Probation crimewave
26% rise in serious crimes by those under supervision
THE number of criminals committing serious violent and sexual offences while on probation has risen by more than a quarter in five years, figures reveal.
And since 2015 more than 1,000 convicts meant to be supervised in the community have been in court accused of crimes including murder, rape, kidnap and robbery.
In one case a violent thug serving a community sentence for assault breached his probation eight times before murdering a teenager.
In another, a boy of five was killed by his mother’s boyfriend, whose probation terms banned him from unsupervised contact with children.
Blunders which happened after the Ministry of Justice introduced a new regime for managing offenders in the community in February 2015 have been uncovered by BBC1’s Panorama and Plaid Cymru.
As of this March there were 268,062 offenders on probation.
Figures from Plaid Cymru showed the number of ‘serious further offence’ reviews, triggered when a known criminal commits another major crime, rose from 409 in 2012-13, the last full year before the shake-up, to 517 in 2016-17 – up 26.4 per cent.
Panorama found that MTC Novo, the private company that runs probation services in London, failed to take action on more than 15,000 breaches.
Offenders are increasingly supervised over the phone rather than in face- to- face meetings. Watchdogs said some criminals are not seen by probation workers for months, while others had vanished before committing sickening crimes.
Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts said: ‘That the number of instances of this kind have surged by 26 per cent since the probation service was privatised is deeply worrying.’
The Transforming Rehabilitation programme was brought in to tackle reoffending, which costs society £15billion a year.
The £3.7billion overhaul created a National Probation Service to deal with high-risk offenders, with the remainder assigned to 21 partly privatised Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs).
These check that criminals comply with court requirements and help rehabilitate them. But this year inspectors said the scheme offered ‘ no real prospect’ of preventing ex-prisoners reoffending.
Some 1,021 ‘ serious further offence’ reviews have been triggered since the reforms
‘It is deeply worrying’
were introduced. Among the most notorious failures was the case of David Braddon, a violent criminal who breached his probation eight times before murdering teenager Conner Marshall.
Braddon, 26, who was serving a community sentence for assaulting a police officer and drug offences, was being monitored by a private company.
The killer, of Caerphilly, South Wales, had taken cocaine and alcohol when he beat Conner with an iron bar.
The Ministry of Justice said it was now managing an extra 40,000 offenders each year but the proportion charged with serious further offences had remained stable at 0.5 per cent.
Panorama – Out Of Jail: Free To Offend Again is screened today at 7.30pm on BBC1.