How Easy It Is To Reoffend?
The criminal justice system is immensely complex.
It encompasses many vast institutions and subsystems—the court system, the prison system, the probation system—and it interconnects with many other issues that the charity and voluntary sector seeks to tackle, such as homelessness and mental health.
From our previous research, Beyond Bars 2019, we know that this complexity in the system, as well as policy turbulence and structural issues, can cause uncertainty for funders around how to use their resources effectively.
For people in the criminal justice system, this can mean ineffective sentencing, not getting the support you need at the right time from overworked staff, and struggling to move forward with your life.
We have therefore created a systems map of the key factors that influence reoffending rates for people in the criminal justice system, with the aim of identifying places that practitioners and funders can intervene to bring about long-term change in the system.
Our criminal justice system requires more investment to tackle the root causes of crime and reoffending. This is primarily the responsibility of government, but independent funders and philanthropists also have a role to play in providing extra support.
However, with the resources available, making progress on tackling the drivers of reoffending requires the charity and voluntary sector and the statutory sector to think strategically and systemically about where to invest.
Limited resources make it critical to recognise how issues are interrelated and where action can be taken to achieve systemic change.
The map is divided into subsections of the different factors affecting reoffending: socio-cultural factors, political system factors, court system factors, prison system factors, probation system factors, system coordination factors (for example, the transitions from prison to the community), and post-release factors.
Each factor includes further explanation of the issues at hand and relevant quotes from our lived experience interviews. Onto this map, we have layered an analysis of where, within this system, funding to charity sector organisations is going.
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By linking an overview of the factors that affect reoffending with an analysis of the current resources going towards tackling those factors, we can identify gaps in support.
Progress depends on a greater understanding of how the criminal justice system works. By taking this kind of systemic approach, we hope to support statutory and charity sector funders to direct resources more effectively, attract others to fund criminal justice initiatives, and ultimately, over the long term contribute to a more effective criminal justice system with lower reoffending rates.
Key recommendations Our systems map and our analysis of charity sector funding within the criminal justice system have enabled us to identify some key recommendations.
Our funding analysis showed that the vast majority (86% by our estimates) of charity and voluntary sector funding goes on community-based initiatives—patching up cracks in the system and supporting those it is letting down once they have served their sentence.
Only a small minority of funding goes to ‘upstream’ initiatives: organisations focused on advocacy receive 1.6% of total funding for specialist criminal justice charities, those shaping public attitudes receive 0.4%, and 0.3% of funding goes to charities focused on the courts.
Transitions between services, like the transition between prison and probation, are critical moments where progress can be reversed if individuals fall through gaps. The lack of coordination between different parts of the system was repeatedly highlighted as a systemic problem. Yet only 0.6% of current funding for specialist criminal justice charities goes to initiatives focused on this.
Collaborate to fund for systems change Whilst supporting those in need today is of course vitally important, we also need to consider how we change the system to prevent more reoffending tomorrow.
Our analysis shows that initiatives which are focused ‘upstream’ in the system, such as shaping public attitudes, tackling issues in the courts and sentencing, as well as shaping political discourse, have real potential to bring about deeper system change. However, these initiatives currently receive the least funding, partly
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because they are not a main funding priority for any major independent funder, and partly because so few charities work primarily in these areas.
We would encourage funders who want to achieve systemic change in the criminal justice system to collaborate to establish a pooled fund which can focus on nurturing new, as well as supporting existing, charities to tackle these ‘upstream’ intervention points, such as the courts, public attitudes and advocacy. The system shapes the experiences of individuals.
If we are to have a significant, long-term impact on the criminal justice system, this huge imbalance between investment in individual support and in improving how the wider system operates must be addressed.
Target gaps and transition points in the system We heard in our analysis how important it was to ensure that people did not fall through the cracks when moving between institutions or services.
Initiatives which, for example, ensure that individuals are supported when they leave prison and move into the community (through-the-gate support) are vital but make up a small minority of the funding available for charities.
We recommend funders ensure more organisations have the resources and capacity to support people through these transitions. Look for ‘leverage points’
Our research identifies twenty ‘leverage points’ in the criminal justice system—these are places where intervention has the potential to affect wider change, such as the quality of pre-sentence reports, or access to adequate housing (for a full list see the appendix).
Although these are not exhaustive, these were identified through our research and analysis as particularly important when thinking about strategic interventions.
