In response to the ‘Strengthening Probation, Building Confidence’ consultation held by the Ministry of Justice, this briefing lays out the Centre’s vision for a new strategy for effective community supervision.
To maximise public safety, we have set out what effective community supervision ought to look like, including:
- Improving the relationship between the courts and probation;
- Making the court experience fairer to promote desistance;
- Reducing the intensity and length of community sentences for low-risk offenders;
- Improving the quality of supervision for medium and high risk offenders;
- Testing new approaches to improving compliance with community sentences that offer timely and proportionate sanctions;
- Expanding the use of electronic monitoring as an additional tool for use in supervision;
- Reducing the use of short prison sentences, including introducing a presumption against very short prison sentences.
To deliver this strategy for effective community supervision, we argue that Government needs to:
- Restructure probation to realign around police force areas with a mixed funding formula in which Police and Crime Commissioners, local authorities and central Government all fund new probation areas;
- Reintegrate probation across the whole of England;
- Give probation a national voice, by emulating the model of the Youth Justice Board.
This work has been generously funded by the Hadley Trust and the Monument Trust.