Our justice system must embrace innovation as a necessity

Ken Clarke says bring prison numbers down through a “rehabilitation revolution”; Teresa May wants to move away from ASBOs, which have limited effectiveness, in favour of more constructive interventions. The Chief Inspector of Probation has talked about making grown up choices over who gets released when. It seems everyone agrees that justice reform is needed – but nobody can quite agree what it should look like.

So what is the situation? Our current criminal justice system is over-subscribed and experiences frequent crises. In England and Wales we imprison more people than most other countries in Western Europe, re-offending by former prisoners remains very high and public confidence in the system’s ability to deliver effective justice and a safer society is low. Having too many people in prison does not improve public safety and it’s also bad for public health – infectious diseases, mental illness and drug addictions all become amplified in prisons before spilling back out into society.

These problems are well recognised but solutions to them are frighteningly sparse. There are very few proven alternatives to what exists which can simply be implemented and scaled up. What is lacking in our justice system is something that other sectors are rapidly and successfully embracing: innovation.

The Young Foundation’s new report Turning the corner: beyond incarceration and re-offending argues that the system needs to become much more adept at designing, rapidly testing and then scaling new innovations in everything from helping former offenders into jobs to effectively supervising people on community sentences. In order to do this, it must embrace innovation as a necessity, not simply as a desirable add-on.

Other sectors such as health and education have done this, with obviously positive outcomes – from better exam results in schools to new treatments and therapies for conditions which in the past might have been life-threatening. In the private sector the most successful companies have done this too – Apple and Google devote resources and create facilities for staff to experiment and seek innovative solutions to existing and emerging problems. This is why they thrive.

And yet the criminal justice sector lags behind. In part, its low innovation culture is to do with its quasi-military history, but it is also to do with the fact that often it is too busy fire-fighting. The sector is dealing with one crisis after another – each one fuelled by prison overcrowding, misaligned sectoral incentives and a lack of support for tough and effective community-based interventions.

What then, can be done to promote innovation, and make the sector embrace it in a way which improves both public safety and the way people view the system?

Three approaches can be highlighted: the creation of an intermediary body to allow experimentation, learning and scaling up of successful work; realigning financial incentives to allow local authorities and third sector organisations to take charge of promising alternatives in their own communities, reclaiming responsibility for their safety – in line with the Big Society agenda; and thirdly the creation of specialist vehicles to address particular problems connected to reoffending.

The first of these approaches could take the form of a UK Centre for Justice Innovation, not dissimilar to the successful New York Center for Court Innovation, which runs experimental projects to address offending and helps scale them when they work well. During its lifetime both crime and the use of custody in New York have dropped significantly, resulting in improved public safety and savings to the public purse. Among its best known achievements is the world-renowned Red Hook Community Justice Centre whose hyper-local approach has been successfully replicated in the UK in Liverpool.

The second idea involves the creation of Social Impact Bonds, where local authorities generate a hybrid of charitable funding and private sector investment to run innovative schemes which result in a reduction of demand on the justice system – less reoffending, fewer court appearances, less use of custody. The savings by the system are then repaid to the implementing organisation, with a return on the initial investment. This could become a powerful tool for ensuring the local solutions are not left to monolithic national agencies.

Thirdly, a specialist vehicle focussing on employment issues offers an example on how to address a particular problem connected with reoffending. Having a stable job can reduce the risk of reoffending by up to a half, and yet currently the odds are stacked against someone who leaves prison being able to get one and hold it down. Building on excellent existing work carried out by various organisations around the country, an Employment Deployer would combine a locally appropriate combination of managed mentoring, through the gate support, brokerage with employers, supported employment and access to appropriate training. This will become increasingly important as the country emerges from the recession.

The current situation is tough, but it is far from hopeless. The political will for reform is there and it’s welcome. But to ensure that the reforms Ministers indicated they wish to see are driven through properly, the system must learn to innovate. Otherwise it will forever remain stuck on the treadmill of incarceration and reoffending.

Anton Shelupanov is a penal reformer and social innovator, based at the Young Foundation, a centre for social innovation. The Young Foundation’s new report Turning the corner: beyond incarceration and re-offending is out today.

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