Cutting crime: The case for justice reinvestment
Jan 22, 2010
The British House of Common Justice Committee has recently released a report on the reinvestment of justice resources aimed at reducing crime. The following is excerpted from the Executive Summary:
We decided to undertake an inquiry into “justice reinvestment”, because of three linked issues.
First, the criminal justice system is a complex network of agencies with substantial public funding operating under increasing pressure but the different parts of the system do not seem to be pursuing the same goals or making cogent contributions to an agreed overarching purpose.
Secondly, the Government’s main answer to the current overcrowding of prisons and the predicted rise in the prison population—already at a record high—is to provide more prison places rather than to seek to address the root causes of this seemingly incessant growth. These causes include: a toxic cocktail of sensationalised or inaccurate reporting of difficult cases by the media; relatively punitive overall public opinion (compared to much of the EU); a self-defeating over-politicisation of criminal justice policy since the late 1980s and the responsiveness to all these factors of the sentencing framework and sentencers.
Thirdly, it is clear that authorities and agencies outside the criminal justice system—with relevant objectives, remits and funding—could take more effective action to reduce both the number of people entering the criminal justice system in the first place and the likelihood of re-entry after serving a sentence.
So questions arise as to whether the existing allocation of attention, energy and funding is the right one. “Justice reinvestment” approaches—which channel resources on a geographically-targeted basis to reduce the crimes which bring people into the criminal justice system and into prison in particular—offer potential solutions to these challenges.
....The Government should implement a holistic approach across central and local agencies and authorities in order to shift resources from the provision of custody for its own sake to the prevention of crime and the reduction of re-offending; This is nothing new: ‘prevention’ is not just better, more effective and cheaper, than ‘cure’ but is right in principle. Victims want to see fewer crimes. A genuinely victim-based approach to crime should therefore, go wider and deeper than providing supportive and responsive services for victims of crime, and be focused on crime reduction and prevention as well as justice.
....The key priorities for Government policy must be:
- putting in place appropriate community-based services to prevent potential offenders from entering the criminal justice system and to divert them from the offending behaviour which can lead to custody;
- creating a well-resourced, credible, nationally-available but locally-responsive system of community sentences that our evidence shows would be more effective in reducing re-offending than custody and hence prevent low-level, but nevertheless persistent, offenders from remaining within the criminal justice system;
- establishing a financially sustainable and effective sentencing framework that can deploy community sentences on an evidential basis—including a mechanism, via statutory provision if necessary, to ensure custody is used only as a last resort—and promote the protection of the public by reducing crime effectively;
- looking to the judiciary to adopt an active role within local criminal justice boards so that they better understand the outcomes of their sentencing decisions, and are enabled to draw lessons from what happens to those they sentence; judges and magistrates should be encouraged to work closer with criminal justice agencies as has been proved successful in community, and drug and alcohol, court initiatives;
- committing to a significant reduction of the prison population by 2015—especially concentrating on women and those whose criminality is driven by mental illness and/or addictions to drugs or alcohol;
- establishing an institution, or other mechanism, to assess and report on the effectiveness of criminal justice interventions—in much the same way that NICE does in health care—in order to move policy onto a firmer evidential footing, responsive to public opinion but insulated from media-driven reactions to emotive cases;
- linking the planning and allocation of resources within the criminal justice system to the management and flow of relevant resources outside that system, principally at a local level;
- implementing the approach to crime and regeneration set out in the Justice for All white paper, reflecting analysis of where offenders live and what local factors may have contributed to their offending; and
- backing up these prudent initiatives with the initial investment necessary to achieve success while expecting significant savings across a wide range of public expenditure areas over the longer term.
Justice Reinvestment
Next week there will be a symposium on justice re-investment at the Capitol in Washington DC. Several of us plan to attend what I expect will be a day of repeated themes and calls for reforms.
These policy discussions continue to drive my thinking to the RJ City model our organization supports. More can be found at www.rjcity.org and the work being done through IIRP www.iirp.org.