of people with no qualifications would yield economic benefits of between £23m and £30m a year after ten years.160 It is not hard to see that savings can be substantial and run into the hundreds of millions of pounds if the target of improving qualifications is set a bit higher.
But getting jobs so that the income earned starts to make people less likely to want to tempt fate and offend requires both knowledge and other employability skills. There is little opportunity to exercise the key skills that employers value such as communication skills and a demonstrable work ethic and, as offenders become institutionalised, their skills subside still further and their chance of future employment inevitably recedes.
Giving people the skills to be re-employed and reduce reoffending is a no-brainer but the quality of education can make a difference. Rightly, in my view, over the last decade the emphasis has shifted from simply providing ‘basic skills’ to those that help with ‘employability’, but some critics suggest this neglects broader holistic education objectives that contribute to a person’s rehabilitation, contribution to society and desistance from crime.
Barriers to successful education programmes include overcrowding and constant transfers between prisons. I heard of many cases where a prisoner was not able to finish a course they were very keen on because they were suddenly transferred elsewhere where that course was no longer available or, even if it was, files did not transfer with them or there was a different contractor and they had to start again – sometimes many times over. This is particularly the case for women as there are few women’s prisons around and a move may mean going to a completely different area many hundreds of miles from where they were before and under a new service provider. There is also the problem that when they leave prison without having completed a course there isn’t always the possibility to get the funding to finish it on the outside. Portable distance learning tailored to individual requirements as part of a package of learning is an obvious part of the solution. The use of ICT for online courses is another. One development has been to pursue the ‘virtual campus’ as a web-based resource allowing prisoners to continue education programmes in different locations, and into probation. After its trial, it is now being rolled out throughout the prison service. However, there seems to be little exploration of how education may cater for prisoners on short-term sentences, who are also most likely to reoffend. Finding a way to support the education of these women after release must be a priority.
The Prisoners Education Trust noted a reduction early in 2013 in applications from prisoners for degree courses completed through the Open University; if numbers continue to lower this would be a worrying development. Prisoners like everyone else have to apply for funding, which of course can be refused. The current attitude seems to be that vocational and degree courses should only be allowed if the prisoner is in sight of coming out of prison so they have a direct impact on their employability – this in my view makes sense for vocational courses but not for those that longer-term prisoners can benefit from, as Erwin James did while serving twenty years for two murder charges. After successfully completing distance learning courses funded by the Prisoners Education Trust, he has emerged as a writer, journalist and commentator and began contributing articles from the inside to The Guardian long before he was released. Under the current arrangements he would not have been able to undertake this study until the final years of his sentence.
So this trend needs to be watched. It would also be a shame if, because of budget constraints, there was to be a cut in the number of people who act as a link between the student in prison and the distance learning provider such as the Open University. Without that help undertaking such a course from prison, given the problems already in the system, becomes that much more difficult. BIS reassured me that while OLASS do not deliver higher education, they are obliged through their contracts in cooperation with the jail to facilitate and support learners who wish to study with the Open University and other institutions that provide distance learning. So while tutorial input is provided directly by peripatetic Open University tutors, the OLASS contractors are still expected to provide general mentoring and guidance to those wishing to take part in a higher education distance-learning course.
Prisoners may be reluctant to take higher education courses because of the high tuition fees. Access courses for prisoners preparing for higher education studies receive full funding from the Prisoners Education Trust (using funds supplied through a grant from BIS), which fully funds the costs of the Open University module, but prisoners then apply for tuition fee loans for the actual course they want to do on the same basis as everybody else. That saddles them with a loan; the spokesperson for the Prisoners Education Trust tells me that prison staff are in fact often reluctant to help prisoners acquire substantial student loan debt. And in any case it is more difficult in practice for inmates to organise such loans than for someone from the outside, and requires the prison, in cooperation with the OLASS contractor, to provide adequate access to IT.
The IT issue is a recurring theme. While I was in ESP I was struck by the unavailability of the internet – all that we could use were intranet sites or secure learning platforms such as those provided by the Open University. The lack of internet use was a great inhibitor to first, learning and second, the ability afterwards to reintegrate into society, especially for those who had a long sentence. I find it odd that in this day and age there can’t be applications available that while still providing security nevertheless allow a prisoner to have access to what is out there both for educational purposes but also to ensure that they are then able to reintegrate with the community much more easily on release. The absurdity of the situation is made even starker when you realise that most open prison residents can access the internet anyway when on external visits or at work and it seems odd to deprive them of it in the few hours they are in prison.
