Memorandum submitted by The Butler Trust

Executive Summary

The Butler Trust was set up as a registered charity in 1985 in memory of RAB Butler to promote and encourage positive regimes in UK prisons. An independent Annual Award Scheme was established to recognise exceptionally dedicated, and often creative, work undertaken by prison staff and volunteers. In 2005 the Award Scheme was extended to probation staff in England and Wales working with offenders in the community. Criminal justice social work staff in Scotland and probation staff in Northern Ireland joined the Scheme in 2006.

The Trust invites nominations from staff and offenders which it considers in the light of their significance to the treatment and resettlement of offenders and to reducing reoffending. At the annual award ceremony, which is frequently held at Buckingham Palace, HRH The Princess Royal presents certificates and awards to award-winning staff who are accompanied by their families, senior staff and key UK prison and probation service personnel.

Winners of major awards are granted funding and expert support by The Butler Trust for professional and personal development. The Butler Trust deals with the best examples of work within the UK Prison, Probation and CJSW Services and is well positioned to link work between establishments, to share best practice and enable contact between award winners and policy makers. It works to disseminate best practice through conferences and networking and by facilitating research visits to other countries.

We outline some of the projects we have recognised in this submission and put forward our recommendations to support the good practice developed over the years by our experience.

Submission

1 The Butler Trust works to recognise, promote and celebrate the vital role played by people working with offenders in prison and in the community. Butler Trust awards offer an opportunity publicly to say thank you to members of staff who make a real contribution to the care and resettlement of offenders in their custody and supervision.

2 The Trust was established in 1985 to promote and disseminate a scheme then known as The Prison Service Annual Award Scheme. In 2005 Trustees approved the extension of the Annual Award Scheme to include employees of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) and probation staff working with offenders in the community in England and Wales. Criminal justice social work agencies in Scotland and the Probation Board of Northern Ireland joined the Scheme in 2006.

3 HRH The Princess Royal has been the Trust's Royal Patron since 1985. Her interest in and contribution to the Trust have been immense. She undertakes about ten visits on the Trust's behalf each year and in every year since the Trust's formation she has personally presented the awards at impressive annual events. These presentations have been made at ceremonies in prestigious surroundings such as Buckingham Palace, St James's Palace, the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, Lambeth Palace, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and once in Cardiff at the National Museum and Gallery of Wales and have proved to be very popular with award winners, their families and the staff involved in their nomination.

4 The Trust started a development programme in 1998 in response to the needs of major award winners who wanted to take their work further. The Trust has a thriving volunteer programme, consisting largely of retired Prison Service staff, of whom there are currently ten. They visit Butler Trust Local Assessment Panels to provide encouragement and advice. The Trust has a Local Assessment Panel in all UK prison establishments and many Directorates and prison service colleges. Most establishments incorporate the Butler Trust panel into their Performance Recognition Committee. The Chair is typically the Head of Human Resources.

5 Lack of formal recognition of sustained quality work and innovation was the primary reason for the creation of the Trust. For some years the Trust offered the only public recognition of 'ordinary work extraordinarily well done'. However, during the past 7-8 years there have been noticeable changes in the three prison services. All now have recognition awards of their own which complement the Trust's work, including the Prison Officer of the Year Awards in which all Governors in England and Wales participate.

6 The cultural shifts which have allowed recognition schemes to emerge balance the more hard-edged performance management measures introduced in recent years - smarter financial management, performance tables, weighted score cards, more open criticism by inspectors, accountability for performance and market testing for prisons assessed as poor performers.

7 The Trust still has an important role in recognising quality performance because it does so from a fiercely independent position. Moreover, for the last 10 years the Trust has helped many award winners develop their work. Increasingly the emphasis has been on spreading good practice, an aspect which has not been effective in the UK prison services.

8 There have been marked advances in performance recognition by the prison and probation services. But they need nurturing. The issues facing the Trust call for continued engagement with the service providers as well as exploring opportunities beyond its traditional boundaries as the distinctions between custodial and non-custodial care become increasingly blurred.

9 Some of these issues include: identifying and promoting excellence and innovation by Prison and Probation Service staff, contractors and volunteers; developing and disseminating best practice; and providing professional and personal development opportunities through the Annual Award Scheme.

10 Dissemination of good practice identified through the Award Scheme has led the Trust to organise a number of national events with partner organisations focussing on award-winning work. Examples of such events include: an offender management seminar for prison and probation practitioners in Yorkshire and Humberside; a restorative justice conference with the Scottish Prison Service; a conference with the Northern Ireland Prison Service involving award winners presenting and running workshops on a number of topics; a seminar chaired by Lord Woolf at Kirkham Prison on resettlement issues for long term prisoners; and a seminar in Carmarthen to celebrate the effective work undertaken by the Dyfed Powys Probation Service Drug Intervention team with offenders in the community, many of whom have been in prison.

11 The three local prisons in Wales - Cardiff, Parc and Swansea - are geographically quite close and all contain more sentenced than unsentenced prisoners. There is only one training prison in Wales, Usk/Prescoed. HMP Usk is an Adult Cat C establishment for vulnerable prisoners and Prescoed, a satellite of HMP Usk, is an open YOI. As a result, there are many Welsh long-term prisoners who spend the majority of their sentence outside Wales and this has implications for their resettlement.

