Unlocking Value

nef’s research found that for every pound invested in support-focused alternatives to prison, £14 worth of social value is generated to women and their children, victims and society generally over ten years.

Not since the mid–19th century has our prison system held as many women as it does today. Many are repeat petty offenders, trapped in a cycle of deprivation, disadvantage, drug abuse and crime that the prison system is conspicuously failing to break.

This report from nef (the new economics foundation) highlights how a criminal justice system focused on short–term cost control and narrow re–offending targets is letting women offenders down and costing more in the longer term.

Using Social Return on Investment (SROI) analysis, nef has examined the costs and long–term benefits associated with the work of two centres providing an alternative to prison in Glasgow and Worcester. It concludes that support–focused community penalties involving high–quality facilities such as these are a more cost–effective option than imprisonment for non–violent women offenders.

Unlocking Value urges policy makers to ensure that sentencing does more to help overcome the problems of women offenders and meet their needs. It also calls for a more broad–based, sophisticated and balanced approach to measuring the impact of imprisonment and other sentencing options so that public money can be invested in a better–informed and more effective way of addressing the root causes of crime.

This report was produced under the umbrella of nef’s Measuring What Matters programme. Direct financial costs and immediate savings have a tendency to drive policy decisions, whereas broader economic and social costs are not always taken into account. This means that policy makers are often taking decisions on the basis of partial information. In an attempt to get to the heart of what really matters in the sentencing of non–violent women offenders this research values the hidden costs and benefits of community penalties.

Prison isn’t working
For women offenders in particular, prison isn’t working. The women’s prison population has doubled since 1997, having grown more than twice as fast as that of men over the same period. There has also been a sharp increase in reconviction rates.

Most women offenders leave prison still encumbered by the debt, mental health, or substance abuse problems with which they entered. It is no surprise that the majority go on to re–offend.

Women’s prisons have some of the worst outcomes in the criminal justice system. In England in 2007, for example, women represented 6 per cent of the prison population but 49 per cent of incidents of serious self–harm.

Stalling on solutions
In 2007 the Corston Review, commissioned by the government, proposed fundamental reform. Its recommendations focused on improving sentencing, providing more and better community punishments and developing a network of support and supervision centres. It also recommended reconfiguring the prison estate to include smaller units with improved healthcare that are reserved for those women whose offending is so serious or violent that there can be no alternative to custody.

In the light of Corston’s recommendations, the government has committed itself to reducing the numbers of women sentenced to prison by investing in alternatives. Although it has accepted 40 of 43 recommendations it has stalled on implementing them. While ministers debate the costs of funding these, the inappropriate use of custodial sentences continues.

This inadequate response flies in the face of cross–party support for Corston’s recommendations and 86 per cent public support for local support and supervision centres for women who offend.

Missing what matters
Measurement of performance in the penal system has become increasingly associated with a narrow agenda of controlling direct costs and meeting headline targets on re–offending. But without a strong evidence base on the rehabilitative impact of different types of interventions, it is difficult to understand what value is being delivered for the billions of pounds being spent in the criminal justice system.

There are a number of problems with current measurement and evaluation
methods, including the following:

• Measuring levels of re–offending is considered so important that other important outcomes for society and for offenders themselves are being neglected.
• Women make up a small proportion of the offender population, so measures have been developed mainly with male offenders in mind and without taking women’s distinctive offending profile and needs into account.
• The OASys (Offender Assessment System) information programme does not track the progress of most non–violent women offenders because they usually serve shorter sentences. OASys is only used for those serving a sentence of one year or more.
• Measurement focuses mainly on where interventions fail, rather than measuring any successes in enabling offenders to lead fulfilling, law–abiding lives. This means it is very difficult to build up an understanding of why some people in the system succeed and to adapt services accordingly.
• There is too much focus on outputs and not enough on outcomes. For example, performance measures set out in the National Reducing Re–offending Delivery Plan include outputs such as the percentage of prison drug treatment programmes completed, and the number of prisoners signing voluntary drug testing compacts. But these indicators do not measure the level of harm reduction associated with treatment and testing programmes – i.e. whether such interventions are effective.
• Programmes do not last long enough to be influenced by data from evaluations, which can therefore only look at the effectiveness of processes and outputs.

