On 30 October the government announced its ‘preferred bidders’ for contracts to manage the 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) which were created earlier this year when the National Probation Service (NPS) was broken up into two separate entities.
The reduced NPS continues to be responsible for advising courts on sentencing, conducting initial risk of harm assessments, managing prisoners and ex-prisoners deemed to pose a high risk of serious harm to the public, and running probation approved hostels, while CRCs are responsible for management of non-high risk prisoners released from custody and delivering interventions and services such as ‘community payback’.
Initially both parts continued to be run by the public sector; however the aim was always to privatise the CRCs. Prior to being elected in 2010 the Conservatives made clear they would do this, and that they could do so easily because the Labour government’s 2007 Offender Management Act had already replaced Probation Boards with Probation Trusts, each with its own budget and with the Home Secretary retaining power to dissolve the Trust and recommission services in the private sector.
The preferred bidders are consortia made up mainly of private multinational security corporations, such as GEO and Amey, and charities, such as Shelter or the St Giles Trust, with a few local councils and colleges for good measure. Some have wacky names, such as ‘Purple Futures’, while others simply describe the sum of their parts, eg ‘Sodexho Justice Services in partnership with NACRO’. In addition, some other 1,000 organisations are chasing sub-contracts to deliver parts of the ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ agenda. Payment to providers will partly be on a ‘by results’ basis, aimed at ‘reducing reoffending, helping drive innovation and getting best value for taxpayers’.
This entire process is fraught with confusion: probation officers have no real idea who their new boss will be, nor prisoners waiting for release who will be responsible for their supervision. Furthermore, it all rests on the achievement of something which is impossible to deliver. Genuine ‘rehabilitation of offenders’ would be expensive and require provision of real jobs, decent homes and in-depth support for drug and alcohol problems, in order to create a prospect of achieving a better quality of life without crime than with it. The government cannot and does not want to achieve this; the real function of the CRCs is to add to the apparatus for policing the growing numbers of disenfranchised working class people who are sucked into the criminal justice machinery, and to do so as cheaply as possible.
Nicki Jameson.
