Managing Offenders in the Community - Everyone's Solution no-one's Job
On Thursday 14th May 2009 Paul Hayes, CEO of the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse, presented the 7th Annual Community Justice Portal Lecture to an audience at Sheffield Hallam University.
To watch a recording of the lecture, click on the slide below.
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Lecture Outline
Although individuals need to take responsibility for their decision to offend and its consequences for victims, few would deny that the social and economic circumstances in which offenders live shape their choices.
Those in prison and under supervision in the community are not a representative sample of the population. They are more likely than the rest of us to be young male, working class and from a black and minority ethnic community. They will typically not have succeeded in school, will have fewer skills and a poor employment history. They will be more likely than their peers be poorly housed, and will live in the areas of major cities with the greatest concentration of crime and other indicators of social distress. They will be more likely to have had exposure to the care system and mental health services. They will constitute the majority of those people whose drug use escalates into dependency and they will disproportionately experience alcohol misuse problems.
There is a policy and political consensus - exemplified through slogans such as "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" and "Breakdown Britain" - that unless the factors underpinning offending: worklessness, poverty of aspiration, dependency, mental illness, homelessness etc. are addressed, re-offending rates will continue to be unacceptably high. Despite this there is a marked reluctance to commit to and resource a comprehensive response.
The lecture will examine:
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The recent history of addressing these issues
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How the current situation in which there is no clear accountable agency for this task has arisen
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How the barriers to addressing these issues may be overcome
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The claims of different stakeholders to lead the process.
Paul Hayes has been Chief Executive of the National Treatment Agency (NTA) since 2001. Paul became a probation officer in the east end of London in the late 1970s eventually becoming Chief Probation Officer for South-East London Probation Service. His interest in drug dependency grew out of his work in the Probation Service in London where he led on drug and alcohol intervention for the Inner London Probation Service and subsequently assumed a similar role nationally for the Association of Chief Officers of Probation.
In 2001 Paul was asked to establish the National Treatment Agency to oversee the expansion in drug treatment planned by the government. Although part of the NHS, the NTA works closely with probation, police, prisons and the YTB to provide drug treatment to offenders and regards the reduction of drug related crime as a key part of its core business.
