A new report for Community Union and Serco finds broad public support for better rehabilitation in prisons, including among voters who favour the toughest sentences.
Beyond Bars: Improving Rehabilitation in Prisons
A new report from Community Union and Serco has found that there is broad public support for improving the rehabilitation of offenders, including from those who favour the toughest sentences.
The report, ‘Beyond Bars: improving rehabilitation in prisons’ is the second in a series of reports from Community, now joining with Serco to call for urgent new attention on rehabilitation, to fix a prison system that too often is failing to prepare people for life after prison, contributing to reoffending and ultimately leaving communities less safe.
Rehabilitation in the prisons of England and Wales is not working. Years of overcrowding, staffing shortages and rising violence has left many prisons struggling to deliver on their core purpose: protecting the public, punishing offenders, deterring crime and reducing reoffending through effective rehabilitation.
Successive governments have prioritised dealing with immediate pressures in the prison system and short-term political gain rather than pursuing sustained long-term reform. The result is a system that too often fails to prepare people for life after prison, contributing to persistently high levels of reoffending and less safe communities.
80% of all offending in England and Wales is reoffending, 28% of all offenders go on to reoffend, and 41.2% of those leaving prison go on to reoffend. Improving rehabilitation is essential to breaking the cycle of crime, improving outcomes for prison leavers and protecting the public.
This report focuses on rehabilitation within prisons and argues that reform should look beyond sentence length and pay more attention to what happens inside prison and its ongoing impact on communities and prisoners upon release. While investment in and expansion of the probation service, electronic tagging and community-based support are crucial, how to do so is not in the scope of this report.
It is widely recognised that long-term reform of the prison system is necessary. The Government’s emergency measures to address prison capacity, alongside longer-term sentencing reforms such as the presumption against short sentences and the earned progression model, represent important steps towards creating a more sustainable prison system.
However, these reforms will only succeed if governments resist the temptation to react to flashpoints in the public mood at the expense of long-term change and ensure alternatives to custody, including community sentences and electronic tagging are properly resourced and effective.
Investment in rehabilitation is often seen as politically difficult because policymakers assume the public views it as a “soft” alternative to punishment. Our research shows this assumption is wrong; the public is more supportive of rehabilitation than political debate assumes. Across the political spectrum, including among voters who favour the toughest sentences, there is broad support for rehabilitation when it is framed as a matter of prisoners taking personal responsibility, focused on reducing reoffending and supporting people into employment. The public does not see punishment and rehabilitation as competing priorities. It expects prisons to deliver both.
The evidence from this research is clear that effective rehabilitation is a vital part of how the prison system protects the public but that it is seriously failing to do so.
