Research Summary 3/10

Transcription

1 Research Summary 3/10 The Evidence and Analysis Unit of the Office for Criminal Justice Reform exists to improve policy making, decision taking and practice in support of the Ministry of Justice purpose and aims to provide the public and Parliament with information necessary for informed debate and to publish information for future use. Community Payback and local criminal justice engagement initiatives: public perceptions and awareness Louise Moore, Annabelle Phillips and Katya Kostadintcheva Improving public confidence in the Criminal Justice System (CJS) is a key government priority. The 2008 review by Louise Casey Engaging Communities in Fighting Crime suggests that public confidence in the CJS may be linked to the visibility of justice, and to how the CJS informs and engages with the public. At a local level, a range of work is underway to ensure the public recognise CJS services. Following publication of the Engaging Communities in Criminal Justice Green Paper in April 2009, a number of new measures have been introduced which are intended to give communities a greater say in the way justice is delivered at a local level. The current piece of exploratory research looked at the public response primarily to local Community Payback projects, but also to four criminal justice initiatives designed to engage communities in criminal justice: Community, Community Impact, Citizens, and Community Justice Teams. Crown copyright 2010 Extracts from this document may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes on condition that the source is acknowledged. First published March 2010 ISBN Contact info: research@justice.gsi.gov.uk The views expressed in this Research Summary are those of the authors, not necessarily those of the Ministry of Justice (nor do they reflect Government policy) Key points Over half of respondents living in the immediate vicinity of a local Community Payback project had seen or heard about the local project. General awareness of Community Payback was higher than for the specific local Community Payback initiatives (three-quarters of respondents across the four Pioneer Areas were aware of the term Community Payback). Residents across the four Pioneer Areas also showed a good level of basic understanding of the term Community Payback. The research suggested awareness and reactions to local Community Payback projects were affected by the location, duration and type of work undertaken, as well as communications. Changes implemented as a result of the Casey Review appeared to have helped make Community Payback work visible with the Orange jackets worn by offenders being cited as the most common reason for the public identifying local projects as Community Payback. Few respondents were aware of the opportunity to nominate Community Payback work. They were, however, generally very positive about the possibility of nominating schemes and further efforts to more widely publicise the nomination of projects may be beneficial. Residents were generally favourable to the Community Payback approach and work being undertaken in their area, and were most supportive of offenders doing outdoor manual work cleaning or repairing public spaces. Communications, such as leaflets, may help clear up misconceptions and allay concerns, including details of the supervision of schemes. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the early stages of implementation, awareness of the four criminal justice initiatives was low, although residents across the four Pioneer Areas supported the approaches and efforts to give communities a greater say in the way justice is delivered.

2 A multi-method approach was employed in the current research which was concerned with providing an early assessment (rather than an outcome evaluation) in four Pioneer Areas, 1 of how such initiatives were delivered on the ground, public awareness and perceptions of these projects, and their expected scope for improving confidence in the CJS. The five initiatives were as follows: Payback: compulsory work in the community as part of a court sentence, previously community service / community punishment, was relabelled Community Payback in 2005 to increase public awareness. Following recommendations in Louise Casey s review, unpaid work of this kind is now consistently referred to as Community Payback (the new term was not always used following its introduction in 2005), and a formal nomination process has been put in place allowing members of the public to suggest projects for consideration. In addition, from December 2008, it was expected that the work would be carried out in high-visibility orange jackets with Community Payback written on the front and back. 2 The fundamental principles of Community Payback are that: i) it is a sentence of the court and, thus, a punishment; ii) it does not replace paid employment; and iii) it makes offenders pay back to communities in a constructive and demanding way. /Community Payback Citizens : introduced to give local people a say on how offenders on Community Payback schemes repay the community for their crimes. The panels enable members of the public to nominate or propose work projects for offenders at public meetings. : introduced to strengthen community engagement activity, Community will engage more with local communities to ensure local priorities inform decision-making by the Crown Prosecution