20/01/2022
Police Oracle
Work with offenders on growing concerns about the future of accredited programmes in prison
Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service has published an update to its annual digest for the 2020/21 financial year. The original digest was published back in last July, it provides a range of facts and figures relating to prisons and probation and a belated minor update would normally only be of interest to the most obsessive of penal policy wonks.
However, this update was different because it included a whole new chapter of data, normally included in the digest, but missing in the original edition this year. The new Chapter 6 provides information on the number of accredited programmes started and completed across the year. In a nutshell, accredited programme provision were more or less completely halted because of the pandemic – these are all groupwork programmes and therefore were suspended because of social distancing concerns.
This is important because very many people in prison, essentially almost all those serving longer sentences, are required to complete specified accredited programmes before the parole board will consider them safe to release. If people can’t do their programmes, they won’t be released. We know from existing research that one of the main reasons that so many people serving Indeterminate prison sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) were released very many years after their tariff date was that the prison service was unable to get them on the right programme in a timely way – and that was years before COVID.
The numbers
There are six categories of accredited programmes (Domestic Violence, Extremism, General Offending, Sexual Offending, Substance Misuse and Violence) and all of them were affected by the pandemic. Overall, the number of accredited programmes which were started fell by 87% compared to 2019/20 from 5,726 to just 744. The number of completed programmes fell by a similar amount (84%) from 5,216 to 833. Just 198 sexual offending programmes were started (compared to 1,133 the previous year) and 169 violence programmes (compared to 1,592).
These figures become even worse in the context of the fact that the number of accredited programmes has been falling year on year since 2010. Some (but by no means all) of this reduction can be attributed to the fact that the NHS has taken over the delivery of substance misuse programmes from HMPPS and has elected to deliver a range of programmes which are not accredited. (Many in the substance use field have been critical of the accredited drug and alcohol interventions for many years, but that is a story for a different article.) You can see from the official chart reproduced from the HMPPS digest below the scale of this drop in the delivery of accredited programmes with the number of offending behaviour programmes basically falling by half before the pandemic struck.
© HMPPS 1
Penal reform groups have been pressurising the Ministry of Justice and HMPPS to ask what remedial action they are planning to address these shortages and ensure that many people in prison don’t serve years longer than the courts intended simply because they are unable to complete their specified programmes. So far, they have received no response.