Funders can compare these points with their own current funding priorities and consider whether they offer an opportunity to generate greater impact. The Justice Data Lab can be a useful tool for identifying effective organisations and programmes working on these leverage points. Recommendations for government
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Analysis from the Prison Reform Trust also shows that women are likely to be given ineffective and inappropriate sentencing, and that the government has only implemented 31 of the 65 commitments from its female offender strategy.
Judges and magistrates must work within parameters set by sentencing guidelines, which limits their ability to consider contextual factors in their sentencing. Improving PSRs and revising sentencing guidelines could allow judges to sentence in a way that may be more appropriate and effective at preventing further offending.
Extend charity sector partnerships Charities are key partners in reducing reoffending, and they need be allowed more space to do their work in the criminal justice system.
Moving between different services or institutions can be a critical moment for individuals, and our research shows how a lack of support can lead to reoffending.
To reduce reoffending in the long term, the government should invest more in charity and statutory sector partnerships such as RECONNECT, NHS England’s care after custody service, which has previously shown success in supporting individuals through transition stages.
Our research This research uses a systems mapping approach to analyse and bring clarity to the criminal justice system. We have layered onto this an analysis of where funding is currently going.
This has allowed us to understand where further intervention is needed to create change. We hope this work can be a useful resource for charity and statutory funders looking to use their assets for greater systems change.
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Finally, systems mapping is also a tool that to some extent generalises people’s experience of a particular system. Although our research touches on the experiences of groups moving through the criminal justice system, such as the experiences of people from ethnic minority backgrounds, this is not the principal focus of this work.
However, we recognise that there would be great value in carrying out further research into the experiences of different groups to better understand the support they might need.
This map might be a useful reference point in any further analysis of how different groups experience the system, and how those groups are impacted differently by factors.
Funding data Using the structure of the map, our research also layers on an overview of where charity sector funding is currently directed within the system.
This allows us to compare the funding available within different parts of the system and to make judgements about areas that would benefit from more support.
To determine the amount of funding available in each key area of our systems map, our methodology included:
Combining a long list of Clinks members with a list of organisations reported to be working in criminal justice (self-reported), and then filtering out non-charities using Charity Commission data.
Manually filtering through this list to identify which organisations worked primarily in criminal justice (specialist criminal justice organisations),
and what their primary area of focus is (as it relates to our map), by examining their publicly available materials. Using Charity Commission data to identify the level of income they reported in Fiscal Year End 2020 and aggregating this in our map subsections.
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Leverage points Breaking reoffending cycles in the criminal justice system | Group 1: Socio-cultural factors Systems approaches emphasise that our ‘mental models’—our attitudes, beliefs, and values— create the systems that exist in our society.
Therefore, to change our systems we usually need to change the mental models that underpin them. These are considered the most ‘upstream’, and potentially the most effective, intervention points for systems change, but also potentially the most challenging.
Our mapping process identified three potential leverage points in this area. Interventions at these points in the system would likely employ similar approaches, for example: 1. Underlying societal beliefs in incarceration as justice:
The belief that justice for criminal activity is achieved by locking up individuals is not fixed. There is good evidence to show how, with different framing and information, advocates for change can overcome these beliefs.
Interventions to change the mental models that underpin the entire system could include research and public messaging that questions this assumption. Public awareness of alternative approaches: Research shows that many people don’t believe prison works. When presented with alternative systems, they will often support them.
Interventions could focus on advocacy and campaigning approaches that increase awareness of the effectiveness of alternatives to prison, such as community-based sentences or restorative justice
. Demonisation and stigmatisation of people in the criminal justice system: People who have committed crimes are often labelled as ‘offenders’ from that point onwards.
They are set apart as being fundamentally different to the rest of society, even once they have served their sentence. Prison serves to reinforce this—separating and removing them, as encapsulated in this quote by Henry L. Tischler: ‘The best way to deal with bad apples is to take them out of the group as quickly as possible.’
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Use the upcoming royal commission to examine where investment is required to prevent reoffending across the criminal justice system Our criminal justice system has been consistently underfunded and overcrowded—letting down people and communities across the country.
The upcoming royal commission on improving efficiency in the criminal justice system provides an opportunity to reassess our approach, and its terms of reference should extend to all the criminal justice system.
it needs to examine the use of prison. Research, including ours, has repeatedly illustrated flaws in the prison system’s effectiveness at preventing reoffending—particularly in the case of short sentences.
