Breaking the cycle
I am at the Ministry of Justice/NOMS conference at Warwick University. This morning I volunteered to be one of the delegates to step onto the Soapbox in the lobby area during the refreshment break to have my say for 10 minutes with a microphone in front of the milling delegates. My theme: Stopping the revolving door – addressing the unmet needs of repeat offenders. My blog sets out my ’10 points in 10 minutes’ checklist.
Here’s what I will say:
Before coming to Revolving Doors I spent 20 years working in the homelessness sector. So the last time I came to Warwick for a conference was for Homeless Link’s gathering of leaders from local homelessness organisations from around the country.
During those 20 years, I saw immense change in the way homeless services responded to their clients based on a growing insight into what worked and what didn’t.
Fundamental to this change was the realisation that while the issue these organisations were set up to tackle was a lack of a home, many of the people using these services faced a range of problems which meant that even when a home is offered, this isn’t a solution unless the underlying issues are met.
A new concept developed, which we called ,multiple needs, to try to describe this phenomenon of dynamic self-exacerbating problems that the people we worked with experienced.
Now thinking about developing practice in the criminal justice system, tackling reoffending and desistance, I am struck by how the narrative is converging on the same realisation: that people who reoffend need much more than a focus on their offending if they are to escape the cycle of chaos and crime.
So, taken from our work at Revolving Doors, from the work of St Giles Trust, Catch 22 and many probation trusts, and the growing evidence from our criminologists, here is my tentative ten point list of what I think we need to address the multiple unmet needs of offenders:
1. Relationship – a trusted relationship where the person feels valued and where there is empathy, which encourages hope and provides a platform for moving forward. This relationship needs to outlast the immediate stage the person’s at, because even when things seem to have settled down, inevitably there will be challenges to overcome and times when sustaining change feels impossible.
2. Connection and coordination – people need help from a wide range of services. Some people will need long-term support to address deep underlying trauma. Others need help navigating the dozens of services that they need to find stability. And they may need connecting back into family or positive social networks.
3. Partnership – to make these connections, we need to have relationships with the agencies in the local area. We need pathways, we need doors to be open, we need people to understand and give the individual a second or third chance. These services will be well linked with the local strategic networks across a wide range of sectors. And we need to gather good evidence to support these partnerships.
4. Meaning and identity – recovery can be very tentative and relapse is normal. But finding new ways for people to explore their interests and develop bonds with people who share those interests will sustain the person into the future.
5. Involvement – by involving service users in improving the services they use, we build their sense of value and responsibility and they find a way to turn their negative experiences into a positive contribution. More and more we expect to see people with direct experience of the issue improving, collaborating and working in services, as peer mentors, as workers, as board members, and as chief executives.
So far so good. And we see much of this in different places around the country. But how do we make this universal?
Here’s five more things we need:
6. We need great delivery organisations that understand this work, recruit people with the right attitudes and skills and support them to do the job.
7. We need commissioners to understand the need for this sort of work, to accurately understand the scale of need, who can work with others to reward multiple outcomes.
8. To achieve this we need local leadership, local responsibility and strategic partnerships. We will need the Police and Crime commissioner working with the local offender health commissioner, the health and wellbeing board, local housing authorities and the health commissioners as well as the other agencies in the criminal justice system. We need a plan to bring this together locally, reaching into the prisons that take and discharge people into the area.
9. To achieve this we need a policy framework that is truly cross government – built on the recognition of this reality about what happens when people’s lives go off track. We now have the right words in the Social Justice Strategy. But we need to see this linking up across government.
10. And to achieve this we need political understanding and commitment. I think we have some ministers who have really grasped this issue. But many who haven’t yet. We need to keep making the case – include the financial case – because when we get this right we not only transform lives, we save lots and lots of money.
So – ten things:
1. Relationship
2. Connecting and coordinating
3. Partnership
4. Meaning and identity
5. Involvement
6. Delivery organisations
7. Commissioning
8. Local leadership
9. Policy framework
10. Political commitment.
Much of this is starting to come into place, but we still have a long way to go to make this the norm. But from this conference I feel that we are possibly heading in the right direction.
