Time After Time (eBook)

Introduction

Reoffending is the great hidden scandal of our times. The UK has among the worst recidivism rates in Europe, with 45 per cent of adult ex-prisoners reconvicted within one year of release. For people serving short sentences, this rises to a staggering 61 per cent.1 Given that large numbers of crimes are never even prosecuted,2 the real number of reoffences will be much higher. Reoffending costs the taxpayer about £18 billion a year,3 which is roughly a quarter of the education budget and more than half what we spend on defence.4 Reoffenders are responsible for the vast majority of all crimes: around 80 per cent of those receiving cautions or convictions have offended before.5 Turning this statistic on its head shows just how deep the problem runs. If we solved reoffending, we’d prevent 80 per cent of all crimes.

A key factor is the country’s hideously dysfunctional prisons, which I often compare to hospitals that make patients more ill or schools that lower pupils’ IQs. I should know; I spent two and a half years inside, having been convicted of tax fraud in 2016. There’s a lot of noise in the news about bad prisons, but there is another side of the reoffending coin that is rarely talked about. Ninety per cent of offenders are automatically released after serving only half their sentences; the rest is spent out in the community supposedly being rehabilitated by the probation service. The judge in my case handed me a five-year prison term, but I was released after 50 per cent of this, 911 days (yes, I counted every bloody one of them).

Probation is the catch-all term for the web of official bodies charged with supervising offenders for the rest of their sentence and ensuring they stay on the straight and narrow. By any measure this supervision is failing at a catastrophic level. The head of the parliamentary Justice Committee has stated that ‘Years of underfunding and botched reforms have left the probation system in a mess.’6 A National Audit report concluded that probation was ‘under siege’ and incapable of providing justice for ‘victims, offenders, taxpayers or society’.7 A Bit of a Stretch showed that prisons are mired in dysfunctional chaos, but they are a paragon of competence compared to the probation service.

About 70 per cent of probation was privatised in 20148 by the hapless Chris Grayling when he was justice secretary; a man who would later waste millions on a ferry company that didn’t have any ships.9 The supervision of low- and medium-risk offenders was handed over to community rehabilitation companies (CRCs), whose primary interest was profit, and staff numbers were slashed.10 High-risk offenders were looked after by the government-managed National Probation Service (NPS), which suffered huge budget cuts.11 Meanwhile the number of people under supervision had shot up, nearly doubling between 2015 and 2020.12 The number of offenders returning to prison for breaching their licence rose by 47 per cent in three years, while the proportion of supervised offenders recalled to custody on short sentences increased twelvefold, from 3 per cent to 36 per cent.13

By 2019, the writing was on the wall. A landmark report called Grayling’s reforms an ‘unmitigated disaster’.14 The National Audit Office concluded that privatisation had wasted almost £500 million, and said the government had ‘set itself up to fail’ by using ‘ineffective’ contracts with private firms which were woefully incapable of monitoring criminals in the community.15 All CRC contracts were terminated and probation was renationalised once more. But the damage to the system is now entrenched, and it will take years and significant additional funding to recover.

If you’re wondering what this has got to do with you, the collapse of the probation service has led to a surge in reoffending and far more victims of crime. The number of rapes, murders and other serious crimes committed by offenders on parole has risen by more than 50 per cent since Grayling’s reforms.16 A 2017 Inspectorate of Probation report found that ‘The quality of CRC work to protect the public is generally poor, and poor work by the CRC to protect against the risk of harm left victims vulnerable.’17

It’s not hard to see how poor supervision leads to recidivism. Leroy Campbell was convicted of rape in 2001. He had 11 different probation officers in prison. When he was eventually released on licence in 2016, he told his probation officer that he was thinking of raping again and had been looking at open windows, but he still wasn’t recalled to prison. Weeks later, he raped and murdered Lisa Skidmore in her own home, after climbing in through her window, only four months after his release from jail.18 These problems have persisted to the present, as every three days someone is murdered by an offender under probation supervision.19 In June 2022, Jordan McSweeney raped and murdered Zara Aleena in east London only nine days after he got out of prison. He had served nine prison terms for burglary and weapon offences and had a long history of violence towards women. He was only allocated a probation officer a week before his release and was wrongly assessed as medium risk. He missed his first probation appointments but wasn’t recalled to prison because his probation officer was struggling under a 50 per cent higher workload brought on by chronic staff shortages. The Chief Inspector of Probation’s report was scathing: ‘The Probation Service failed … He was free to commit this most heinous crime on an innocent young woman.’20

There is also a terrible human cost to offenders themselves. Every two days an ex-prisoner takes their own life while under probation supervision, a sixfold increase in the last ten years.21 I know several offenders who have found the outside world so difficult that they’ve deliberately reoffended just so they can return to prison, which is an astonishing indictment of the services that are supposed to be supporting offenders in the community.

In the months after my release, I kept hearing of former colleagues returning to jail. I found this extremely depressing and grimly fascinating. These guys knew exactly how bad conditions were on the inside, and yet still they’d gone back to square one. The drumbeat of another ex-con reoffending sent the same intractable question round and round my head: if British prisons are so awful, what’s going wrong in the outside world that means so many people keep going back?

This book is my attempt to find an answer. I’m in a strangely unique position to do this, as I’m both an investigative journalist and a former convict. Ex-jailbirds are a naturally cagey bunch who are understandably hesitant to discuss their activities, but my own lengthy imprisonment inadvertently ingratiated me into this normally elusive community. A criminal record is usually a barrier to employment, but for this particular job it’s an absolute necessity, allowing me to reach parts of the criminal underworld others can’t get near. A Bit of a Stretch explored life behind bars, while this book looks at the other side of the coin to see why ex-prisoners can’t go straight.

Writers often meet their subjects for a couple of hours, but I’ve been able to track these repeat offenders over several years. I shared a wing with some of them in Wandsworth back in 2016, and I’ve followed their ups and downs ever since. My friend Ed has been inside five times since I’ve known him, though this will probably have increased by the time the book is published. They are deeply flawed, chaotic and damaged characters, but also warm, funny, intelligent and kind. It’s fair to say they are largely rubbish at their chosen profession, given how often they get caught. Their crimes range from shoplifting to murder. Only one of them, in my view, is irredeemable.

I’ve also spent months digging into the official bodies, charities and companies that are supposed to prevent reoffending, and have uncovered shocking failings that are published here for the first time. This includes an investigation into the biggest mass shooting in the UK for ten years, exposing serious flaws in the supervision of the perpetrator that the police would rather you didn’t know.

What started as a simple quest to track persistent offenders has grown into something much bigger. Story after story has presented me with the same dark conclusion: that the system doesn’t really want people to go straight. This isn’t deliberate, but justice apparatus has nonetheless developed an inescapable gravitational pull, relentlessly sucking people back to prison despite their best efforts to escape. The criminal justice system has morphed into a dark monster that grabs people with its tentacles and refuses to let them go. The problem goes way beyond reoffending, as you can be reimprisoned without committing any more crimes. One of my contributors was incarcerated indefinitely for simply attending a party, despite not even turning up. Another went on trial for a violent assault that he had been convicted and punished for 18 years before. We’ve inadvertently developed a merciless system that arbitrarily decides that certain people are utterly beyond redemption and tries to lock them up for the rest of their lives.

Like A Bit of a Stretch, there is plenty of black comedy in these pages. Simon successfully escaped a...