Service. Impact : a report completed by the police, in short, standard format that is intended to inform decisions made by practitioners and aims to put an offence into the wider context in which it was committed, detailing its effects on the community. Justice Teams: bring together the different parts of the CJS, for example, the police, the courts and probation, to share information about community issues and work together with the public in a local area to address local problems with anti-social and criminal behaviour. Approach The exploratory research examined public awareness of and responses to Community Payback projects and four criminal justice initiatives in four Pioneer Areas (Hull, Liverpool, Nottingham and Sandwell). These areas were selected as they were known to be undertaking work and communications on Community Payback. While the ability to generalise from these results will be limited, they may be applicable to other Pioneer Areas where schemes are up and running, and operating in similar contexts. Awareness of four specific Community Payback projects (one in each Pioneer Area) was assessed. These projects were typical examples of visible Community Payback work rather than the most high-profile projects in each of the areas. All involved group activity carried out in residential areas, and covered a range of tasks from clearing leaves to painting recreation grounds. A summary of the Community Payback projects can be found in Table 1. 1 The Neighbourhood Crime and Justice Group in the Home Office fund and work in partnership with 60 Pioneer Area Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships. These areas, which are coterminous geographically with local authorities, were selected according to their ranking on a number of Police Force Area and local authority measures including British Crime Survey and Place Survey data relating to deprivation and public attitudes towards crime. 2 Distinctive clothing is not to be worn by 16/17-year-olds and those subject to Enforcement Orders under the Children and Adoption Act It is also not worn if there is a potential risk to the public, staff or offenders, or if there is a justifiable objection from the beneficiary of the work. Although the different projects were not directly comparable (including differing types of work, areas, and time periods), the combination of projects allowed perceptions of a wide range of Community Payback work to be explored. 3 Each of the four 3 Further follow-up research is currently underway in one Pioneer Area to examine immediate perceptions of the public to a Community Payback project in a non-residential, town centre location. 2

3 Table 1 Work undertaken Duration of work Area Other criminal justice engagement initiatives in area Community Payback projects for each of the four Pioneer Areas Hull Liverpool Nottingham Sandwell Removing fly tipping and clearing overgrown hedges One-off job lasting one day Residential estate of terraced and semidetached houses Impact Justice Team Tidying common land e.g. tree removal, painting fences Painting recreation ground railings Clearing leaves/ overgrown areas/ litter Four months Two days Three days Residential estate including blocks of flats Impact Justice Team Recreation ground in residential area of flats Impact Justice Team Walkway in residential area of semidetached houses and blocks of flats Impact Pioneer Areas had also distributed leaflets to local houses before or after work was completed. In three areas, these referred to local Community Payback schemes, while, in Hull, they referred to the Justice Seen, Justice Done approach. A multi-method approach was taken to allow public perceptions of local initiatives to be examined from several different angles. The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods allowed for the triangulation of research findings, and an assessment to be made of how far messages on criminal justice activities were communicated beyond the location where work was undertaken, and the rationale for public perceptions to be explored. The following methods were employed in each of the four Pioneer Areas. 1. A small-scale household survey with a random sample of adults (aged 18 or over) in the immediate vicinity of the Community Payback projects who may have received leaflets/other communications. The survey included detailed questions about the information members of the public received about the local project, whether they had seen local projects or heard about them, and their views on such information/activities. 4 4 An adjusted response rate of 58% was achieved across the four areas. The unadjusted response rate for the survey was 55%. The adjusted response rate is based on excluding ineligible property (codes included are property vacant, property derelict, property demolished, non-residential property and property not found) from the calculations. 2. An on the street survey with a purposive sample of passers-by in the immediate vicinity of the Community Payback projects (i.e. people seeing the projects) to assess their immediate reaction to Community Payback work, what they thought was happening and how the activity made them feel A local-authority-wide random-digit-dialling telephone survey of adults aged 18 or over, including a broader range of questions than outlined for the household survey, examining awareness of the local Community Payback projects, national Community Payback work and views on the other criminal justice initiatives across the wider Pioneer Area. 6 The sample sizes achieved for each of the Pioneer Areas are shown in Table 2. The data presented in this report are unweighted due to the small sample sizes (and the lack of available population data for the household and in-street elements). The results therefore reflect the views of those interviewed rather than the wider population in these areas. 5 The response rate for this survey was not recorded. 6 An adjusted response rate of 18% across areas was achieved. An adjustment was made for those individuals who were ineligible to take part in the survey (e.g. the telephone number was for a postcode outside of the local authority). 3

