Met’s Diamond project may cut reoffending and save money

It is Ken Clarke’s plan to cut the numbers serving short prison terms and millions of pounds off the criminal justice budget.

For the last two years The Metropolitan Police has been running a pilot project to reduce reoffending.

The Diamond initiative has targeted six areas in London which have the highest reoffending rates.

It offers the only test so far of what the Government can realistically expect to achieve.

It cost £5m a year and Channel 4 News has learnt that figures suggest the reoffending rates have been cut to 20 per cent below the national average.

An independent jury of criminologists and economists is to publish an evaluation of the project early next year in what’s been described as the largest in-depth study of the rehabilitation process and how it relates to reducing prison costs.

The Ministry of Justice has so far refused to invest but is offering a percentage of the savings Diamond makes in criminal justice costs in the future.

I have been filming on and off with one of the six Diamond units, the one based in Southwark. It is made up of eight police officers, two probation officers and two housing officers.

They are all under the same roof and all have one aim in mind to keep petty criminals out of prison.

I went with two of the team to meet Dean Duffy in prison on the day before release. The three sit in an office in Brixton Prison and draw up what they term a compact, an agreement.

On probation

Dean, who has 38 previous convictions, 11 prison sentences and several community service orders, agrees to try to stop reoffending and the Diamond team promise to help sort his life out on the outside with problems like housing, benefits, and employment.

The following day he walked out of Brixton Prison after serving an eight week sentence for assaulting a police officer to be greeted by police officers.

He tells me he’s scared – scared of returning to homelessness, despair, drink and that vicious circle. He describes how he used to spend nights sleeping on the Number 12 bendy bus as it orbited central London.

Police officers who are there to meet him have promised to find him housing. He says he is not going to drink anymore.

James Jarvis is already well down the road. He has just about managed to stay out of prison for almost all of this year, but it is by no means easy.

His life teeters on the brink on a weekly basis as he struggles to keep daily appointments.

One of the Diamond team, probation officer Colin Budd swings by his one bedroom flat by at least once a week to help him through a minefield of bureaucracy, housing, job seeking, appointments, and a mountain of paperwork.

The deal in return is that James stops stealing bikes and doing drugs.James is now 33 and has 23 convictions.

His front door has been kicked down more times than he can remember. In fact he stopped putting it back on its hinges. It is now parked in his bedroom to remind him of times past.

But since he got taken on by Diamond he has only been back to prison once in the last year.

Diamond team

Officers on the Diamond team are not in the business of kicking down doors.

Every day they try to recruit reoffenders to the project instead of banging them up. From names drawn from the police national computer they target those they term the under 12s (under 12 month sentence) various computer data bases.

It’s a move away from conventional policing in an attempt to break the cycle of arrest, court, prison where costs cannot be sustained.

The initiative overseen by the London Criminal Justice Partnership for two years in the areas of London with the highest reoffending rates – 2500 have been through the project, aged between 17-67.

‘Million dollar block’

It is based on a US academic study called the ‘million dollar block’. It mapped and analysed the scale of reoffending among inmates in the US penal system and discovered that within just one block of various American cities such as Kansas, more than a million dollars is spent simply processing the reoffending through the criminal justice system.

It has been borrowed and adapted here by the Metropolitian Police’s deputy commissioner Tim Godwin who sees this as a way of changing the face of policing so that it’s not just about arrested and imprisoning but about trying to break the cycle of criminality but offering help to those they used to bang up.

He believes that with the forthcoming budget constraints, cutbacks and hundreds of fewer officers, things have to change and Diamond is the way forward.

His biggest problem is proving to Government that in the long term there’s a permanent reduction in reoffending and that translates to cutting millions of pounds off criminal justice bill.