12 The Welsh prisons are located in South Wales, and it is important that the Prison Service should be represented on all Criminal Justice and other committees that have an influence on the treatment and conditions of prisoners in Welsh prisons. These include those dealing with healthcare, particularly of the mentally disordered; drug treatment; probation, with which there are currently admirable links; Social Services, with whom the current collaboration is an example of good practice and one that could be followed elsewhere in the Prison estate in areas such as education, work provision and the all important maintenance of contact with families. Effective links with the Welsh Assembly are important to maintain and sustain these working relationships.

13 Involvement with staff who work with prisoners who are located long distances from home has been a key feature for Butler Trust work over the years. Research clearly demonstrates that the preservation of family ties provides the best hope of resettlement for most prisoners. Prisoners who have a strong support network around them when they are released into the community are less likely to reoffend. Many of our award winners have, therefore, taken this approach in their work by running parenting courses (Wolds), developing sexual awareness in relationships (Deerbolt), maintaining contact with families over the sentence (Everthorpe and Brixton), developing visitors centres (Grendon), keeping in touch with children during the sentence (Dartmoor) and establishing bonding relationships between mother and child (Askham Grange). These projects are all fine examples of best practice over the years.

14 Sadly many Welsh prisoners, young offenders, female prisoners and adults cannot spend their sentences close to home, making contact with their families and the communities to which they belong more difficult. The burden of travelling all over the country can be very disruptive for the lives of those left behind. This adds to the experience of deprivation which staff in the establishments holding them have to manage if they are to provide offenders with the best opportunities for resettlement on their release. The Butler Trust recognises the inevitable strain this imposes on staff through its Award Scheme.

15 Another major theme of The Butler Trust's work in promoting and developing excellence has been with prisoners' education and training skills. To use the prison sentence as an opportunity to develop skills which will help make a person employable on release gives it a purpose and legitimacy which can engage prisoners and their families. In 2005 the Trust awarded HMP &YOI Guys Marsh a major award, The Keith Bromley Trust Award for the development of education and skills, for its work in developing employment practice in the prison. Opportunities are provided for over 100 prisoners to participate in real work with enhanced wages - many of the prisoners came from Wales. The Trust helped the prison install learning pods in the workshops so that men would not have to leave their place of work to undertake a computer-based period of self-learning. As prisoners were not required to go to an education class to engage in the activity (many have resistances to the classroom setting), they were able to develop basic skills and embark on a life long learning experience. Similarly, an instructor at Ashfield YOI and Remand Centre received a major award for developing courses to equip some of the most damaged young offenders with transferable skills in catering. This work enhanced their self esteem, enabled them to prepare a meal for their families and has helped some get employment and training on release.

16 A further theme of the Trust's work with staff is supporting their efforts to create and sustain a safe atmosphere and culture within prisons, particularly supporting those who are feeling suicidal or at risk of self-harm. Being deprived of freedom can be a traumatic experience for people with added vulnerabilities of low self-esteem, limited survival skills and dysfunctional relationships. The work undertaken at Cardiff Prison has been particularly significant in this respect and it features with great credit in the attached list of recent award winners. The work at Cardiff is of the highest standard in UK prisons. Similarly, credit should be afforded to Swansea Prison which first introduced the Listeners Scheme wherein prisoners act as mentors for those feeling suicidal, thus developing an accessible group of Samaritan-like supporters within the prison. The value of this work has become internationally recognised in saving lives in custodial settings and has now been implemented in all prisons.

17 Greening and sustainable development has been a key area of work recognised by the Trust in the past four years. Recent award winners visited Welsh areas of excellence to learn about the most up-to-date systems of sustainable heating at the Senedd building and nearby installations of wood-chip boiler systems. All prisons now have some element of recycling and sustainable planning to encourage conservation of the environment and to help prisoners develop a culture of sustainability for when they are released.

18 In 2006 The Butler Trust gave a major award to the Dyfed Powys Probation Area team working with offenders with serious drug abuse problems. The Trust has just held a major conference in Carmarthen to showcase the good practice and to disseminate it more widely. Other areas were very interested in the work and will be able to learn from the experience of working with very addicted offenders, many of whom have served prison sentences in the past. The scheme enabled courts to provide a community based sentence that has public approval and that is effective in achieving change for those who could be a considerable burden on health and other social services.

19 This report is intended to demonstrate The Butler Trust's considerable experience of working with prison staff and, more latterly, probation staff to support them in their demanding work which is rarely recognised or celebrated.

20 We make the following recommendations:-

· Every effort should be made to locate prisoners close to home - the 50 mile rule of the Youth Justice Board was a good start. Additional prison places may be needed for young offenders and female prisoners in order to achieve this. A prison in the north of Wales would also be needed at some stage.

· Long-term and lifer prisoners should return to their home area for resettlement planning.

· Greater importance should be attached to the development of staff within establishments. Our prison staff are the least trained in Europe with the current training being reduced to 9 weeks and much of it taking place locally. Commitment to staff development, leadership programmes and similar life-long learning systems should be a fundamental part of the Prison Service's approach to its staff if it is to get the most from them and to develop work in prisons in adherence to the current thinking about criminality.

· Prisons should be encouraged to share good practice. There has been a noticeable shift towards a competitive culture within establishments due to the way in which establishments are assessed and credited with success.

· Similarly, greater partnership working with other criminal justice agencies such as the police and probation services is to be encouraged. Some of the best schemes recognised by the Trust have involved this approach.

· Diversity in prisons has recently been a cause of much attention and the status of Welsh speaking prisoners calls for sensitivity in language and cultural learning. A great deal more needs to be done in this area.

28^th November 2006