Solving the prisoner’s dilemma

Aleksi Knuutila is a researcher in the Valuing What Matters programme at nef

Image by Antti Knuutila

With the glimmering colourful lights and the smell of popcorn, the Empire at Leicester square seems an unlikely place for serious discussion on public policy. Yet it may be the starting point for an important movement to change public perceptions and the politics of youth justice.

Yesterday about 400 people were gathered at the Empire for the first screening of the documentary The Fear Factory. The film powerfully described how the fear of crime is maintained by sensationalist media coverage and the cynical tactics of political parties. This has lead to harsher and more punitive responses to youth crime, which in many cases do little more than entrench the criminal behaviour. The documentary, produced by Spirit Level Films, is connected with a campaign for a criminal justice policy that is more humane and long-term in its perspective – and ultimately better at delivering safety for our neighbourhoods. nef’s latest report Punishing Costs was launched in connection with the screening.

With interviews from key experts and practitioners, the documentary shows how the public’s beliefs about the risk of becoming a victim and the general trends in the amount of crime were far from reality and all evidence. Britain has become a safer place in the past two decades – yet the fear of crime remains stubbornly high.

Unfortunately, it is perceptions that drive politics. One of the safest political strategies in the recent past has been to promise to crack down misbehaving youth and to hit them where it hurts. The Fear Factory documents how any deviation from this pattern is quickly struck down, as happened to Cameron when he suggested understanding the social causes of crime. The film also points an accusing finger at the media that gives disproportionate attention to violent cases and misrepresents sentencing as more lenient than it is in truth.

This reaction may actually create the monster that it so much fears. In the climate of alarm about youth crime, the imprisonment of children and young people has remained on very high levels. Prison as an intervention is incapable of dealing with the real causes of crime, and does little more than temporarily isolates an individual from contact with society. About three in four young people released from prison return to crime within a single year.

At the same time custody uses up massive amounts of resources that could have truly improved the safety on our streets. Our report Punishing Costs shows how the full cost of a year-long sentence in prison is £140,000. It is worth pausing to think about what could be achieved if these resources would be put to a positive use.

The screening was followed by an excellent panel that included some prominent criminologists and politicians – and an ex-editor of a tabloid who astonishingly displayed no sense of regret for his past role. Most of the panellist agreed that current policy was too much determined by knee-jerk reactions to high-visibility criminal cases in the media and an arms race between the parties to appear to be the true guardians of law and order.

One of the solutions they proposed by the speakers was to create a cross-party committee for a longer-term vision of developing criminal justice policy that all parties would sign up to. This would curtail the harmful competition between parties, which has led to the current punitive arrangements that hardly anyone believes to be productive or humane. Such a committee, together with a better debate and engagement with the public, is part of the recommendations of Punishing Costs.

Documentaries are powerful tools in transmitting knowledge and awareness of issues. At a time when the media is transmitting a largely false picture and political parties are failing to take the leadership to change perceptions, a film may be exactly the tool that is needed. I hope the Fear Factory, and the coalition forming to campaign around it, receive the attention they deserve.

Plans for new jails costly mistake

Aleksi Knuutila is a researcher in the Valuing What Matters programme at nef

In difficult times for state finances, prison is the only public service enjoying growing investment. The plans to expand prison capacity faced strong criticism from a major report by a cross-party committee, released yesterday. The Common’s Justice Committee latest report demands that the government should reallocate resources to more effective ways to reduce crime.

The Government in the future faces a tough choice: to continue with the expenditure trajectory the current administration is embarking upon with its prison-building plan, or to reinvest the public’s money in attempts to reduce the need for new prisons in the first place.

The Committee is right in recommending shifting resources spent on inefficient punishment towards rehabilitation and the prevention of crime. All the evidence suggests that this approach is not only more humane, but will be more effective for potential victims of crime as well as state finances. To be truly tough on crime is to stop it at its roots.

The Valuing What Matters team at nef will publish research in the end of February that will show how the policies advocated by the Justice Committee can be put into practice in the sphere of youth justice. It will demonstrate the full social consequences to society of imprisoning children, which go beyond the high bill to the state. The report will also outline policies that will empower local authorities to comprehensively prevent young people from getting into trouble with the law.

