Submission to the Justice Select Committee inquiry on rehabilitation and resettlement
16 January 2025
The Howard League for Penal Reform submitted to the Justice Select Committee inquiry on rehabilitation and resettlement: ending the cycle of reoffending.
Key points
- Ambitions for prisons to be places of rehabilitation in a context of gross overcrowding and capacity crisis are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
- Ultimately, a fundamental rebalancing between supply and demand within the system is necessary. This is precisely why the current sentencing review announced by the government is so important.
- The billions of pounds earmarked for building new prisons would be better invested in securing an effective and responsive probation service, working to cut crime in the community, and to improve conditions in existing jails.
- Probation also faces structural problems that inhibits its ability to work effectively. Merging the probation service with the prison service to provide ‘end-to-end offender management’ has not worked. Probation should be independent and structured more locally to be effective.
- The concept of ‘justice reinvestment’ provides a more radical and whole-system approach to thinking about criminal justice reform. Considering how justice reinvestment principles could be applied to the current criminal justice landscape would be a fertile area for the committee to examine in a future inquiry.
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