Today the government is releasing an estimated 1,700 prisoners early, under the scheme (SDS40) in which most inmates will only serve 40 per cent of their sentence. By the end of October, some 5,500 prisoners will have been released early. The idea is to take pressure off the prison system, and buy enough time to build more capacity. Life may become a little easier in our jails, but for the probation service, this means yet more pressure.
Probation is a crucial part of the justice system. It is responsible for supervising people who are serving community sentences, and those who have been released from prison ‘on licence’. Probation officers are expected to ensure that people do not breach the terms of their licence, do not reoffend, and that they participate in programmes to address substance or behaviour problems. If an offender breaches their licence, a probation officer may have to ‘recall’ them, sending them back to prison for some or all of their sentence. In many ways, it is much harder to supervise offenders in the community as opposed to a prison. At least in jail, we generally know where a prisoner is sleeping each night.
The early releases will challenge a service that is already in crisis. Staffing is in a critical condition, with only 70 per cent of the needed number of qualified probation officers: a shortfall of around 2,000. While the government has promised to recruit another 1,000 trainees by March next year, the reality is that trainee hiring has collapsed, down almost 60 per cent year-on-year, and the service actually lost 178 officers in the last quarter.
Morale is terrible. A probation officer in the Midlands said: ‘Staff don’t feel protected. They don’t feel like the service cares about them.’ The view of many probation officers, from speaking with their union, NAPO, and individual POs, is that management and the organisation will not support them if the worst happens and someone they are supervising commits a serious further offence. This fear is likely one factor behind our astonishingly high rates of recall. Around 55 per cent of prisoners released from jail will be recalled. While for many this is because they’ve committed further offences, probation officers often take the decision to recall because they don’t believe they can keep the public safe in any other way.
Of course, public protection has to be at the heart of the justice system, but a properly staffed and resourced probation service would be able to manage far more offenders in the community. Instead, understaffed and overworked, probation oversees a system in which more than a quarter of released prisoners are proven to have reoffended within a year.
This stressful environment has significant consequences. Tania Bassett, of the probation trade union, NAPO, said: ‘We’ve got really bad levels of sickness at the moment, mainly as a result of poor mental health.’ A probation officer in the South West remarked that ‘staff go off sick with work-related stress, then get given a warning and an 18-month improvement period, but there’s no change to their workloads’. In a hostile and unsupportive management culture like this, it is no surprise that staff are leaving.
This isn’t serious policy
I understand that probation staff have only had a few weeks’ notice of the additional people they will be supervising, and in some cases were only told last week. This provides no time for the staff to familiarise themselves with the prisoners’ needs and risks, or to put in place support around drugs, housing or behaviour which may keep them out of prison. Prisoners who are released homeless, without a job and without any meaningful support are at a particularly high risk of reoffending. As a probation officer from the north of England said, ‘I just don’t think SDS40 has been thought out properly. It’s unsafe.’
This, combined with the pressure on individual probation officers, may well mean that this early-release cohort is even more likely to be recalled or commit further offences. If so, we might expect more than 60 per cent of the 5,500 prisoners to be back in jail before too long. It is hard to see how the government is going to find enough extra capacity. The prison population continues to climb, and we are already seeing hints that the Tories’ laughable plan to send prisoners overseas may be revived. This isn’t serious policy. Our prisons are full because of longer sentences, a court backlog which this government has exacerbated by reducing court dates by 2 per cent this year, and the soaring rate of recalls.
As Tania Bassett said to me: ‘We need to start the long-term conversations now.’ Serious reform would mean significantly expanding the open prison system and working to deport the estimated 10,000 foreign nationals held in our jails. Early release isn’t the solution, and if it results in a wave of reoffending, while failing to save the prison system, then the government will only have itself to blame.
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