Christian Guy

July saw the Centre for Social Justice call for a radical shake-up of Britain's broken criminal justice and addiction treatment systems. They believe that Britain cannot afford a situation where crime by ex-prisoners alone cost society at least £11 billion a year and where the bill to taxpayers for public order and safety, has risen by nearly 50% over the last decade. Only 4% of Britain's 200,000 drug addicts emerge drug free from treatment. Public confidence in the criminal justice system is low. Almost half of all offenders beginning community sentences are re-convicted within two years and re-offending rates amongst ex-prisoners are as high as 60%. To talk more about this Jonathan Bellamy caught up with Christian Guy, the senior policy specialist at the Centre and author of the criminal justice green paper.

Jonathan: How has the green paper been received?

Christian: It's been received rather well. It's building on four reports that we published over the last three years, so it's a collation of our work. We published a report in 2007 on addiction and then we followed that up with three reports on the criminal justice system last year, looking at courts and sentencing, at police reform and also prison reform. At the moment obviously there's a controversial debate being sparked up by Ken Clarke and others about sentencing and the use of prison, so it's tied in nicely to that debate.

Jonathan: Is the recent shake-up in the government at the last election a good time to put forward this green paper? Do you think there's more possibility of bringing the change you'd like to see?

Christian: We do. We think that perhaps this is a bit of a sea change moment on criminal justice. The timing is positive. The new coalition government have made some encouraging commitments so far, at least on paper, for their vision of the justice system and also for drugs and alcohol. It's been a fortuitous time to publish for us and we're hopeful and confident that the new government may have a fresh appetite to deal with some of these issues.

Jonathan: How big a problem is drug addiction in the UK and particularly related crime?

Christian: It's a big problem in a number of ways. If you look at the figures, people are often arguing that it's actually a small problem. Only 330,000 people are addicted to class A drugs and obviously more who are alcohol dependant; but if you look at the impact of that group of people it's a hugely insignificant impact. About half of all violent crime is alcohol related; our prison system is awash with drugs; it drives a lot of the criminal behaviour in this country and crime in an economic sense is hugely significant, about 60 billion a year is the cost of crime. About 11 or 12 billion is the cost of re-offending by ex-prisoners alone, so this is a significant problem.

As we've gone to our most deprived communities at the CSJ, we found that drug and alcohol dependency is far too common and it's driving an entrenching poverty. Unless we are serious about dealing with addiction we're also not going to get particularly far in trying to lift families out of poverty too. There's a criminal element, an economic element, but there's also a poverty angle that we've tried to highlight here.

Jonathan: What about the next generation? There's a recent survey done by Child Wise for BBC News Round that said nearly half of 10 - 14 year olds surveyed were not bothered by adults drinking and a Child Wise research director said that this suggested drinking culture had become ingrained. Do you think we are sitting on a time bomb?

Christian: I think we possibly are. I think children are seeing a new approach to alcohol in society. It's worrying. It's freely available and perhaps more cheaply than ever before. I think it's actually cheaper in certain supermarkets than buying water. The age of initiation into alcohol is also, I think, falling. We are sitting on something of a time bomb with this. It has been, for too long, an elephant in the room. There are others, such as mental health, but alcohol has been neglected in terms of policy and certainly in addiction treatment for a long time now. Part of this paper's argument is to try and integrate how we deal with alcohol with how we deal with drugs, because alcohol is of course a drug too. The impact of alcohol, I fear, is one that is rarely recognised but is significant. At the moment, I think up to one million children have an alcohol-addicted parent. These are big numbers and we need to do something about that.

Jonathan: Money talks, or certainly lack of money talks just as loudly in the current economic recession; I imagine these issues are becoming more and more serious so that they can't be ignored? What would you like to see implemented to be able to deal with these things?

Christian: We've made a number of recommendations across each of the areas. On addiction we've said that we need to be pushing for full recovery at the heart of our treatment system. Too many addicts are just simply parked on substitute drugs, which may be a bit cheaper in the short term, but in the long term that's extremely expensive. Also, it doesn't deal with things like individual dignity and it doesn't deal with long term costs and the impact of being on a legal drug for a long time.

We are looking to see recovery at the heart of the treatment system. There are things you can do with governance and culture to achieve that. We've suggested with policing that we get our police back out on to the streets again by lifting some of the bureaucracy and encourage them to treat their desks as the office rather than the streets.

We've talked about speeding up the courts process and having a big debate about short sentences, because too many short sentences are passed and they are largely ineffective. On prisons we have said that rehabilitation has been an ignored goal of the system for too long, it's not been a feature and we need to get to grips with our prison system, to put rehabilitation at the heart of it and to drive down the re-offending. Victims have supported this too, because the victim's concern is often that there isn't another victim. We can't keep locking people up for very short periods of time and not doing anything to turn their lives around, because within a few weeks or months they're back on the streets; so we've made a number of recommendations to that end.

On the economic situation, we spend a lot of money picking up the pieces of social breakdown and crime and we really don't spend a lot of money before it gets to that stage, getting ahead of the problem. There are some simple things we can do I think, to get ahead of the problem and make sure that in the longer term, as well as the short term, we are starting to save money and prevent waste.

Jonathan: Thank you very much Christian. If people want to read the green paper, where can they do so?

Christian: You go to our website, which is also a place to learn about the work of the Centre for Social Justice. It's www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk. You can download the report as well as all of our other publications. It would be great to hear from anyone feeding back about the work.