The Last Day

The last full day of a home leave is a strange one. The day is overshadowed by what tomorrow will bring - prison - and interrupted by packing, arranging travel, etc.

To be sitting in a place of ease and beauty and yet be preoccupied by prison is one of the many emotional strains that are both unexpected and profoundly unpleasant.

Whilst the prison professionals focus on work, timekeeping, etc, it is these deeper emotional waters that are the real story of the road to release.

It's a lot harder than you'd think!

The Grand Plan

At the same time that Michael Howard was proclaiming that “prison works” and that our lives should be “decent but austere”, his minions were busy putting together a huge plan to reduce the rate of reoffending. This reveals the schizophrenia that comes from prisons being expected to do both punishment and rehabilitation, but there you go.

This Grand Plan was to reach back nearly a century and dust off the idea that criminals are somehow inherently different. This comes within a whisker of the old concept that criminality is a mental disease but with a modern spin.

The broad idea is that we suffer from 'cognitive deficits'. We think differently from free people. On the back of this dodgy reasoning, a range of psychological treatments were imported from North America. Collectively they are known as Offending Behaviour Programmes (OBPs) and their purpose is to help us to think in a different way.

Thus we are afflicted with courses entitled Enhanced Thinking Skills; Sex Offender Treatment Programme - Core, Extended, Modified, and Booster versions; Controlling Anger and Learning to Manage It (CALM); Cognitive Self Change Programme...and so it goes on. Each one has a future refresher or booster version and it is common for one to lead to the other.

There are several problems with this Grand Plan. The most obvious being that, after being in operation for over a decade, the research evidence that any of this stuff actually does work is extremely thin. None is peer reviewed. The level of desperation on the part of prison HQ to squeeze some hint of hope out of this was revealed by the latest research on the Enhanced Thinking Skills (ETS) course. Rather than follow the standard criminological research format - follow up cohorts of those who have, and haven't, done the course and compare the reoffending rates - the latest research confines itself to asking whether those who have done ETS feel that they may reoffend less in future. With one eye on their parole reports, to a man the prisoners swore blind they were cured of their criminal afflictions. Doh! Even if the course did work, the elephant in the room would be this - would reoffending rates be lower because the course altered criminals’ behaviour? Or could it be that the course trained us to think so much better that we plan our crimes more efficiently and just don't get caught? Just a thought...

If these courses worked, I might possibly stomach them. As they don't, they lead to wicked injustices. Lifers can't get released without addressing their 'cognitive deficits'. This leads to us spending many, many years undertaking course after course, a psychological conveyor belt of gibberish. The course are, of course!, voluntary. We just won't be released if we don't do them. So we sign up under massive pressure and go through the motions. Even if the courses could work, they would be ineffective as nobody changes on demand and under threat.

So, lifers are kept in for ever-longer periods, to complete an ever lengthening list of courses, none of which can be shown to work. After 15 years and 200 million quid, the reoffending rate is unchanged. We feel screwed over and hard done by, put upon by psychologists who know nothing and don't care to learn. To say we despise them is to be polite. They are a plague.

But it is when this Grand Plan is coupled with a kneejerk change in sentencing that the real wickedness becomes evident. The introduction of Indefinite sentences for Public Protection (IPP) has seen the lifer population approach 10,000. The average tariff (punishment period) for these IPPs is 18 months. At the end of that time, they can be released if they can show they pose little risk of future offending. This is done by completing the psychology courses. But as the number of places on courses is limited, you may have to wait years to complete them.

Policy makers failed to join the dots here, committing one of the cardinal sins that psychology claims for prisoners; a lack of consequential thinking. Thousands of men are kept in prison on open ended sentences solely because the Ministry failed to lay on sufficient courses for them to complete in a timely manner. It is deeply unjust to sentence a man with a 2 year tariff, knowing damn well it could be 6 years before he can do the necessary courses. It is inept and dishonest, at best, and downright wicked at worst. I predict that during the next wave of riots, alongside the word 'food^’ on the banners of complaint will be the words 'courses' and 'psychology'.

That is the Grand Plan. It continues on, with all concerned pretending that it does work. That the people in charge of our lives can be so self deluding is frightening. And me? I was assessed years ago and whatever my faults may be, it is accepted that 'cognitive deficits' are not included. As more than one governor has pointed out, there is no course to address being awkward.