This chapter looks at changes to the criminal justice system brought in by the previous Coalition Government, following proposals made in the Ministry of Justice's (MoJ’s) Transforming Rehabilitation (MoJ, 2013a), referred to here as ‘TR’. The particular needs of women – and what might ‘work’ with them – are covered elsewhere in this book, and this chapter will not include these discussions. However, the criminal justice system has long been regarded as being designed for men; the overriding view of critics is that the stance of successive governments that only minor modifications were needed to accommodate women has been an inadequate response (see, for example, Worrall and Gelsthorpe, 2009).

In the recent past, policy has been dominated by the Corston Report (Corston, 2007) and government reactions to it. Overall, the consensus of critical opinion has been that while certain elements have improved, these have been somewhat piecemeal and that a paradigm shift has not occurred. Moreover, this is unlikely to take place unless the government accepts the central argument that most offending by women can – and should – be dealt with in the community, and that sentencers’ powers should be limited in that direction (see Chapter One and Chapter Fourteen).

The background to Transforming Rehabilitation

The New Labour government laid the ground for TR and the privatisation and marketisation of the probation service with the creation of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) in 2004 (Hough et al, 2006). The impetus for this was the Carter Report (Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime – the Correctional Services Review, Carter, 2003), which proposed breaking up the National Probation Service for England and Wales, which itself was only created in 2001, and putting out to tender some of its services. NOMS was initially an administrative entity, until the Offender Management Act 2007 allowed the Secretary of State to commission ‘any other person’ to undertake probation roles except for the supervision of the highest ‘risk of harm’ individuals and advice to courts (MoJ, 2011a). It is this Act that the Coalition government relied on as the legal basis for the break-up of the probation service under TR.

After the election of 2010, the Coalition government introduced proposals to address what it argued were high rates of reoffending within the criminal justice system, particularly by those prisoners sentenced to fewer than 12 months’ custody; this includes the majority of women sentenced to imprisonment.