But what would clinch the issue of the importance of education would be a proper econometric analysis that would prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that education works in reducing offending, reoffending and cost to society. There are still difficulties. Analysis would be reliant on reported crimes only. Another problem is that data on crime statistics and educational outcomes is not generally held together in one place and therefore is not easy to match together to allow one to estimate the causal relation. The Ministry of Justice Data Lab proposal does provide a potential solution to this by matching data from education providers with offending data from the police national computer. The Prisoners Education Trust is currently working with the MoJ to assess the impact on reoffending of its provision of distance-learning programmes to prisoners. This is welcome but more progress is needed.
We know that education and higher skills increase the chances of employment which in turn should reduce reoffending. It sounds correct in practice but there is still some way to go to ensure the correlation is proven. What is emerging, though, is a link between employment and a reduction in reoffending.
A Ministry of Justice report looked at the impact (if any) that employment (measured by having a PAYE employment spell notified by a P45) has on reducing reoffending.161 It compared the proven one-year reoffending rates for offenders who received a P45 denoting employment in the year following their release from custody with a matched comparison group of offenders with no P45 employment. For robustness of the analysis it minimised the differences it could find on the databases on
other characteristics that might have explained different reoffending rates, though the possibility still exists that other non-recorded characteristics rather than employment may explain part of the reoffending rate differences. The exciting thing about this study is the way it used linked data from the MoJ’s data linking project, which brings together data on offenders from across the criminal justice system, with data that tracks the employment and benefit status of offenders, including that from the DWP and HMRC. That allowed all sorts of things to be taken into account such as drug and alcohol misuse though this restricted the sample to data coming from ‘OASys’, the assessment system used by prisons and probation services to measure the risks and needs of offenders under their supervision. This also meant that the study only considered serious offenders whose attitudinal data is held on the system; in addition, low-paid people below the tax threshold and the self-employed were not included in the data. Also, given that in the report’s terminology reoffending is measured as ‘any offence committed in the twelve months after release from custody which receives a court conviction, caution, reprimand or warning in the twelve-month period or within a further six-month waiting period’, it could be argued that there are likely to be many undetected or unrecorded offences which are by definition not picked up in the analysis.
Nevertheless, despite all these caveats, the study points to a number of statistically significant results which I quote below:
Offenders who got a P45 form, a piece of paper that officially welcomes them back into employment at some point in the year after being released from custody, were less likely to reoffend than similar offenders who did not get P45 employment.
For custodial sentences of less than one year, the one year proven reoffending rate was 9.4 percentage points lower for those who found P45 employment after release than for the matched comparison group.
For sentences lasting one year or more, the one year reoffending rate was 5.6 percentage points lower for those who found P45 employment than for the matched comparison group.
The time from release until the first reoffence was longer for offenders who got P45 employment than for the matched comparison group, who did not get P45 employment.
The study concludes that ‘there are limitations to this analysis which are highlighted in this report. However, the magnitude of the estimates of the reduction in reoffending and their statistical significance, alongside the results of the sensitivity analysis we have conducted, means we are confident that P45 employment has a positive impact on reducing reoffending.’
This is all very encouraging. There is undoubtedly more work that needs to be done in the UK by using matched data to take this further and extend it to a wider range of offenders. But it is becoming increasingly clear that education and employment are key in achieving a reduction in reoffending. And yet the amount of effort made in this area is almost nonexistent. The MoJ has a prison budget of some £2.6bn year but only just under £100m is being spent on education, and very little on careers and employment help. Even in ESP, despite its positive approach to education and employment, women faced difficulties accessing paid jobs; while I was there the lady who was supposed to arrange interviews for residents to get jobs after they left prison was almost never available – I am sure for purely legitimate reasons – and many appointments were cancelled. And some girls reported that the ESP advisory office in the ‘out of bounds’ cabin made signing on at the Jobcentre seem an arduous task. I know of a number of women who didn’t bother to sign on because of the advice they were given. Given the win-win scenario from providing education and support for employment for offenders, it makes no sense to discourage people from trying to find a job. Quite the opposite.