The benefits of support–focused community penalties
For this research nef interviewed women sentenced to community penalties at two facilities – centre 218 in Glasgow and the Asha centre in Worcester. It also interviewed women serving custodial sentences at Bronzefield prison in Middlesex.

Using data from a range of authoritative and statistically robust sources, the researchers plotted the financial implications – over periods of 10 and 20 years – of giving women support–focused community sentences instead of sending them to prison.

The research found that:

• For every pound invested in support–focused alternatives to prison, £14 worth of social value is generated to women and their children, victims and society generally over ten years
• If alternatives to prison were to achieve an additional reduction of just 6 per cent in re–offending, the state would recoup the investment required to achieve this in just one year
• The long–run value of these benefits is in excess of £100 million over a ten–year period.

As well as providing new evidence on the costs of imprisoning non–violent women offenders, nef analysed the adverse consequences of mothers’ imprisonment for their children. It found that:

• Imprisoning mothers for non–violent offences carries a cost to children and the state of more than £17 million over a ten–year period
• The main social cost incurred by the children of imprisoned mothers – and by the state in relation to these children – results from the increased likelihood of their becoming ‘NEET’ (Not in Education, Employment or Training)
• Additional savings can be made with non–custodial sentences because of the reduced likelihood of children becoming problem drug users, or becoming involved in crime, if their mothers avoid prison.

In interviews at Asha and Centre 218, women reported much higher levels of confidence and self–esteem than the women interviewed at Bronzefield. At Centre 218, 82 per cent of women reported an increase in confidence and self–esteem, compared to 50 per cent at the Asha Centre and only 36 per cent at Bronzefield.

The benefit of such changes in the outlook of women offenders should not be underestimated, although further research is required on the link between improvements in well–being and other outcomes such as reoffending.

Conclusions and recommendations
This analysis shows that there are huge benefits from investing in alternatives to prison. Even small reductions in re–offending translate into significant savings.

Because they are convicted for relatively petty crimes and do not pose a serious threat to society, and because of their unique role as primary carers, non–violent women are a special case. Support focused alternatives that deal with the underlying causes of women’s offending could be more effective than prison sentences in helping them lead law–abiding lives.

The government has committed itself to reducing the numbers of women in prison by investing in alternatives. This commitment should include gathering the kinds of data required to ensure informed public and political debate and make sound judgements about returns on public investment.

Our three key recommendations for action are:

• Measurement systems need to be put in place to enable a fuller analysis of the costs and benefits of different decisions
  
  Better information about effectiveness is vitally important. Only with a stronger system of measurement can we can track the things that matter to people over the long term. What is ultimately needed for non–violent women offenders is a personalised assessment system that identifies appropriate interventions and tracks how they are progressing against important outcome indicators. This needs to be accompanied by system–level measures on each of the outcomes developed with women at an individual level so that policy makers and sentencing authorities can make informed decisions about sentencing and resource allocation. The system should recognise that the things that help offenders improve their lives ultimately benefit the public and victims.
• The government should change how it thinks about investment
  
  This research demonstrates the value of an expanded, more accurate assessment of costs and benefits that should be considered by ministers. Policy making is currently disproportionately concerned with the direct costs of prisons and other penal facilities, neglecting consideration of the wider economic, social and environmental costs and benefits of government interventions. The Treasury should invest in research using approaches such as SROI, which could help inform sentencing authorities about the knock–on effects and long–term consequences of the decisions they take. In particular, the Treasury must strengthen its approach to valuing social outcomes. One approach worth examining is the model of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the health sector. Although limited, in that only looks at value to the state, it does make difficult decisions on resource allocation based on a richer vein of information and the entire process is more transparent that what we see in other areas of social care.
• Sentencing for non–violent women must do more to meet their needs
  There is a need to ensure that sentences are used appropriately and are relevant to individuals’ needs. If more meaningful cost data can be generated, these should be provided to the sentencing authorities. It is essential that those handing down sentences have access to information that ensures they know not only what the direct cost of a sentence will be but also what the broader costs and benefits will be for women offenders, their families and their communities. It is both feasible and desirable to provide sentencing authorities with cost  information on factors such as the cost to family members or local authorities of caring for a female offender’s children if she is imprisoned.