From rehabilitation revolution to reality

 By Steve Punter

Today, Sadiq Khan MP unveils a new, more liberal Labour line on crime policy. In an article in the Guardian (bearing a curiously agrammatical headline), the Shadow Justice Secretary implicitly accepts Justice Secretary Ken Clarke’s call for a ‘rehabilitation  revolution’ and aims to put ‘clear blue water’ between the parties on funding cuts not prison cells.

In doing so, Khan creates a fragile new Westminster consensus –  that prison is, in the words of Douglas Hurd, “an expensive way of making bad people worse” and that rehabilitation in the community works, or at least can work. Reformers will breathe a sigh of relief – Clarke’s liberal stance has made him isolated within the Conservative party and the subject of regular attacks from the right wing press – putting the rehabilitation revolution at risk of being still born. It remains to be seen whether the two main parties have the nerve to rein in for good the populist instincts which have seen two decades of ever-shriller rhetoric and ever-more draconian and ineffectual crime policy.

Even if crime policy on the ground does start to follow the political rhetoric in its new rehabilitative turn, there’s no guarantee of a happy outcome however. While all the evidence suggests that custody is an expensive failure (for example, a recent nef report suggested that locking up young people costs £140,000 a year in financial and social costs)  the problem of providing effective rehabilitation services  is far from solved. While projects like Construction Youth Trust’s Toolkit for Life or the Transition to Adulthood pilots offer inspiring examples, they measure their caseloads in the dozens – a far cry from the nearly 90,000 currently in prison in England and Wales.

If the rehabilitation revolution is to be a success it will need to do more than reject punitive populism. It will have to find better pathways to rehabilitation for the huge numbers of people caught up in the criminal justice system. It will need to not only learn from the great work of the charitable sector, but use that learning to tame the big beasts of the system – police, courts, prisons and probation. And it will need to look at the reasons people get caught up in crime - problems like  poverty, mental illness, substance abuse and unemployment. It remains to be seen whether either party have the vision or courage to achieve this. But at least they both acknowledge the problem.

For more information on nef’s new project to develop a vision for a criminal justice system fit for the 21^st century, visit the project page.