Coalition Government Penal Policy 2010–2015

Austerity, Outsourcing and Punishment

David Skinns

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137457332
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137457349
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

This book shows how the overall impact of the penal policy agenda of the Coalition Government 2010-2015 has not led to the intended 'rehabilitation revolution', but austerity, outsourcing and punishment, designated here as 'punitive managerialism'.

The policy of austerity has led to significant budget cuts in legal aid and court services which threaten justice. It has also led to staffing reductions and overcrowding in the prison system which threaten order and have undermined more positive work with prisoners. The outsourcing of prison and community-based offender services is based on untried method with uncertain results. The shift in orientation towards punishment is regrettable because it is essentially negative. The book notes that this move to punitive managerialism is located in the broader trend towards neo-liberalism. It concludes by attempting to articulate the parameters of an affordable and emotionally satisfying yet humane and rational penal policy.>

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

David SkinnsCoalition Government Penal Policy 2010–201510.1057/978-1-137-45734-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

David Skinns¹ 

(1)

Kendal, UK

 

End Abstract

Both Kenneth Clarke (2010–12) and Chris Grayling (2012–15), as successive secretaries of State for Justice, announced the need for a ‘revolution’ or ‘transformation’ in how offenders were dealt with, apparently prioritizing ‘rehabilitation’. But what does rehabilitation entail? How did sentencing and custodial and community-based offender services need to change? What debates did the reform agenda stimulate? What did it include and omit? What essential issues remained? What light can the experience of other countries throw on penal reform in England and Wales? Did the two Conservative politicians successfully revolutionize the penal system and, if so, in what direction? Questions of this kind (and many others) are the subject matter of this book, providing as it does a critical examination of the penal policies propounded and penal practices promoted by the UK Coalition Government.

The motivation to write the work derived from my previous background as a criminologist, but also my recent experiences as a member of the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) for Prisons and particularly from the comments of the chair of my local IMB branch who argued, in 2013, that prisons were not in such a bad state as the press often suggested. But reflecting on this comment led me to want to engage in a systematic investigation of the net impact of penal policy change. An intensive and critical examination of the then existing government policies seemed the way forward.

Thus the present work focuses on the actions of the UK Coalition Government which was based on an agreement between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties made on 12 May 2010. Based on an overall majority of 80 (Parliament 2014), the agreement between the two parties survived so that the Coalition was able to go to the polls on the last date set by the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011, 7 May 2015. In order to note some ‘after-effects’, the impact of the Coalition Government on penal policy has been tracked to 30 September 2015.

This book deals with penal policy rather than the much broader set of policies associated with the criminal justice system, but this should not be taken to imply that the penal system can be treated in isolation from other aspects of criminal justice, other areas of government activity or broader questions of social justice. Chapter 2 provides a brief exposition of the key institutions within the criminal justice system and elsewhere in the text due regard is taken of broader social and criminal justice processes, but these remain secondary rather than primary matters. Further, this book is about the emergent penal policy of the Coalition Government and the practices of the penal institutions insofar as they are influenced by such policy.

The work is confined to developments in England and Wales and does not detail the penal arrangements in the other two legal jurisdictions (of Scotland and Northern Ireland) which make up the UK, enabling avoidance of the complexity attendant on trying to take account of multiple changes in three diverse legal jurisdictions. However, attention is given to available comparative material where relevant. The book critically examines only that penal policy affecting adult (21 years of age and over) and young adult (18–20 years of age) offenders, thus entirely omitting policies pertinent to children and young people (10–17 years of age) and their labyrinthine complexity.

Central to the present work are the three main areas of the penal system: sentencing, custodial services and community-based offender services. Although governments do not play a direct part in sentencing in a democratic society, they do formally create the general legal and regulatory framework and exert influence on relevant decision-makers, as well as more informally shape general sentiments about the appropriateness of sentences. We shall have cause to critically assess the Coalition Government’s record on promoting sentencing reform. The second main area that the book examines is Coalition Government policy on custodial institutions including prisons (for adult offenders) and young offender institutions (for young adult offenders). Coalition Government policy on community-based offender services is the final main area of the book, covering the supervision of those released on licence from prison and the supervision of those placed on community orders.