4 Table 2 Interviews conducted by method across four Pioneer Areas Hull Liverpool Nottingham Sandwell Overall Household survey Street interview RDD telephone survey Four focus groups were also conducted in Nottingham, involving 32 members of the public, to further explore perceptions of Community Payback and the four criminal justice engagement initiatives, the potential to impact on confidence, and preferences on communications about such activities. 7 Results Awareness of the local projects Just over half of respondents (completing the household survey) living in the immediate vicinity of a local Community Payback project reported having seen the work being undertaken, suggesting projects are visible locally, but only half of those who had seen or heard about the project were aware that the work was being undertaken by offenders on Community Payback. This suggests that further work may be needed to link the local projects with the Community Payback brand. Those who were aware that the local projects involved offenders on Community Payback were most likely to recognise the work from the highvisibility jackets. 8 As might be expected, awareness was lower among those living further away from the project with around one in five being aware of the projects across the wider Pioneer Areas. Awareness of the specific local project was found to vary across areas, which suggests that the scope for impact may vary depending on the delivery model employed for Community Payback initiatives in residential areas. Residents in Liverpool were more likely to recall having seen the project/heard about it across all surveys. The higher level of recall in this area may be attributable to the longer-term nature of this project which involved several initiatives taking place over a period of several months on one estate. By contrast, residents across the wider local authority in Hull were much more likely to have seen a 7 Focus groups consisted of individuals recruited from i) the household survey; and ii) a new exercise in the vicinity of the local project using a questionnaire to establish attitudes and views towards Community Payback. This ensured those with differing levels of awareness were included in the groups. 8 When asked what made them think the local work was Community Payback, 27 of the 50 residents in the household survey selected either I recognised the orange jackets or Community Payback written on their backs from the response options available. 4 Community Payback project of some kind (other than the specific local project) than in the other Pioneer Areas. It is likely that the greater number of shorterterm projects taking place in differing locations in this area provided more opportunity for members of the public to see work in action. A higher proportion of respondents in this area was also aware of the ability to nominate work, and appeared more likely to do so. A slightly different pattern of awareness and recall was observed for Sandwell and Nottingham where the specific local work lasted two to three days and there were a number of other projects in the surrounding large residential areas. Residents in these two areas recorded similar levels of awareness of the local project to Hull, but their recall of Community Payback in the wider local authority area was comparable to that in Liverpool. Just over one-third of residents living in the proximity of a local project who had heard of Community Payback had received information about the project: leaflets were the source most likely to be cited by local residents. Those who were aware of the projects were generally positive about the impact on the local area and on the community (88% of all respondents to the household survey agreed that the work had improved the look of the local area). They were also broadly favourable to Community Payback as a type of punishment, and towards offenders undertaking such work in their local area. Awareness of the wider Community Payback scheme Across all surveys over two-thirds of respondents stated that they had heard of Community Payback (Table 3 shows the proportion across the four areas for the localauthority-wide survey). This mirrors previous national findings from Home Office surveys 9 and suggests that the term is understood by the majority of the public. The local-authority-wide survey suggested that members of the public most commonly heard about Community Payback from the media. When asked about the best form of communication, leaflets through the door and local television were cited as being most popular. 9 See Justice Seen, Justice Done Tracker Survey. The corresponding figure from the Tracker in December 2009 was 75%.

