Looking at employment - Nacro

Photo: Michael GrieveDiverting the New Generationremains so, almost wholly ineffective against certain types of youngoffenders. There was a period as well, and it is passed I am glad to say,when probation officers could be heard referring to offenders rather thanthe taxpayer as ‘clients’. That did not do a lot of good for publicconfidence either. And to compound all that, the police abandoned thepolicing of some of the most difficult areas, like the one I have justdescribed.At the beginning of the 1980s, police officers got very large pay rises.One of the effects of this was that, whereas previously they often livedlocally and were fairly widely dispersed, they all began to get mortgagesand move up to the leafier end of town. I remember a police inspector’swife telling me that there were 13 police officers living in the rathershort street in which she lived. But there was not a single officer on thePennywell Estate, which has about 10,000 people living on it. There wasa time - it has changed now - when the only police officers seen inPennywell came in large raiding parties and glared at citizens throughthick plastic windows. Not a very good basis for creating communityconfidence. All these factors contributed to a general loss of publicconfidence in the system and a growth in demands for retribution, and itis very difficult for politicians to resist this when they are dailyconfronted with the victims.About five or six years ago some politicians discovered that there werevotes to be had by pursuing the prison works philosophy, even though Isuspect that they knew that it did not. There was a very willingconstituency for this point of view, and the result was an escalation in theprison population. I like to think that the publication of our report a fewmonths ago marked the formal end of the prison works philosophy. Wetook evidence from a wide range of witnesses. We had evidence inparticular from two retired senior probation officers, Peter Coad andDavid Fraser, and Professor of Criminology Ken Pease. They argued thata much bigger prison population was required; that alternatives do notwork properly and the only way to guarantee that the public is safe fromcriminals is to keep them locked up. But I felt that the bubble burst ontheir argument when they were asked what level they expected the prisonpopulation to rise to if their philosophy was to reach its logicalconclusion. They disagreed about numbers but eventually settled onabout 200,000, which was three times the crisis level we have now.I do not think that any government of any political persuasion is able tocontemplate having 200,000 people locked up, if for no other reason thanit is extremely expensive. Once we had on the record that this was wherewe were headed we could have a rational discussion about thealternatives.We looked at various programmes around the country and the one thingthat became clear very quickly was that the outcomes of alternatives toThe second task isto divert thevulnerable awayfrom criminalactivity and intouseful lives. Thisis best done at avery young age,long before theycome into contactwith the criminaljustice system.