Failing institutions don’t like challenge, let alone being shown up. Few institutions are failing more tragically than our prisons – and the situation is getting worse. This is because the officials who preside over this debacle are purging the few people who have actually been making a positive difference.
The latest organisation to be banned from prisons is Sycamore Tree, a Christian charity which arranges meetings between prisoners and people who have been the victims of similar crimes to those they committed. It charged prisons nothing and had operated successfully for more than 25 years, running courses for more than 40,000 prisoners. The story of its banning was broken by Inside Time, the prison newspaper read by inmates and staff at jails across the country.
The Sycamore Tree case is a far from isolated one. The evidence has been building for some time that the Ministry of Justice is opposed to any programme or intervention, however innovative or successful, that originated outside the civil service.
In the spring I wrote for The Spectator about Unlocked Graduates, a charity that recruited hundreds of high-calibre graduates into the prison service and which now faces closure after it was unable to agree a new contract with the MoJ. In June, Prue Leith described the plight of The Clink, a charity that trains prisoners to be chefs and runs restaurants attached to prisons in which members of the public can eat. The charity has had to close three of its four restaurants and faces an uncertain future. It is currently bidding to keep its last site at HMP Brixton open.
Restorative justice too seems to be under attack. The process, dramatised in the West End and Broadway play Punch, whereby people who have committed crimes communicate with and even meet their victims, relies on cooperation between prisons, probation and specialist charities. When managed properly it helps victims to understand the crime and ensures that criminals face the reality of the harm they’ve done. According to recent reporting by Inside Time, one MoJ department named ‘re:hub’, meant to oversee restorative interventions, ‘is in fact blocking’ them from taking place.
Specialist restorative justice practitioners from across the country tell the same story. It is getting harder and harder to run interventions. Victims are frustrated by lengthy delays. While the MoJ believes it is best placed to safeguard victims, Charlotte Calkin, a practitioner with 15 years’ experience, says: ‘Re:hub is systematically blocking the development of this field. It is making decisions on suitability based on limited knowledge and experience… and a lack of trust in the skills of facilitators.’
The evidence is that the MoJ is opposed to any programme that originated outside the civil service
Each of these examples might seem distinct, but they all point to a culture within the MoJ that is fundamentally hostile to, and distrusting of, outsiders. In each case the civil service has seemingly chosen to block activities that make the justice system work better.
Sycamore Tree, taking its name from the Gospel story of Zacchaeus, did something which is absent in most of our justice system: it made prisoners face up to the harm they’d done and encouraged them to change their lives as profoundly as the tax collector Zacchaeus did.
The testimonies from participants are inspiring. One man who had been imprisoned for a serious driving offence met a widow whose husband was killed by a dangerous driver. This shocked the prisoner, who in that moment swore to change his life. He now works to keep men away from drugs, alcohol and crime.
Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester and Bishop for HM Prisons, said that she ‘cannot understand how this decision has been taken. The [MoJ] ignores the good things the scheme achieves in getting people thinking about the harm their offending has done’.
Some sources have indicated that the charity was excluded from prisons because ‘it is run by a Christian organisation and the volunteers were predominately white’. The official line from the MoJ is that the decision was taken because the National Framework for Interventions panel determined that Sycamore Tree did not meet ‘international standards’. The MoJ is insistent that neither diversity nor demographics had anything to do with the decision. However, the official policy framework document says that ‘panels will be required to consist of experts able to consider the equality and diversity issues affecting the intervention’.
Unlocked Graduates is another organisation driven out by process – in its case, an entirely legally compliant procurement process. Despite winning a tender to provide graduate recruitment for the prison service, the charity’s contract was not renewed after the MoJ demanded it relinquish control of its brand and IP, something no such organisation could reasonably agree to. While the MoJ insists that this requirement was made clear before bidding took place, the department has not sought to re-tender the contract and has not begun creating an internal graduate recruitment scheme.
When I asked the MoJ for comment I was told: ‘It’s plainly wrong to suggest we don’t value our charity partners – our partnerships with charities and social enterprises are vital to cutting crime and reducing re-offending.’
Senior civil servants, however, are canny. No one will have told a minister: ‘We want this organisation gone.’ Instead, they wear a cloak of procedure. A tender has been issued. A framework has been followed. Legal advice recommends. Ministers who trust the process too readily may find they are rubber-stamping hidden agendas as they destroy programmes which do much good.
It is an intolerable situation. But with a new Secretary of State, David Lammy, who is widely believed to be more positive about justice charities than his predecessor, perhaps there is still time for him to overrule the civil servants and save Unlocked Graduates, Sycamore Tree and restorative justice.
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