CHAPTER 10
ALTERNATIVES TO PRISON FOR WOMEN
On 19 June 2013, I received texts and calls from friends informing me that there was going to be a BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour special on women offenders in advance of the justice committee’s publication of their review of women in prison. One of the issues that would be discussed was alternatives to prison. I wondered whether they were going to cover at all the situation in other countries and draw comparisons. The statistics for and attitudes towards women in prison seem to vary greatly from country to country. I had been intrigued by attitudes in places like Italy where apparently there are very few women in prison as the belief is that they should not be separated from their children and they are instead put under what they call ‘house arrest’. This is clearly not restricted to women as ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at one point faced house arrest as well, in this case ostensibly because of his age, according to news reports.
Worldwide there are approximately 625,000 women and girls held in detention, including those convicted and those on remand, out of a total of about 10.1m prisoners serving sentences or in custody.162 Of these women about one third are in the USA. Out of the total prison population, the median percentage of women in prison worldwide is about 4.45 per cent, with Africa generally being just under and Asia being a bit over. There has been an increase in the number of women in prison worldwide of 16 per cent since 2006, particularly driven by the USA where there has been an increase of 23 per cent. Europe as a whole has actually had the lowest increase – only 6 per cent.163
While the collateral effects upon children of imprisoned mothers are felt throughout the world, there is difficulty in making direct comparisons between countries since information on whether a detainee has dependants is not consistently checked throughout the world, and when it is the information is often not very transparent or reliable. However, in the USA, approximately 54 per cent of the prison population are parents to a child under eighteen years old,164 resulting in somewhere between two and three million children with a parent in jail.165 Of these there is a huge racial difference with one in fifteen Afro-American children having at least one parent in prison, compared to one in 111 for white children.166 In New Zealand 47 per cent of female prisoners had dependent children and 35 per cent were sole carers.167 And in the EU 800,000 children are separated from an incarcerated parent on any given day of the year.168 And the data for the UK is amazingly depressing. The female prison population has increased hugely, partly because of harder sentences and also partly because women tend to break court orders – often given for offences that carry no custodial sentence in the first instance – and are then sent to prison. In many instances, the reason for breaking probation or curfew has tended to be related to providing care for their children, causing them to miss their court or probation appointment. Of course, fathers also care for children but, as one ex-prison governor remarked, it was telling that it was overwhelmingly women who were taken to court for not paying the household’s television licence or for rent arrears or for their children’s truancy. And of the children affected by their mothers being in prison, only 9 per cent are in fact cared for by their fathers while their mother is away. At least one third of the women in prison with children are lone parents by comparison to only 9 per cent for the population as a whole. And the number of children affected is huge. Figures for 2009 suggest that during that year some 200,000 children in England and Wales had at least one parent in prison at some point during the year, and this compares with just 64,999 children in care in that year and 36,610 on the Child Protection register. In one year, more than 17,240 children are believed to have been separated from their mother due to the mother being sent to prison.169
But some countries are seeking alternatives and in the Netherlands the number of community service sentences more than doubled between 1997 and 2007, moving from 14,485 to 32,590. A 2010 study in the Netherlands investigated the rates of recidivism of those sentenced to community service compared with short-term imprisonment of up to six months and found that for different crimes, and over different lengths of time after the sentence had been completed, the rate of reoffending for those who served on community service was lower than those who had been imprisoned.170 The evidence from the UK paints the same p
icture: community services on average have lower rates of recidivism and of course cost a lot less by comparison to keeping people in prison. Even if community orders produced similar reoffending rates to custodial sentences they would be worth it for the lower cost alone.
One solution to the problem of family separation proffered is to attach women’s units to men’s prisons. Campaigners I spoke to worry that the disadvantages of this drastically outweigh the advantages. There has traditionally been very little women-specific training for officers. In East Sutton Park we were sharing the officers with HMP Blantyre for men. It was obvious when new officers would come or relief officers would arrive to fill in when ESP was short staffed during holidays that they had no experience of women’s open prisons or of women themselves. They had little idea of the rhythms and specific needs of a group of incarcerated women. The example of Durham prison was mentioned to me by both a previous governor of a women’s prison and an ex-probation officer. A women’s unit was attached to Durham prison but women ended up being ignored and treated like second-class citizens. If there were staff shortages or trouble in the men’s units, activities for women were just stopped. The unit has since closed.
Women’s Breakout, a representative body of forty-seven women-centred services across the country which offer community alternatives to custody specifically designed for women, argues that in order to prevent and reduce crime committed by women, what works best are gender-specific approaches, which understand women’s specific needs and are delivered by women-only community-based organisations. To me that seems so sensible but the rhetoric from the government continues to be very much a male-centred one not specifically designed for women or other ‘minorities’ – and women are a minority because of their small number in prison.
