Anton Shelupanov
As social innovation catches on, even in the most unexpected places, the UK's criminal justice sector seems to be barracading itself in an innovation-free zone. Anton Shelupanov explores why the sector is stuck in its ways, and tracks down the individuals breaking the mould.
In recent years the idea of what social innovation is about has been better articulated than ever before, and there is a lot of good work going on across a number of sectors to promote it. There are many great tools available to social innovators, books have been written on the subject and governments are beginning to recognise its value to delivering social change. The European Commission is devoting serious resources to attempting to systemise social innovation across Europe. In the UK, intermediary bodies such as Nesta are driving not only smarter funding of innovative projects but also working to encourage the establishment of an emerging evidence base for doing things differently.
Across a number of sectors in public policy we've seen great strides being made in fostering social innovation. Examples include devoting a percentage of the budget to innovation in the healthcare sector, or creating group project-based learning incubators in education. Many professionals working in long-term care, ageing, chronic conditions, energy, neighbourhood management and various other areas have embraced social innovation whole heartedly. And yet one sector, criminal justice - the sector in which I work - is often accused of lagging behind. The work of the sector impacts on so much in the public sphere, so why is it seen as a poor relation in the social innovation world?
In part this view persists due to the sector's historical quasi-military heritage, hierarchical structures and a focus on security. Partly it may be to do with the fact that the offender population we work with is high need and chaotic, so justice professionals are perceived as spending so much time managing crises and firefighting (sometimes literally when a prisoner sets fire to their cell as a protest against something) so as not have the same capacity for social innovation as medics, educators or urban planners. And of course, given the often prevailing public opinion (real or invented by tabloids) that offenders and those who manage them don't matter, justice innovation seems unlikely to get a look in.
The question is then, is this actually true? Is there really a dearth of social innovation within criminal justice? My emphatic answer is "no", but not a simple or unconditional "no". Over the course of the past year or more, my colleagues at the Centre for Justice Innovation and I have spoken with a couple of dozen criminal justice pioneers across Britain. The outcome of these conversations is a book called StreetCraft, which was published on 19 February 2014.
The research we carried out reveals a wealth of grassroots practitioner-led social innovation in the sector. There are a number of clear themes which are well covered in social innovation 101, for example, collaborative and partnership working, service design based on user experiences and opinions, using technology to simplify processes, co-location of services. But there is a lot more than that - the magic dust of social innovation which comes from the people who choose to throw themselves into this exciting but often uncertain world. Working on a hunch and gathering evidence as you go along, bending the rules, seeking out allies in unlikely places.
The innovations we looked at were impressive and extensive in their scope. For example, a local authority worker in Tottenham, North London who refused to accept the closure of the project he led to reduce reoffending, and turned it into an independent charity so that the community would not lose a vital service. Or the case of a cop, who introduced a radical way of helping prolific burglars cease their offending by ecouraging them to volunteer to wear electronic tags, and in the process, disrupting the oligopolistic stranglehold of two huge private companies on the electronic monitoring market.
So why is my "no" not unconditional, if there is indeed so much great innovative work out there? It is because many of the stories we heard were accompanied with tales of barriers which had to be overcome and pitfalls which had to be avoided, not always entirely successfully. It seems that despite the great groundswell of social innovation in criminal justice, the sector itself is often resistant to it. Large organisations in particular, are not always great at nurturing rank and file members of their staff who have an innovative idea. This criticism was more often levelled by charity workers at big statutory bodies, e.g. some probation trusts, but some large charities concerned with service delivery are not immune from this either. Nor are many large criminal justice organisations that are great at engaging in an honest discussion of failure, and at learning from it.
Perhaps in this sector it is less surprising. Whilst the inventor James Dyson sees a hallmark of quality in the fact that some 5,000 prototypes of his revolutionary vacuum cleaner had to be created before the perfect design evolved, it is hard to imagine a chief constable admitting that a previous 5,000 security breaches mean that the current approach is the ideal one.
But the most heartening finding of our research has been the clear proof that despite all the sectoral difficulties and quirks, criminal justice practitioners still have the drive and sense of social mission to get on with it. And when they clearly see that some established practice is not the best, they go against bureaucracies and conventional wisdom and try something new, even if the odds are stacked against them. This is because the sector attracts people who are genuinely committed to making the communities they serve safer.
We all know that evidence and research in the world of social innovation is only part of the whole story. Action is imperative, and our findings have encouraged us to launch a practical support programme for early stage criminal justice innovators. We are calling the programme StreetCraft Scholarships. It will be delivered by the Centre for Justice Innovation together with two very experienced partners - Clinks and the Young Foundation. Together we shall seek out a new generation of StreetCrafters and support them at the very outset of their innovation, providing development support and hopefully some tools to enable them to take their idea to the next level.
Applications are open until 28 March. We hope that together we can pave the way to a social innovation-centred criminal justice system fit for the 21st Century.
This article originally appeared in Pioneers Post on 13th March 2014