The book has been written to be inclusive and it is hoped that it will appeal to a variety of readers, including interested non-specialists as well as students of politics, criminology and criminal justice or those training to work in criminal justice agencies like the police, prisons and probation and other community-based agencies.

There are three reasons why this work is worthy of detailed study. Firstly, it will stimulate the reader to reflect on the questions of why people offend and what can be done to reduce offending. Secondly, readers of this work will gain a detailed and critical grasp of the penal policies promulgated and practices promoted by the Coalition Government including an assessment of whether they achieved their goals and whether their goals were worth achieving. Thirdly, the developments initiated by the Coalition Government will be situated in the broader trajectory of penal policy change in late modern societies.

The central thesis derived from this intensive investigation may be briefly stated—Coalition Government penal policy has moved the penal system in the direction of punitive managerialism, based on punishment and outsourcing undertaken within the leitmotif, austerity. Some real reductions in public expenditure have been achieved, particularly with regard to the closure of some 17 public sector prisons and many courts, workforce restructuring in the remaining public sector prisons and severe cuts in the legal aid bill. But the ideology of austerity, together with the assumption that private enterprise is necessarily best, has been used to also justify a wholesale contracting out of penal services to the private sector. Although during the Coalition Government’s term of office only two public sector prisons were privatized and two private prisons built, there has been an extensive outsourcing of prison services, resettlement services for prisoners and community orders for offenders. Whether such outsourcing will lead to reduced public expenditure or just a change in the recipient of the same level of government funds is a moot question. Although the political rhetoric, in slightly different forms, has been about the rehabilitation of offenders, the reality with regard to the reforms in sentencing, custodial services and community-based services has been a move towards an increasingly punitive and exclusionary penal system. When the actions of the Coalition Government are placed in the broader trajectory of social change it is clear that the reforms instituted are consistent with patterns that became established in many countries in the late twentieth century and are, in turn, clearly associated with significant changes in those countries attendant upon the move to a political economy rooted in neo-liberalism, with the notion of austerity being used as a political strategy to turbocharge neo-liberalism.

Chapter 2 provides an introductory guide to the structure and organization of the criminal justice system, but it may be omitted altogether by those already familiar with the territory. Chapter 3 provides an overview of how we might critically assess penal policy. Chapter 4 examines the sentencing policies of the Coalition Government taking into account the administration of justice and policies affecting custodial and community-based sentences. Chapter 5 offers a critical assessment of Coalition Government policies affecting the provision of custodial services including the drive to make the custodial estate more affordable, the attempt to introduce ‘prisons with a purpose’, the reconfiguration of prison discipline and the denial of prisoners’ voting rights. Chapter 6 examines Coalition Government policies relating to community-based offender services including the drive to outsourcing, the extension of licence arrangements for short sentence prisoners and the attempts to establish ‘robust and credible’ community orders. Chapter 7 discusses the penal policy trends identified, locates these trends in broader patterns identified by others and attempts to provide a sociologically informed explanation of these patterns. Chapter 8 provides a summary of the key arguments, an indication of some of the limitations of the work, a consideration of some research questions raised and a tentative indication of what should be done to mitigate the regrettable penal policies pursued by the Coalition Government.

Reference

Parker, H, Sumner, M and Jarvis, G (1989) Unmasking the Magistrates: The “Custody or Not” Decision in Sentencing Young Offenders, Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

David SkinnsCoalition Government Penal Policy 2010–201510.1057/978-1-137-45734-9_2

Begin Abstract

2. Crime, Criminal Justice and the Penal System

David Skinns¹

(1)

Kendal, UK

End Abstract

This chapter sets the scene for an understanding of penal policy in the 2010–15 period by considering two topics: the structure and organization of the criminal justice system and the nature and the extent of, and trends in, crime in England and Wales. The issues are dealt with in this order, reflecting the fact that the amount of crime in a society is a complex product dependent, to a very large degree, on the nature of the criminal justice system, as well as the nature of the broader society.

