£11m reoffending scheme had no impact, says report

An £11m scheme to cut reoffending rates among criminals jailed for up to a year has had no impact, the official evaluation of the project found.

The “disappointing” results of the two-year Diamond Initiative raise concerns about Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke’s plans for a rehabilitation revolution, the report for London’s Criminal Justice Partnership said.

But it would be wrong to describe the project as an “unqualified failure”, the authors insisted, adding that the findings “lead to a policy stance of gradual reformism rather than revolution”.

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The scheme, which was piloted by the Metropolitan Police and London Probation in six areas of the capital, aimed to break the cycle of reoffending among adults who have served short sentences by offering offenders help with problems such as drug and alcohol misuse, housing debt and unemployment.

But the results showed that 156 of 368 offenders (42.4 per cent) on the scheme committed new crimes within a year, compared with 136 of 327 similar convicts (41.6 per cent) who received no special help.

“This is the headline finding of the Diamond evaluation and would appear to demonstrate that the initiative had no impact on offending,” the report said.

It added that helping people to turn their backs on a life of crime is a “slow and uncertain process”, which was “frequently a case of ‘two steps forward, one step back’.”

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Rehabilitation programmes “can easily become derailed, especially when they involve complex partnerships between several different agencies” and, on the whole, any positive results tend to be fairly small, the report said.

“The most thorough research evaluations of treatment initiatives, when they show positive results, tend to report fairly small effects.”

Any stronger results in small “demonstration” projects prove “very difficult to replicate when a similar programme is ‘rolled out’ on a larger scale”, the report said.

“The main implication of these studies is that programmes of work with offenders can accelerate the desistance process, but viewed in the round, they tend to have only a modest impact.”

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Sir Anthony Bottoms, chairman of the academic reference group which oversaw the evaluation, added that there was no difference in the seriousness of the crimes committed by offenders on the scheme and those who were not.

“The two groups of offenders exhibited highly similar offending careers, which continued to be comparable after prison release, despite the fact that the evaluation group were referred to the Diamond Initiative,” the report said.

“Given that no impact on offending has been found, it is unsurprising that no economic benefit, in terms of cost of crimes averted, has been detected.”

But the evaluation found there was “tentative evidence to suggest that the Diamond Initiative may have reduced the degree to which violent or ‘disorderly’ offenders reoffended”.

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