Prisoner Resettlement

Anthea Hucklesby, Lystra Hagley-Dickinson

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781843922544
• eBook ISBN: 9781134004065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kriminologie

Prisoner resettlement is high on current political and policy agendas. The high reconviction rates of ex-prisoners have been acknowledged for many years but the rapidly rising prison population has meant that more prisoners than ever before are released. This together with the pressure this puts on to the infrastructure of the prison estate and the publication of two influential reports which highlighted the problems faced by prisoners leaving prison has concentrated attention on attempts to ensure that prisoners do not return to prison once released. The resettlement of prisoners is now a priority policy area linked directly to Government initiatives to reduce reoffending. The renewed policy interest in prisoners resettlement forms the context of this volume, which brings together current knowledge and understanding about prisoners resettlement. The book draws on the contributors extensive experience as researchers and practitioners in the field and includes contributions from acknowledged experts. Prisoner Resettlement provides a comprehensive review and analysis of resettlement policy and practice in England and Wales in the early part of the 21st century. In particular it: critically reviews current policy, theory, practice and research on prisoners resettlement explores practice issues through case studies of two resettlement initiatives and an examination of accommodation provision and voluntary sector involvement in prisoners resettlement; and examines the particular issues raised by the resettlement of different groups of prisoners including women, minority ethnic groups, prolific and priority offenders and high-risk offenders.

Part 1

Prisoner resettlement: theory, policy and research

Chapter 1

Rediscovering resettlement: narrowing the gap between policy rhetoric and practice reality

Carol Hedderman

Introduction

This chapter sets out to explore the reasons that the concept of resettlement has undergone something of a renaissance in recent penological policymaking and to discuss how that relates to the practical assistance ex-offenders receive in helping them to lead law-abiding lives. While Raynor (see Chapter 2) provides a detailed consideration of the history of resettlement, this chapter summarises some of the key policy developments in order to show how the concept of resettlement has gone in and out of fashion over time. This is followed by a discussion of why resettlement was rediscovered and the factors which have affected current policy. Evidence about the way resettlement work is conducted in practice is then considered. The chapter ends by considering how the policy rhetoric and practice reality might be brought closer together.

The term resettlement appears in ministerial speeches, central government policy statements, regional action plans and academic papers, but whether we are all thinking of the same thing is debatable. In some contexts, resettlement refers to the services which enable ex-prisoners to access benefits or employment, tackle drug problems and secure satisfactory accommodation on, or preferably before, release (see, for example, HM Prison Service 2006). In other contexts, it includes a sense of social reintegration and acceptance (McNeill 2004a). In some circumstances, resettlement only seems to relate to ex-prisoners whereas in others it also includes offenders on community orders (UNHCR 1990). Commentators have also queried how far we really mean resettlement and reintegration or are actually discussing the settlement and integration of individuals who were excluded from society well before they got caught up in the criminal justice system (Social Exclusion Unit 2002). Either as a cause or a consequence of this ambiguity, as Maruna et al. (2004) point out, there is no coherent theory of resettlement and recent criminological theorising about desistance seems to have played little part as yet in influencing either policy or practice (see McNeill (2004b) for a full discussion of the implications of this neglect). In the next chapter, Peter Raynor discusses these issues in the detail they deserve. The issue is noted here for two reasons: first, in order to explain that the term is used in this chapter both to refer to the social integration of prisoners on release and to address their practical service needs; second, it is almost too obvious to comment on this, but the very fact that we may not all mean the same thing when we use the term resettlement may, in itself, contribute to the disjuncture between the policy and practice which later parts of this chapter consider.

