Employing ex-offenders is a result worth paying for

Employing ex-offenders is a result worth paying for

The right to vote has little relevance to many prisoners, but a meaningful job would help change their lives

Mark Johnson, Guardian, Tuesday 15 February 2011 16.30 GMT

Voting is not as important for prisoners as getting a real job. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA Wire/Press Association Images

The votes for prisoners debate was a circus for clowns who kept missing the point. I've lost count of the interviews that I've declined to take part in on this subject because I don't want to add to all the noise about it. But the fact is that the rest of Europe regards voting as a human right. Politicians such as Tory MP David Davis, who talk about offenders losing their rights because they have "broken their contract" do not understand that where most offenders come from, contracts aren't meaningful. And their education has been given such a low priority that they probably couldn't read the small print anyway.

The ballot box has little relevance to many of the prisoners I meet on the wings: a drug-addicted offender with mental health issues has other priorities. But even if every one of them was a willing participant, our politicians know that 85,000 votes from people who are otherwise voiceless will make no difference to an election result. Playing to the baying mob on a safe ticket of self-righteous condemnation might just win a few seats. So no prizes for guessing that our politicians have opted for the moral low ground.

When someone commits a crime, he is punished by losing his freedom. If prisons really were places of rehabilitation, then reintroduction to society should be an important part of that process, which must involve understanding society's structure and voting. Excluding prisoners is the very opposite of what we need to do.

And even the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has acknowledged that we need to do something because offending and reoffending rates are so high. Rather than tackle this problem himself, he is planning to hand it over to private investors and then pay them by "results".

There are already public, private and charitable interventions operating both in and outside of our jails, but payment by results could change the structure of the criminal justice system. It's too early to know the details but the R in PBR suggests that measuring success will be crucial to the process. But when it comes to providing clear evidence of outcomes, existing interventions have a patchy record.

Measurements of success are all too easy to manipulate. If rumour proves right, PBR will define an intervention as "successful" if a participant has not reoffended up to six months after release. But the road to recovery is full of relapses. Change requires long-term therapies that attack the roots of criminality. We know these may lie in damaged, abused and neglected childhoods. We know that they are often nurtured by later addiction and mental health problems.

Will PBR be offering long-term rehabilitation to tackle these problems? And some long-term method of evaluating success? Surely investors won't be able to turn a quick buck by cherry-picking the easy-to-reach offenders, leaving the needy majority languishing at the taxpayers' expense? That would be criminal.

Another victim of PBR could be the health of the third sector itself. Already some voluntary organisations are offering public services on the cheap. That can mean they sacrifice a scientific approach to the demands of the publicity they need to attract sponsors and flatter donors' sensibilities. If the trend accelerates with PBR, the charities' traditional role of advocacy for the disadvantaged will be supplanted by management of services. Small, local grassroots charities could be left out in the cold.

Finally, service providers have a very poor track record of employing the people they are trying to help. There is still an assumption that a degree is worth more than experience when tackling crime and disadvantage.

Maybe a PBR intervention to prevent reoffending should be paid for its success only if, by the end of the programme, the organisation employs a healthy percentage of ex-offenders. And I don't mean paying a former master criminal to sweep the floor. I mean letting him use his intelligence to follow a meaningful career. Now that's how payment by results might reduce reoffending.

Mark Johnson, a rehabilitated offender and former drug user, is an author and the founder of the charity Uservoice.

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