Our prison system is overcrowded and is expected to grow by another 20,000 people by 2026,4 and some groups are vastly overrepresented within this population—for example,
27% of people currently in prison are from a minority ethnic group, and 13% are Black or Black British people.5 Yet alternatives exist, such as community-based sentences, but they are under-resourced and under-used.
They deserve greater study, and the royal commission should give serious attention to alternatives that have proven to be effective elsewhere.
Invest further in appropriate sentencing When considering reform in the criminal justice system, governments need to focus on the whole system and not just prisons. People we spoke to repeatedly emphasised that what happens in the courts has a critical influence on reoffending.
Pre-sentence reports (PSRs), provided by probation officers, give judges contextual information on the circumstances behind an offence and the defendant’s situation. Due to staffing and time constraints, these reports can be insufficiently detailed and thus sentencing is given without adequate consideration of the context.
This increases the chance of structural biases such as racism affecting an individual’s outcome—the Lammy Review found that people from a minority ethnic group are more likely to receive a custodial sentence than their White counterparts.
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This research has specifically focussed on factors that impact reoffending cycles. We are aware that reoffending does not capture all that charities do in the criminal justice system, but we focus on it because it is a clear failing of the current system and reoffending rates remain a key metric for charities and government.
In his speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 2021, the Prime Minister highlighted his concern about reoffending by describing it as ‘the one-way ratchet of the criminal justice system.’
At the time of publication, the latest reoffending figures showed that those released from sentences of less than or equal to six months had a proven reoffending rate of 61.6%.10 Systems mapping Systems maps help us to analyse behaviours and patterns in a system.
We have developed this map with a range of partners (from charities, funders, research organisations and those with lived experience of the criminal justice system), using the process to identify blockages, reinforcing loops (such as vicious cycles) and other system drivers that cause reoffending.
We also looked for places to intervene in the system (leverage points), where it seems leverage could be applied to achieve wider change. Systems maps are by nature an abstraction.
Criminal justice is a highly complex system, and a level of simplification was necessary to create something concise enough to be used. To that end, we have focused on the experience of charities within the criminal justice system.
Our work was also focused on reoffending. We have not focused on factors that contribute to an individual’s journey up until that first brush with the criminal justice system, for example childhood or family background, even though these are undeniably key drivers of outcomes.
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We could not use 360Giving’s Grant Nav data in this project due to the lack of Ministry of Justice funding data and other government department funding data published through it. We would encourage all funders, including the government, to publish their work through 360Giving’s Grant Nav to make this kind of analysis possible.
Caveats Our categorisations are based on each organisation’s ‘primary focus area’, even though many charities in fact work across several areas. We also know there are many other charities whose primary focus is not criminal justice, but which do work that has an impact on this area.
For example, charities working with people experiencing homelessness were excluded from this analysis. However, we believe this analysis still presents a useful picture of the current levels of funding in different areas of the system.
Our analysis of the funding available in the criminal justice system is based on charity income (including government and private funders). We are aware that there is more government funding available that is not captured in our analysis, such as direct funding for prisons. We have only focused on charitable income.
Leverage points Some factors on our map have been enlarged and highlighted with a light brown border. These indicate leverage points, places where leverage could be strategically applied to affect greater change in the criminal justice system.
For example, the image below shows one leverage point from our systems map: ‘Demonisation and stigmatisation of people in the criminal justice system’.
This was raised as a key factor influencing reoffending rates in our lived experience interviews, and it is connected to many other factors on our systems map, suggesting that a change here would influence positive change across many other parts of the system.
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This stigmatisation is compounded by other forms of discrimination, such as racism and sexism. For example, women from ethnic minority backgrounds are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and sentenced to harsher punishment than their White counterparts.
Yet when people are presented with specific cases, provided with context and background, they tend to feel compassion towards the individual and favour less punitive approaches
Addressing this demonisation of people in the criminal justice system and increasing awareness of personal contexts could contribute to changing the mental models that underpin much of how our criminal justice system works.
Charity sector funding in this area There is potential for charities to help shift these beliefs, as they have for other issues such as poverty. However, only a tiny fraction of current charitable funding is focused on advocacy.
For specialist criminal justice charities, only 0.4% of funding is focused primarily on shifting public attitudes and beliefs.
Work by Transform Justice and Frameworks UK shows that there are evidence-based ways to speak to the public about the criminal justice system to shift their beliefs, and organisations are pursuing new and accessible ways to tell rounded stories about the criminal justice system to a public audience.
Funders who are interested in bringing about wider ripples of change should consider how these initiatives can form part of their approach to systemic impact.
