Criminal rehabilitation: a sub-prime investment?
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2010
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ken Clarke has promised a "rehabilitation revolution" in which private investors will fund projects aimed at cutting the re-offending rate. If the projects succeed, the government will pay those investors a return. But if the projects fail, the investors will lose their shirts.
You can see why the idea is attractive to ministers. In a period of spending restraint - and with a huge and hugely expensive prison population - a 'payment by results' system promises to fund rehabilitation projects from future savings.
But will it work? After all, rehabilitation is hardly a new idea. And so far, it seems, most attempts have made little difference. So the question is whether a new way of paying for criminal rehabilitation might deliver better results. There's unrestrained excitement among some of those working with offenders. And deep scepticism among some criminologists.
Emma Jane Kirby investigates.
Interviewees include: the Justice Secretary, the Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP; criminologists Professor Sir Anthony Bottoms and Professor Carol Hedderman; Geoff Mulgan from the Young Foundation; the welfare expert Professor Dan Finn; Toby Eccles from Social Finance; and Rob Owen, chief executive of the St Giles Trust.
Producer: Richard Knight.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
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| 0:35.4 | Sounds. |
| 0:36.4 | Thank you for downloading the Analysis Podcast from the BBC. |
| 0:40.2 | This week Emma Jane Kirby looks at the government's promised rehabilitation revolution. |
| 0:48.8 | This is Michael. He's 35. He likes what he met matter the day. He loves spaghetti by the names and he's worried about |
| 0:56.3 | going bald. He's a normal bloke. Oh, and he's about to be let out of prison. |
| 1:09.8 | Another promotional video by another rehabilitation charity wanting more money to help people like Michael. |
| 1:11.6 | You don't need to have seen this cartoon to guess what happens next. The story |
| 1:15.9 | after all almost always has the same ending. People like Michael on short-term sentences just end up back in jail and that leaves the other character |
| 1:26.2 | in this criminal justice tale with an expensive problem. |
| 1:30.0 | This is Ken. |
| 1:34.0 | He's 70. He likes watching Match of the Day. |
| 1:39.0 | He loves Curry and he's worried about having no budget. |
| 1:43.6 | He's an ordinary chap. |
| 1:44.8 | Oh, and he's the justice secretary. |
| 1:47.0 | And the last government's left him with a record prison population. |
| 1:52.4 | Michael's inability to keep on the straight enough. population. But luckily for both of them, Ken has had an idea. |
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