Just & Reasonable™

It was interesting to see fairly prominent coverage of the Conservative party’s latest proposals for criminal justice reform on page three of today’s Financial Times. The main goal of the proposals is to improve the cost-effectiveness of the criminal justice system. The article reports that the system today costs around 2.5% of gross domestic product each year (a higher per person level than the US or any EU country) and yet is so ineffective that nearly seven out of ten people are back in prison within two years of their release.

The Conservatives’ key proposal is for the private and voluntary sectors to take over the post-prison rehabilitation of released prisoners who don’t pose a significant threat to the public. One suggestion for this proposal is to pay for results by rewarding private and voluntary service providers who manage to keep an individual out of prison for longer than a given period of time, say two years.

It seems evident from the high rates of re-offending that many of the incentives of the current criminal justice system are failing. So, the Conservatives’ proposals to offer new incentives to the private and voluntary sectors to reduce re-offending are a timely step in the right direction.

Perhaps reform should go further though. For example, why not introduce similar incentives for the public sector as well, such as the National Probation Service and Her Majesty’s Prison Service? These public sector bodies could be paid for results by offering them a greater allocation of taxpayers’ money provided that re-offending rates are reduced.

Behavioural economists such as Professor Richard Thaler, who co-authored “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness” and advises the Conservatives about regulation, understand that losing something makes us roughly twice as unhappy as gaining the same thing makes us happy. The government could use this powerful feature of human psychology to devise an even more effective incentive scheme whereby, in addition to rewards for reducing the rate of re-offending, a failure to reduce the rate of re-offending would lead to lost revenue for the private and voluntary sectors and reduced allocations of taxpayers’ money for the public sector.

Indeed, while discussing incentives, how about extending the incentive programme to the prisoners too? Incentivising prisoners to reduce the rate of re-offending ought to have the added benefit of making prisoners feel that they have more of a stake in the outcome of their – and their fellow prisoners’ – prison sentences.

Join the debate – post a comment below now to let folks know what you think about incentives in the justice system.

Tags: Justice, Rehabilitation

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 6:48 pm and is filed under Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.