The Criminal Justice System 2010

An important function of a nation state is the maintenance of internal social order. Given the importance of stability for social relations and economic activity, it is not hard to see how the maintenance of social order can be perceived as being a primary, perhaps a defining, task of the nation state, especially in a democratic society. This said, it would be a mistake to take the nature of social order for granted. Conceptions of social order differ widely not only contemporaneously from country to country but over time. What are considered to be appropriate socio-economic arrangements in terms of income and wealth distributions vary, as do the entitlement to and even the conception of civil and political rights. In turn, such sentiments are crucially influenced by the balance of forces evident in a society at a particular moment including social, political and economic arrangements and sentiments pertaining to matters other than social inequality and civil and political rights such as religious views, family patterns and trade unions.

The institutional framework that has emerged to deal with the task of securing and maintaining internal order and dealing with offenders is referred to as the criminal justice system. Some contemporary institutions of criminal justice can trace their origins back many centuries but for most forms their birth occurred within the complex of social forces linked to the nation state and capitalist economic organization. The term ‘system’ is used here to denote a series of linked institutions, connected because the output of one institution becomes the input of another. For example, court-sentencing decisions constitute an output affecting the agencies that provide custodial and community-based services. Each institutional structure has its own personnel, rules and regulations, funding and connections to government.

Criminologists, since the 1960s, have tried to develop adequate concepts that capture the complex, ongoing, contingent human process that is criminal justice. One such concept is that of ‘career’. In ordinary usage this term means a work history which shows upward progress. Criminologists make use of the concept of career and deploy it to denote not just movement up the ‘ladder’, but descent down the ‘snake’. This concept emphasizes the contingent but influential interaction of the rule breaker and rule enforcers (Becker 1963; Goffman 1961; Young 1971; Cohen 1980).

The contingent character of criminal justice is well-illustrated by looking at the processing of crimes and criminal perpetrators. Only about 38 % of incidents discovered by the British Crime Survey (BCS) in 2010/11 had been reported to the police by the victims (Chaplin et al. 2011:37). The majority of incidents involving BCS (later known as the Crime Survey for England and Wales -CSEW) respondents simply failed to achieve any kind of ‘official’ existence beyond being recognized by the victim and discovered by the survey. There are numerous reasons for this including the relative triviality of the offence, lack of insurance and thus no need to report the matter to the police, the fear of reprisals or simply because the police are perceived as ineffective. Furthermore, about 25 % of crimes reported to the police are not recorded by them (Nicholas et al. 2005:36). How they are ‘crimed’, that is, how the behaviour of the perpetrator is recorded as a specific offence (e.g., whether robbery or theft), is also a matter of discretion but likely to lead to very different consequences. Of those that are reported and recorded by the police about 29 % (Smith et al. 2013:9) are cleared up, that is, attributed to a perpetrator either directly by police investigation or indirectly, through them being ‘taken into consideration’ when a suspect is dealt with by a court for other offences. The above figures, when taken in conjunction with one another, reveal that of 100 offences reported to the BCS/CSEW, only about 8 are subsequently attributed to a suspect!

If we now move from the career of the offence to the career of the suspect, then it is clear that again another contingent and human process is revealed. Because not all offences inspire an official response (because of not being reported by the public to the police or not being recorded by the police if reported to them by the public), a number of offenders have no proceedings taken against them for their criminal conduct. Some suspects are also deemed by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) as not worth proceeding against where there is no reasonable chance of conviction and/or it is not in the public interest to proceed. Some suspects are the subject of out-of-court action. In 2009/10, 22 % of all those proceeded against were dealt with by means of out-o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Crime, Criminal Justice and the Penal System
• 3. Assessing Penal Policy
• 4. The Coalition Government and Sentencing, 2010–15
• 5. Custodial Services
• 6. Community-Based Offender Services
• 7. Neo-liberalism and Austerity, Outsourcing and Punishment
• 8. Conclusion
• Backmatter