The prison population in England and Wales has almost doubled in the last 20 years, and the cost of the extra prison places has been met by the Ministry of Justice alone. With council budgets cut to the bone there is little financial incentive for local agencies to prevent people going into prison, because they see none of the savings.
In 2009, for instance, the Leeds Youth Offending Team decided too many children in the city were being imprisoned and that it wanted to stem the flow. It made huge efforts to improve its relationship with Leeds youth court and support children most at risk of serious offending, and succeeded in reducing the number of under-18-year-olds sent to prison by a third [pdf]. This saved the Ministry of Justice around £2m, but Leeds city council saw not a penny of the saving. In fact, it incurred extra costs looking after teenagers who were given community sentences.
Independent researcher Rob Allen, in a new report for Transform Justice [pdf], advocates a new way of paying for justice: devolving money from the centre to local areas, so local agencies can properly invest in prevention to save on the high cost of prison.
Even in the US, which has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, authorities have begun to ask whether money spent on imprisonment is being used wisely and making the public safer. Politicians on both the left and right have decided to reverse decades of punitive legislation. The administration of criminal justice is already local – managed at state or county level – so any savings made by reducing prison numbers can be used by local government on something else. The “justice reinvestment” movement has led to greater spending on alternatives to custody; Pennsylvania, for example, has passed a law to require a percentage of cost savings achieved through reducing imprisonment to be reinvested in public safety improvements over the next six years.
One huge barrier to the devolution of budgets in England and Wales is that most criminal justice services are run from Whitehall. Prisons, courts and the supervision of adult offenders are all centralised. The exceptions are youth offending teams, managed by councils, and elected police and crime commissioners. It would make sense to devolve the cost of imprisonment to a local level so local agencies could benefit from prison numbers going down, but power would need to be devolved first.
Power in youth justice is already localised: councils supervise all children convicted of crimes. It’s here that the most radical experiment in financial devolution has been tried. In 2011, the budget for the imprisonment of under-18s was delegated to four groups of local authorities. If each group exceeded its target for reducing imprisonment, they kept the money saved. West Yorkshire reduced its use of custody by 28% in the first year and 42% in the second – a huge success, but one ignored by then justice secretary, Chris Grayling. His successor Michael Gove is a fan of decentralisation and he needs to save money; let’s hope he understands the potential of the devolution revolution to reverse the cycle of crime.
Penelope Gibbs is the director of charity Transform Justice
Talk to us on Twitter via @Guardianpublic and sign up for your free weekly Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you every Thursday.