Such shifts in state activity sometimes seem so obvious that they beg the question: Why is it not happening? One of the reasons is the tabloid media that are constantly placing pressure on government for harsher, symbolical reactions on crime. The Daily Mail, for instance, responds to the Committee report in the following way:

The prison population should be slashed by a third – putting 28,000 offenders back on the streets, according to a group of MPs.

The justice select committee says Britain will have 96,000 prisoners by 2014 – the highest incarceration rate in western Europe – but spending £4.2billion on building the extra 12,000 prison places needed is a ‘mistake’.

The committee wants the prison population to be stabilised at its current level of 84,000 – then slashed by a third.

It would leave 56,000 inmates in jail and put 28,000 criminals on the streets.

An observant reader will immediately note that the Committee did not want to release inmates out of custody. They recommended creating conditions that will lead to fewer offences being committed, reducing the need for prison beds in the first place. The Mail’s text is hence slightly ambiguous: Did they misunderstand the report? Or are they claiming that that the 28,000 that averted prison should be considered criminals regardless of whether they break the law?

Why investing now in children’s services will bring benefits to us all

Jody Aked is a researcher at nef‘s centre for well-being.

We can save money and put a stop to persistent social problems by investing now in a preventative system of public services for children and young people.

Gordon Brown succumbed to mounting pressure from the somewhat unrelenting Tory line on public spending cuts and used the “c-word” in his speech at the TUC conference yesterday. The message was that cuts under a Labour government may be necessary to restore public finances, but they won’t be as bad as under the Conservatives.

Of course, the devil is in the detail and neither party has shed much light on where these cuts will take place. Brown has assured us that “vital” frontline services will be saved from any future belt-tightening, because the cuts will happen in “low priority budgets”. What he didn’t say was how we decide which services are high priority and which are low. In the scramble for votes before the General Election, there’s a risk that all parties will try and score points simply by promising bigger savings and this will narrow the focus of the debate.

Quick fixes will be seen as cheap and attractive. Those services that generate significant social value by way of bringing wider benefits to society but which will not deliver an immediate return to the State may be brushed aside, in favour of those designed to provide a short, but temporary, solutions for our most critical social problems. Already professionals working in children’s services have expressed concern that preventative services – which typically work ‘behind the scenes’ to keep families together, keep children in school, and promote mental and physical health – will be some of the first to go. Yet, the work of these services, particularly in early childhood, has far reaching implications for generations to come, beyond the next term of office starting after the Election.

Consider, for example, nef’s analysis of the social and economic benefits of preventative and early intervention services, released today in Backing the Future: why investing in children is good for us all. Our reseach shows that if we invest upfront to rebalance our system of service delivery towards one that is more preventative than our current model, we can expect to save £486 billion over the next 20 years – even when the transaction costs of making the transition to a new system are taken into account. When compared to conservative estimates which show the UK’s preventable social problems – crime, mental ill health, family breakdown, drug use, and obesity – look set to cost the UK economy £4 trillion over the next 20 years, the case for investment is overwhelming.

And while it may seem like a strange time to be looking to temporarily increase and reconfigure public  spending on children and young people, the evidence indicates we can ill afford not to. At the moment it looks extremely unlikely that the UK will meet its poverty reduction targets, it is languishing at the bottom of international rankings of child well-being and the UK has the lowest rates of trust and belonging among 16-24 year olds in all of Europe. The current system of services has got things the wrong way round. It spends much more on children and young people when problems have become entrenched, when they are often impossible and certainly expensive to remedy. Despite being one of the richest countries in the developed world, our society is one of the most unequal and one of the least child-friendly. By not proactively tackling the root causes of our social problems, we have for too long allowed them to become a drain on public resources: the price tag of the UK’s social problems is a third more expensive than the next most troubled nation in Europe.

Even in a time of immediate crisis, any politician worth their vote needs to keep one eye on the future. Out of the ruins of the recession, we need to harness the opportunity to build a stronger society, with fewer social problems. To achieve this, we need policies that can improve the life chances of today’s most at-risk children and succeed in preventing the same root causes of social problems, including poverty and inequality, from having an adverse effect on the next generation. As the details of spending plans are unveiled, we should not be won over by easy political sells at the expense of funding decisions that will put the UK on a trajectory to a stronger, fairer and happier future.

Backing the Future: why investing in children is good for us all makes the social and economic case for switching to a preventative model of services for young people and children. This research was carried out by nef in partnership with Action for Children, whose Executive Director Clare Tickell makes the case for change in today’s Society Guardian.