5 Table 3 Proportion of respondents across four Pioneer Areas who reported that they had heard of Community Payback Pioneer Area Overall Hull Liverpool Nottingham Sandwell Base size Yes 76% 78% 75% 76% 73% No 24% 22% 24% 24% 26% Don t know 1% * 1% 0% * * denotes less than 0.5%. Responses to the household and local authority surveys also suggested that respondents had a good general understanding of the term Community Payback and were aware that it involved offenders carrying out unpaid work in the community (92% and 95% respectively of those who had heard of Community Payback across areas). However, members of the public showed less knowledge of the specific details of the initiative and raised some concerns about how many hours offenders do each day, the type of offenders given this type of sentence, the impact on re-offending rates, the consequences of not turning up for work, and levels of supervision. For example: It worried me as I passed as they did not seem to be supervised. As noted above, high-visibility jackets were the most commonly listed means of identifying Community Payback by respondents in the household survey. Members of the public expressed differing views about the use of the jackets, however. While some residents in the discussion groups felt that the jackets would deter offenders from committing further crime, others did not agree with the use of jackets to distinguish offenders. As I m walking past, I think, if I do something wrong, I m going to have to wear that. I don t agree with the name on the back. I just think it ought to be blank. It causes humiliation. Few respondents were aware of opportunities to formally nominate Community Payback work. Across areas, 87% of respondents to the local authority survey were unaware or answered don t know when asked whether local residents could suggest a project (83% in Hull, 93% in Liverpool, 85% in Nottingham, and 89% in Sandwell). Even fewer respondents had made a suggestion (only 2% across areas in the wider local authority survey). Evidence from the discussion groups suggested that the formal nomination approach was potentially an important feature of the initiative as it offered local communities an opportunity to be involved in decision-making and to feel able to make a difference. Participants were extremely positive about the approach, referred to it without prompting and greatly valued the opportunity it provided. The old people in the community who need jobs doing, they can t afford it If they can get in touch with somebody and say my garden s a bit of a mess and let somebody come down and do it at least (the offenders) are putting something in. Awareness of local criminal justice engagement initiatives As might be expected given the early stages of implementation, only a small proportion (between one in five and one in ten) of residents across the four Pioneer Areas stated that they were aware of the local criminal justice initiatives. Community Justice Teams were most well known with almost one in five respondents in the local-authoritywide survey stating that they were aware of the approach. The higher level of recall for this initiative may be attributable to the longer-term operation of community justice initiatives. 10 Alternatively, people may be getting confused with wider use of the community justice term. The low levels of awareness reported for the Citizens further reinforce findings regarding the lack of awareness of the nominations element of the Community Payback scheme. Support for the four initiatives was generally high amongst those interviewed across the four Pioneer Areas. 10 There have, for instance, been three prior research publications relating to the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre (see McKenna, 2007; Llewellyn-Thomas and Prior, 2007; and Joliffe and Farrington, 2009). 5

6 Perceived scope for improving confidence in the CJS Analysis of both the household and wider local authority surveys showed that residents were broadly favourable towards Community Payback (76% and 73% respectively). The street survey and discussion groups also supported this finding, highlighting benefits to the community as one of the most positive outcomes of the approach. For example: It s very good. They ve cleaned up the area of rubbish and leaves outside my house. A large proportion of respondents completing the household survey felt unable to assess the likely impact of Community Payback on their levels of confidence in the fairness and effectiveness of the CJS (around 50% and 40% respectively were unable to give a response either way or answered don t know ). Around one in three respondents agreed that hearing or seeing Community Payback had increased their confidence that the CJS was effective (32%) and/or fair (27%). Among those who were able to assess the likely impact on confidence, the main reasons highlighted for increased confidence were the general message that something was being done, the perceived benefits to the community, and the belief that the punishment was appropriate for minor crimes. Reasons cited for confidence not increasing were perceptions that Community Payback was not a tough enough punishment, not an effective deterrent or not delivering justice to victims. Community Payback is not normally used to make direct reparation to victims. The intention that offenders are provided with the opportunity to make indirect reparation to the community