Ken Clarke’s return...

For those of us wondering where on earth the skipper has been over the past month it looks like the Minister for Justice has returned to make a grab for the tiller of the Coalition’s policy response to the riots. 

And he brings with him some statistics on rioters that tell a story just as captivating, and far more informative, than the tale of the lidl water snatcher and trainee social worker turned looter.  Three quarters of adults convicted for the riots so far had previous convictions.  This has led Ken to pronounce (once again) that the Penal System is a mess and useless at preventing reoffending (though to be fair if you found out you were the unwanted progeny of an union between Broken Britain and Bonkers Bureaucracy you would want to lay down and play dead too).

Underneath all the rhetoric about a feral underclass and inflated expectations however it doesn’t seem like the Minister has changed his views.  Clarke still wants to reduce reoffending by tackling some of the problems faced by offenders (recognising the importance of employment, housing and family context).  In his article in the Guardian yesterday he wrote:

Locking people up without reducing the risk of them committing new crimes against new victims the minute they get out does not make for intelligent sentencing.

This analysis isn’t anathema to most people interested in reducing crime and protecting future potential victims.  The real difficulty is that reoffending will never be addressed by the criminal justice agencies in isolation (let alone the penal system) and especially not while agencies like probation and the police are facing budget cuts.  The introduction of payment by results will likely emphasise the value of one short term outcome – reoffending within a set time period.  The risk is that this mechanism in itself only exacerbates the difficulty of getting a broader range of agencies to work together to enable offenders to build new kinds of lives.    

 It takes the efforts of a whole range of public sector workers and voluntary and community sector organisations – youth and social workers, mental health and drug services, housing officers and those working with complex needs to name but a few to impact on offending behaviour over time.  The sticking glue that we need to mend a broken penal system isn’t a new community sentence; it is these essential services and interventions that meet the needs and tackle the wider problems of offenders.      

Ken’s return today brings these issues back to the fore, and highlights again the need for forward looking proposals that both invest in and bring together support that make a difference to offenders’ lives and criminal behaviour.