Danny Kruger: 65% of boys with a convicted parent go on to become criminals. We need to change that.

Danny Kruger provides the latest instalment of our series looking at the conveyor belt to crime. Danny who runs a charity for ex-offenders, Only Connect, was a speechwriter for David Cameron.

The recent riots were fomented and largely carried out by boys and young men without adequate role models or social structures. In gangs they form their own, destructive families with their own, malign approximations of fatherhood and brotherhood. They have suffered a deficit of healthy relationships and they are wreaking their revenge on themselves and the rest of us.

We need a conscious and deliberate effort to create, artificially, a positive alternative to the negative social networks future rioters and looters are growing up in. And because we have to start somewhere, and we should crack the toughest nut first, I propose a new ‘children of offenders strategy’.

65% of boys with a convicted parent go on to become criminals. That’s the same as the national re-offending rate for ex-prisoners, and equally shows that crime has its own momentum. To stop that momentum we need to intervene directly in the lives of offenders’ children.

So long as both parents agree, they and their child should receive intensive support and advice at every step, possibly delivered by a faith-based, voluntary or community group but closely aligned with the work of the statutory sector. Local authorities should be free to implement the strategy as they see fit, but the unifying principle should be emphasis on the social networks young people grow up in – and a determined attempt to steer them into networks that teach them to believe in British society, and give them opportunities to participate in it.

Financed through a social impact bond – an independent investor provides the upfront cash, carries the risk of failure and is repaid by government in the event of success – this policy would cost the taxpayer nothing to implement and save huge sums in the long run.

Conservatives believe in preserving positive inheritances – literally, in the case of inheritance tax, by allowing people to pass on the fruits of their enterprise to their children. We should be equally concerned to dam up bad inheritances, blocking the passage down the generations of the attitudes and values that curse a child’s life, and through him, curse society as a whole.

The Peterborough Prison pilot: through a glass, darkly

Information on the pilot study designed to cut reconvictions at Peterborough Prison has dribbled out in an unsatisfactory way. But with the publication of a report by RAND Europe at the end of May we now know a little more than we did – though by no means enough – about how this flagship project will be run.

The report, called Lessons Learned from the planning and early implementation of the Social Impact Bond at HMP Peterborough, is based on interviews with 22 insiders who have been involved with setting up the scheme. Social Finance raised £5 million from investors to fund the bond: they will get a return on their investment if reconviction rates at Peterborough are lower by a defined amount than those of a control group of prisoners released from other prisons.

The scheme aims to reduce reconvictions in the 18 months after release for offences committed in first year post-release for 3,000 consecutive short-sentence (up to 1 year) prisoners liberated from HMP Peterborough in 5+ years from September 2010. Crucially, short-sentence HMP Peterborough prisoners liberated from court are ineligible.

Three cohorts, each of 1,000 ex-prisoners, allows for interim analyses and early pay out to SF investors if at least a 10 per cent reduction in reconvictions is observed per cohort. Commendably, cohort-size was determined for statistical assurance on the precision of the estimated reduction. SF investors will get a return if the services, delivered to prisoners both before and after release, succeed in reducing reconvictions by 10 per cent (or more) per cohort of 1,000 eligible ex-prisoners compared to controls; or by 7.5 per cent (or more) across all 3,000 eligible ex-prisoners. A cap has been set so that MOJ’s total pay-out is limited in the event that One Service (as the service is called) delivers more than anticipated.

The cap is not spelled out in the RAND Europe report but earlier disclosures about the scheme suggest that it has been set at £13 million. (In 2010 money? This is not clear.) The authors do disclose that MOJ’s provision on how much it is likely to have to pay out is off the Treasury books – an uncanny characteristic of government private finance initiatives that Professor Allyson Pollock has lambasted in the NHS. This lack of transparency is a key statistical issue because the amount of prior provision derives directly from the prior plausibility (or probability) that MOJ attaches to each percentage point of reduction in number of reconvictions. Bayesians beware!

Selecting controls against which the released Peterborough prisoners willhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif be compared is a key issue. Here lie the greatest weaknesses of the pilot.

Randomizing eligible offenders within HMP Peterborough – some to One Service, others as controls - was rejected as an interference with SF’s business model, which relies on maximizing the number of ex-prisoners released into the local area in which SF’s partners operate the services delivered after release. Randomization would have reduced their case-cohort by half (50:50 randomization) or a third (67:33 randomization) but bolstered the evidence-base.
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