Inventing and losing sight of resettlement

Histories of probation and prisons in the United Kingdom show that until the mid-1800s, state-run prisons were primarily a holding pen for debtors or for the soon-to-be transported or executed. In the UK, the pressure to work with offenders to ensure their resettlement grew once prison became a place of punishment in its own right and as industrialisation increased the demand for a sober and reliable workforce (Garland 1985). From her examination of the operation of the London Police Courts in the late nineteenth century, Davis (1984) concludes that the courts not only existed to suppress lawbreaking but also to provide access to financial assistance and social support. By balancing these two objectives, Davis (1984: 315) argues, the courts served ‘… not merely to suppress law-breaking but also to win lower-class acceptance of the law and, thus, implicitly, of the social order’. Similarly, Garland (1985) and Vanstone (2004) conclude that the origins of probation-style resettlement work were inspired partly by a mix of humanitarian and (Christian) evangelical concerns for the most socially excluded elements of society and partly by a concern that this substratum posed a threat to the social order which must be managed by being repressed or reformed.

The resettlement of prisoners only became a statutory responsibility in 1862. More than 30 years later the Departmental Committee on Prisons chaired by Lord Gladstone (1895) expressed its dissatisfaction with the variable quality of the assistance received by discharged prisoners. Although the Probation Service was set up in 1907 to do very similar work with those on non-custodial court orders, it was not until the 1960s that the service became responsible for the resettlement of prisoners. Raynor’s more detailed history in the next chapter considers how the concept of resettlement changed during that period. Also in the 1960s, the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (now Nacro) was set up both to support the Probation Service in its work and to develop new ways of working with offenders to secure their resettlement (Crow 2006).

The next decade (the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s) has been described as the heyday of the Probation Service because it was respected by sentencers as a source of expert advice and because of widespread confidence that its activities could bring about rehabilitation (Chui and Nellis 2003). However, even during this golden age there was scepticism about whether it was possible to reform as well as punish offenders, leading the New York State Prison Service to commission a review into the rehabilitative impact of interventions in institutional and non-institutional settings. The review, conducted by Robert Martinson (1974), supported the sceptics’ perspective in that it concluded that very few interventions had a significant effect on further offending. Although Martinson pointed out that the results were not clear-cut because of the methodological shortcomings of some of the studies, the overall message was taken to be that ‘Nothing Works’. Similar overall conclusions were reached in the UK by Brody (1976) and Folkard et al. (1976).

Of course, then as now, research results were not received in a political vacuum. Raynor (2003) has suggested that one reason Martinson’s caveats, and the methodological limitations of the UK studies, were ignored was that ‘Nothing Works’ was what the conservative US and UK governments of the 1980s and early 1990s wished to hear. In other words, Martinson’s conclusion meshed with their pre-existing desire to limit public expenditure on prisons to that needed to contain and punish offenders while they were inside. The stark prison conditions which resulted were expected to also have a deterrent effect. This is what one of the British Home Secretaries of the period meant when he (in)famously claimed that ‘prison works’ (Howard 1993). The concordance between research results and political ideology may explain why the results of a methodologically superior Canadian review by Gendreau and Ross (1979), which found that some interventions were effective, was ignored in the US and the UK during this period.

In the ‘Nothing Works’ era, public expenditure on supervision could no longer be justified to ‘advise, assist and befriend’ offenders, but the 1991 Criminal Justice Act recast its purpose as ‘punishment in the community’. As Maguire and Raynor (1997: 3) explain: ‘This idea, of course, was a key element of the government’s attempted solution to the chronic problem of prison overcrowding: to remain credible in a punitive climate, any diversion policy had to appear to involve “tough” alternative penalties.’ In Chapter 2 of this volume, Raynor details how this change came about. Not only did punishment in the community ease overcrowding, Home Office figures (1999) also show that it was at least ten times cheaper per month than the £2,070 cost of imprisonment.