may therefore need to be clarified. A possible explanation for the difficulties in assessing impact on confidence, emerging from the discussion groups, was that residents may not directly relate Community Payback to the CJS or see it as a new initiative, given its grounding in community sentences/unpaid work. For example: I knew about it for a long time It s just always been there to me so it s just the norm, basically. Over half of respondents to the wider local authority survey agreed that hearing about all five initiatives had increased their confidence in the CJS. However, there were some concerns at the discussion groups, for example, that the initiatives would not result in change (due to beliefs that local police did not listen to or act on residents complaints), and that they would not be properly embedded in the CJS or last for long. Conclusions and implications The exploratory piece of research outlined here suggests that the changes to Community Payback implemented following the Casey Review have gone some way to making community sentences more visible, with members of the public across the four Pioneer Areas showing awareness and a general understanding of the Community Payback brand, and citing the orange jackets as key identifiers of such work. The public are less well informed about the details of local projects, however, and further efforts may be needed to publicise the formal public nomination element of the approach. Whilst few residents had actually nominated projects, this research suggests that simply knowing that it is possible to make a suggestion may improve public perceptions of the CJS. There are likely to be variations in awareness and reactions to local Community Payback work depending on the type of delivery model employed. Locally focused, longer-term residential projects conveyed positive perceptions and attitudes within the local vicinity of the project. Whilst rotating oneday projects throughout the local authority resulted in more individuals seeing Community Payback work across the Pioneer Area, and were also linked to greater awareness of the nomination process. The reduction in knowledge for those living further away from projects emphasises the need for a range of activity and work across the local area in order to maximise awareness. The concerns raised by members of the public also show the need to consider the likely impact the practicalities of Community Payback (e.g. length and timing of breaks, and the duration and location of work) can have on public perceptions and the visibility of the approach. The research outlined in this report focuses on awareness and reactions to residential approaches only, and it is possible that responses to projects in town/city-centre based or rural locations may differ. 6

7 The formal communications produced in relation to Community Payback appeared to assist with raising the profile of the initiative, with leaflets being cited as the most effective form of communication. Further information could help to clear up misconceptions and to explain the finer details of the approach, however, including information on how many hours offenders work each day, the type of work undertaken, the consequences of not turning up, the impact on rates of re-offending, and the level of supervision provided to offenders carrying out such work. The length of the working day, enforcement and levels of supervision are all prescribed through national standards. It is a requirement, for instance, that members of the public should be able to distinguish offenders from supervisors and it needs to be communicated to the public that offenders are closely supervised. While Community Payback can be employed for a wide range of offences, it may also be worthwhile reassuring members of the public that their safety is paramount in the delivery of Community Payback, and, before being allocated to work projects, offenders on Community Payback are required to be subject to a rigorous risk assessment. In terms of wider links with the CJS, Community Payback Citizens, which are now operating in 30 Pioneer Areas, may provide an opportunity to publicise a clear relationship with other parts of the CJS, given that the are often linked to neighbourhood policing meetings. References Casey, L. (2008) Engaging Communities in Fighting Crime: A review by Louise Casey. Available: assets/publications/crime/cc_full_report.pdf. Green Paper (2009) Engaging Communities in Criminal Justice. London: Crown. Joliffe, D. and Farrington, D.P. (2009) Initial evaluation of reconviction rates in Community Justice Initiatives. Ministry of Justice Research Summary 9/09. Llewellyn-Thomas, S and Prior, G. (2007) North Liverpool Community Justice Centre: Survey of local residents. Ministry of Justice Research Series 13/07. McKenna, K. (2007) Evaluation of the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre. Ministry of Justice Research Series 12/07. The four local criminal justice initiatives emerging from the Engaging Communities in Criminal Justice Green Paper had not been fully implemented at the time this research was conducted. Therefore, it is not surprising that few members of the public were aware of such initiatives. The research shows general support for efforts to give communities a greater say in the way justice is delivered at a local level, and that it is important that these approaches are seen to be fully implemented and sustained. 7