Prison: the facts…the values…and the grey areas of management discretion

Last week the Prison Reform Trust (PRT) and Bromley Trust released an innovative new ‘app’ for anyone interested in keeping an eye on the ever-persistent operational pressures on the UK prison system. ‘Prison: the facts’ is downloadable free through i-Tunes, and transforms the excellent Bromley Briefings for a digital-era audience. Getting more ‘facts’ about prison life out into the open is clearly a vital public service, says Simon Bastow, but it assumes that there is consensus about what the facts actually are

Can Clarke square the circle of reforming criminal justice while also cutting costs by a quarter, by getting 20,000 people out of jail?.

In a major speech that has already furrowed brows amongst the Tory right wing, Ken Clarke set out proposals for wide-ranging criminal justice reform. Simon Bastow listened to his speech and sets it against the overall picture of pressures on the Ministry of Justice, where 25 per cent cuts might come, and the future of the prisons system especially.

Curtailing the market for private prisons: schism or blip?

The reputation of the privately managed prison sector in the UK has taken a beating in recent years. Does this spell the end for the ‘whole prison’ contracting era, asks Dr. Simon Bastow

Lockup quotas in U.S. prisons are not necessarily a tax on low crime, and may actually help maximise value for money for taxpayers

Last Thursday’s post on this blog (and research report) by In the Public Interest (ITPI) shows how U.S. private prison operators have negotiated ‘lockup quotas’ to protect their business against reductions in the prison population. It raises important questions, writes Simon Bastow, about how governments should manage such reductions and the dynamics of entrenched private-sector interests. But to say, as the authors do, that lockup quotas constitute a ‘tax on low crime’ seems like one ideological extrapolation too far. Click here to view a Google Hangout video related to this article

Open data sheds light on how universities are minority providers of commissioned research to government.

Anyone under the impression that universities are the dominant suppliers to government of commissioned research, advice, and knowledge, think again. Open data on government spending shows the relative dominance of other suppliers and mediators of knowledge to government – not least the private sector and think tanks. Simon Bastow presents some preliminary government-wide data

Rehabilitation outcomes will be limited unless we resolve geographical imbalances in prison capacity

The National Audit Office (NAO) focused attention last week on the challenges of managing the prison estate in England and Wales. The report raises questions about how we reconcile running the estate at close to 100 per capacity while, at the same time, realizing the government’s Transforming Rehabilitation agenda. Simon Bastow explains inherent limitations involved in trying to do both

Overcrowded as normal: governance, adaptation, and chronic capacity stress in the England and Wales prison system, 1979 to 2009

Why do public policy systems sustain chronic conditions despite general consensus that these conditions are detrimental to overall performance? The answer is because they are, in one way or another, sustainable. Systems find ways of sustaining manageable and acceptable equilibrium between demand for their services and their supply. Yet in doing so, they develop ways of coping with and normalizing situations of chronicness. This research is about chronic capacity stress (CCS) in a large and complex public policy system. CCS may be caused by excessive demand for services. It may also be caused by inadequate supply. Either way, it is a property of sustainable equilibrium between the two, and therefore must be understood in these dynamic terms rather than as just the product of one or the other. I examine overcrowding in the England and Wales prison system as an archetypal case of CCS. It starts with the assumption that the prison system should in theory be set up to deal with the demands made upon it. In doing so, it examines the way in which the system itself has coped with, normalized, and sustained crowding over the years. I have conducted in-depth interviewing with former ministers, top officials, governors, and other key actors, as well as extensive quantitative analysis covering three decades. I develop four inter-related themes as a part of a ‘problematique’ which explains why CCS is sustained: ambivalence towards rehabilitation, coping and crisis culture, benign resistance, and obsolescence and redundancy. Constrained autonomy of actors and their adaptive behaviours are key to understanding how the system sustains CCS, and how it is able to function despite CCS. Ultimately, I show how three groups of public policy theory – public choice, cultural theory, and governance - are vital aspects of an overall explanation, but that independently they are insufficient to explain why chronicness sustains, and therefore must be integrated into a more holistic, governance-style explanation. CCS can be seen as a function of governance dysfunction

The contemporary social sciences are now converging strongly with STEM disciplines in the study of ‘human-dominated systems’ and ‘human-influenced systems’

Much less is known about the development of the social sciences as a complete discipline group than about the previously dominant STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) discipline group. Patrick Dunleavy, Simon Bastow and Jane Tinkler set out some key findings from their new book ‘The Impacts of the Social Sciences’, identifying five key trends that are causing the old social sciences versus physical science divide to dissolve. With the advent of ‘big data’ and e-science across the board, the social sciences are converging strongly on a ‘rapid advance/moderate consensus’ model previously characteristic only of the STEM disciplines

The impact and value of the Foresight research programme: report to Foresight from the LSE Public Policy Group

The LSE Public Policy Group was asked by the Foresight Programme in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) to review the impact and value of eight future-focused research projects completed as part of the Programme’s work since 2002. We have looked at impacts of these research projects across government in policy making and practice, in academia and research science communities, in the commercial sector, and in civil society and the public at large. Overall the eight Foresight projects have achieved a wide and in parts impressive range of impacts. In our interviews with research scientists involved in the projects, almost all could point to some specific or relevant impact from the research work, and very few were dismissive of the Foresight work and its value. Most, if not all, research users in government and civil society were generally positive about Foresight research, and on the whole confirmed or corroborated impact claims made by researchers. More experienced observers compared the current model of Foresight reports far more favourably to previous versions from an earlier period. Around half of our survey respondents agreed with the statement that the ‘Foresight model works well’ and only around 1 in 10 disagreed with this. More than one half of the references to Foresight research that we found in our Google searches were explicitly positive, a high rate, (with the vast majority of the rest neither positive nor negative) and we list some words below which conveyed the general mix of feeling (see Figure 1.21 in Part 1)

Failure of interpolation in the intuitionistic logic of constant domains

This paper shows that the interpolation theorem fails in the intuitionistic logic of constant domains. This result refutes two previously published claims that the interpolation property holds.Comment: 13 pages, 0 figures. Overlaps with arXiv 1202.1195 removed, the text thouroughly reworked in terms of notation and style, historical notes as well as some other minor details adde