In so far as supervision to resettle offenders was discussed at this time, it was portrayed as mainly, if not very successfully, being concerned with the policing of offenders’ behaviour during the licence period (i.e. when they might otherwise be in custody). While this demoralised many of those working with offenders to secure their resettlement, there is little evidence that government policy had much practical impact on the nature of resettlement work in the community. However, official statistics show that its extent was certainly curtailed because of the associated reduction in funding for non-statutory aftercare. In 1991, 26,699 prisoners received some form of voluntary support from the Probation Service pre- or post-release; five years later the number had dropped to 4,653 (Home Office 2001a). While the number of adult offenders on statutory throughcare more than doubled (from 22,628 to 58,396) over the same period, policy documents of the time, including the newly introduced national standards for supervision (Home Office 1992, 1995), emphasised the importance of protecting the public by securing attendance and compliance. In contrast, practitioners saw their efforts in terms of what they might achieve with regard to reintegrating offenders, albeit with the long-term aim of reducing reoffending (Maguire and Raynor 1997). The gap between policy rhetoric and practice reality can be identified most clearly from this time.

The renaissance of resettlement

A natural consequence of the long-term tenure (1979–97) of a Conservative government, which asserted that prison was effective in reducing offending and reoffending, was that the sentenced prison population began to rise. Having been 33,046 in 1993 it went up 15,000 in the next four years (Home Office 2003). Unfortunately, the then government’s confidence concerning the benefits of such an increase was not reflected in two-year reconviction rates which rose from 53 per cent to 58 per cent over the same period (Home Office 2003).¹ However, both these trends probably made the incoming Labour government more willing to consider alternative approaches to dealing with offenders. Their arrival also coincided with the publication of two government-sponsored reviews (Vennard et al. 1997; and Underdown 1998) which confirmed the ‘what works’ conclusions of earlier influential reviews by Hollin (1990) and McGuire (1995) and of Canadian meta-analyses (e.g. Andrews et al. 1990; Lipsey 1992). In essence, the message of this research was that it was possible to identify some combined approaches (usually including, but not restricted to, cognitive behavioural work) which were effective with some groups of offenders who were otherwise at moderately high risk of reoffending (interventions worked less well with the highest and lowest risk groups). The new government quickly committed itself to ensuring that all work with offenders should be evidence-based (e.g. Home Office 1999). In fact, Raynor (2004) has suggested that, even under the previous government, senior policymakers were already a receptive audience to the ‘What Works?’ approach. This is supported by the fact that, while Vennard et al. (1997) and Underdown (1998) reported after the Labour government came to power, both reviews were commissioned before the general election.

Faced with a further escalation in both the prison population and prison reconviction rates, the newly formed Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) was tasked with providing a clearer picture both of who was in prison and the effects of imprisonment. Its report (Social Exclusion Unit 2002) concluded that characteristics of those in prison showed them to be among the most socially excluded, displaying very low levels of literacy and numeracy and exceptionally high levels of mental illness and drug dependency. Their childhoods were characterised by time in care and as adults they experienced very high rates of unemployment. The report also noted that on release from prison two-thirds of those who had been in employment had lost their jobs, a third had lost their homes, two-fifths lost contact with their families and one-fifth faced increased financial difficulties on release. The report was particularly critical of short prison sentences which were, it concluded, of limited overall value ‘… as the disruption they cause to support networks and protective factors can outweigh the limited opportunity they present to do positive work’ (Social Exclusion Unit 2002: 123). As the Halliday Review (Home Office 2001b) had pointed out in the previous year, this group of prisoners had higher reconviction rates than those serving longer sentences but were not subject to statutory supervision on release. A joint Prison and Probation Inspection also pointed out that even statutory throughcare and aftercare was sometimes little more than a paper exercise (HM Inspectorates of Prisons and Probation 2001) which was, consequently, unlikely to make an appreciable difference to an ex-prisoner’s resettlement prospects.

Many of the SEU’s recommendations for change, such as measures to improve access to drug treatment and housing and employment services, were a direct response to the evidence in their report. However, as Crow (2006: 37) notes:

The Social Exclusion Unit’s report (2002) and surveys of the prison population contain quite a lot of factual information illustrating the disadvantaged nature of the prison population. To know that there are such relationships is to know something about what needs to be done. But much of this is familiar territory. Research that tells us what works best in terms of resettlement and how best to do it is much scarcer.

