Opinion: Vox Pop - Should youth custody funding be performance-based?
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
The Conservatives are considering "payment-by-results" for youth prisons. The idea is to encourage institutions to reduce reoffending rates and is part of the party's root-and-branch review of the youth justice system.
NO - FRANCES CROOK, director, The Howard League for Penal Reform
Funding prisons for children according to performance simply misses the point. Children have taken their own lives in prisons and self-harm, assaults and violence are rife. The ineffectiveness of prison for children is reflected in the appalling reoffending rates.
There are also difficulties in identifying to what extent an institution can be responsible for reducing reoffending, given that children can be moved around while in custody. Ultimately, children who get in trouble need an individualised approach based on care and support, not prison walls and Whitehall targets.
NO - PENELOPE GIBBS, director of strategy to reduce child and youth imprisonment, Prison Reform Trust
All the evidence says that if you really want to reduce reoffending, you have to keep young people out of prison. At the moment the recidivism rate is 78 per cent, which is still higher than for any community sentence.
A better option would be to put more into community sentences. You would have to change things an awful lot and give prisons more resources to control what happens on resettlement. The custody budget should go to the local authority to give them an incentive to try to prevent children being remanded in custody.
NO - MIKE THOMAS, chair, Association of Youth Offending Team Managers
Any money spent on the prison service would be best spent on keeping youngsters out of custody in the first place. Any move towards a performance-related regime would be wholly inappropriate.
You can't introduce such a system of performance-related pay unless you actually improve the conditions in the prison service itself. Spending on education and training for young people for when they come out of prison has been decimated over the years. We still have youngsters being locked up in cells without any opportunities for education.
YES - ELIZABETH TRUSS, deputy director, Reform
Local authorities or a justice commissioner should be able to set performance measures for prisons, and there should be a link between responsibility for prisons and community service.
If a governor is responsible for someone who hasn't reoffended after two years, they should be given a bonus. What I would like to see is a governor who is responsible for correctional services as well. Basically, at the moment governors are responsible for stopping riots taking place, making sure people in their care are not escaping, but they are not responsible for the period after they leave prison.