His own review of the evidence suggests that there is little strong support to suggest that getting offenders into work and accommodation or off drugs reduces reoffending (Crow 2006). To some degree the evidence is weak because of the methodological failings in the underlying research, but also, as Crow (2006) and others have noted, little of what was being attempted could be expected to be effective. There is evidence that most offenders have numerous criminogenic needs (see Harper and Chitty 2004, for example). Both research reviews (e.g. McGuire 1995) and common sense tell us that if only one of these issues is tackled, even if it is tackled effectively, this is unlikely to have a measurable impact on their risk of reoffending. In other words, getting a job when you are homeless and drug addicted is not going to make the difference. Despite this, most of the interventions which have been attempted in England and Wales over the last decade have focused on single issues usually with disappointing, but predictable, results. Moreover, as Crow (2006) also points out, even holistic approaches are unlikely to be successful unless offenders are assisted to change their attitudes and social relationships along with their material circumstances.

A further difficulty with the approach devised by the Social Exclusion Unit was that, in following the Labour Party’s pre-election mantra of being ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, it left a fundamental resettlement policy dilemma unresolved. Should ex-prisoners be supported to help them overcome their many social problems because these seem so closely related to their risk of reoffending? Or should they be dealt with as self-serving, heartless miscreants who must be coerced into improved behaviour? The SEU’s compromise was to recommend a carrot and stick approach, which is still the defining characteristic of Government policy on resettlement work today (see, for example, Carter 2003; Home Office 2004; Home Office 2006a). To some degree the SEU’s (in)decision is understandable. To argue that someone’s background and circumstances may have contributed to their offending is not the same as arguing that offenders should not be held accountable for their actions or punished for them. The dilemma may be irresolvable, but sidestepping the tough questions, or even failing to acknowledge that the dilemma exists, is not a way to form penal policy which ensures that post-release supervision in practice is coherent, defensible or effective.² Without clarity about the point at which supervisors should switch from carrot to stick, there is bound to be inconsistency between supervisors, between supervisees and in the treatment a single ex-prisoner receives over time. Not only is disparate treatment undesirable generally in a legal context which espouses notions of justice and equity, it is also at odds with the literature on pro-social modelling and effective therapeutic relationships, which indicates that to be effective supervision must be consistent (see, for example, Trotter 1999).

The mismatch between policy and practice

In theory, current policy requires that offenders who are sentenced to custody should be assessed immediately afterwards (Home Office 2006a). A single case manager (called an ‘Offender Manager’) will then be appointed who is expected to design and oversee the implementation of sentence plans after consulting other professionals and relevant voluntary sector agencies. Once offenders have signed up to the plan, it will be operationalised while they are in prison and on release. The transition is expected to be seamless as the Probation and Prison Services will be working to a common master in the National...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Prisoner resettlement: theory, policy and research
• Chapter 1 Rediscovering resettlement: narrowing the gap between policy rhetoric and practice reality
• Chapter 2 Theoretical perspectives on resettlement: what it is and how it might work
• Chapter 3 Models of resettlement work with prisoners
• Chapter 4 Researching and evaluating resettlement
• Part 2 Issues in resettlement practice
• Chapter 5 The SWing model of resettlement: some reflections
• Chapter 6 PS Plus: a prison (lately) probation-based employment resettlement model
• Chapter 7 Accommodation and related services for ex-prisoners
• Chapter 8 The voluntary sector and prisoners' resettlement
• Part 3 The resettlement of specific groups of prisoners
• Chapter 9 Women and resettlement
• Chapter 10 The resettlement of black and minority ethnic offenders
• Chapter 11 The resettlement of prolific offenders: policy and practice
• Chapter 12 Dangerous offenders: release and resettlement
• Chapter 13 Conclusion: opportunities, barriers and threats
• Index