Silence the Violence: What works for transforming rehabilitation
Reoffending and social action
Reoffending is a serious problem. The Prison Reform Trust’s 2015 briefing highlights that 45% of people leaving prison reoffend within one year. Amidst big changes in the UK’s criminal justice system, the Cabinet Office has been funding innovative approaches to changing how rehabilitation of people leaving prison works. One of the charities that the Cabinet Office funded was Khulisa, a charity that I’m a trustee of.
My personal experience of Khulisa
Khulisa, which is a Zulu word roughly translated as “to nurture”, was inspired by Khulisa Social Solutions, a South African charity that runs a range of criminal justice services with a core focus on restorative justice and rehabilitation. Khulisa in the UK runs a tight set of programmes, the flagship one being Silence the Violence, a five-day programme run in prisons and in the community, which helps participants take a journey of understanding and reflection through their own path of violence. I’ve been to a one-day version in the community (I’ll go to a prison session soon), and seen first hand how Khulisa’s powerful approach has the capacity to make people from all walks of life look at that journey a little differently. And by looking at their journey differently, people are that bit more likely to have a different perspective, and greater control of their journey going forward.
I became a trustee of Khulisa as I’ve seen the effect that violence and offending can have on people’s lives, including my own — I’ve lost a family member and a friend to London’s longstanding problems with gun and knife violence — so I was eager to find a way to help people break the cycle of violence that blights so many people’s lives.
The evaluation setup
But as I’m also a Director at a consultancy that specialises in evidence-informed innovation, I’m not one to jump to the conclusion that “we know what works”. Khulisa has had a number of evaluations over its five year history in this country, and they have all pointed to the impact that it has, but we still wanted more proof. So when the charity was funded by the Cabinet Office in 2013 to run additional programmes, we agreed that they would also fund an in-depth evaluation by RJ4All (Restorative Justice For All). RJ4All carried out a mixed methods evaluation where they looked at “hard” measures like the reoffending rates of Khulisa’s participants contrasted with those of non-participants, and some “softer” measures such as participants’ well-being and motivation to stop committing crime, for example.
The evaluators looked at Khulisa’s delivery of our core Silence the Violence programme, coupled with our ongoing mentoring support (either through a programme that we run called Milestones, or via other partners). The core research question they set out to answer boiled down to “Does participating in Khulisa’s programme lead to less reoffending?” There were lots of subsidiary questions (e.g. what does it do to motivation to stop reoffending, to aggression levels, to life satisfaction) but all of these can be understood as factors that contribute towards a person flourishing, and a person who flourishes does not reoffend.
What they found
The findings were pretty exciting. There were two main parts. Looking directly at reoffending, RJ4All was able to compare the reoffending rates for 162 programme participants with a control group of people in prison with a similar profile (principally who had a similar offending history) and found that 7.8% of Khulisa’s participants had reoffended after six months as opposed to 31.4% for the control group. You’ve read that right — people who did Silence the Violence and went on to be mentored afterwards were three-quarters less likely to have reoffended than people of a similar profile.
7.8% of Khulisa’s participants had reoffended after six months as opposed to 31.4% for the control group
The second part of the findings were the richer, qualitative measures. The news there was pretty good to. Based on a range of interviews and conducting validated surveys, Khulisa programme participants were found to have increased levels of motivation to stop reoffending than when they started the programme, as well as being more self confident, having higher levels of life satisfaction and being marginally less aggressive (we’re a bit disappointed about that last result, but as their rates of reoffending were so much lower than a control group, it is not as bad as it sounds).
What does this mean for Transforming Rehabilitation?
These are pretty powerful findings. At a stage where the Government is outsourcing probation services in England and Wales through its Transforming Rehabilitation agenda, (with people judged low to medium-risk managed by outsourced private and social sector providers, and high-risk people managed by a streamlined National Probation Service), we think it is pretty important. New, mainly private providers, are currently wrestling with how to deliver probation services and to meet ambitious government targets on payment by results contracts. With what we know about Khulisa, I hope more providers will work with us, and indeed with other programmes backed by solid evidence — because without evidence, you can have a hunch, but you cannot know what works. And at an average cost of £36,237 per prison place (according to the Ministry of Justice) there are not just other people’s lives at stake — your money is too.
Curbing our enthusiasm
So should we have Khulisa in every prison? Our ambitions are a bit more focused than that and we also recognise the limits of even positive findings like those of our recent evaluation. We have a small team, and we work hard to make sure we grow our team at a speed where we can maintain quality support. We’d rather see more charities using restorative approaches and learn from our work than try and do everything ourselves. Also, we’re looking at what the proper mix of support is after people have been through our main Silence the Violence programme; mentoring is hard to get right and we’ll probably try and do more with partners who have a tight model for selecting and training mentors as time goes on.
One last thing to curb our enthusiasm is that we’re really eager to see what happens to our participants’ reoffending rates over longer than six months, we want to know where they are at after one year and after two years. We do not currently have funding to do these additional bits of evaluation, but it is so important that we understand the longer term effects of our work that I know we’ll find a way.
What next for Silence the Violence?
But even at this stage, we have a lot more evidence to back up our work than many approaches to reducing reoffending which garner significant amounts of taxpayer money and public donations. So what next? Well two things. Firstly, we want to play a bigger role in the Government’s Transforming Rehabilitation agenda — because that is precisely what we think we can do. Secondly, we also want to influence the public debate about reducing reoffending, and we hope our position as one of the shortlisted Guardian’s 2015 Charities of the Year will bring more mainstream attention both to our work and to the sorts of approaches that more organisations in this space should be taking.
I am a trustee of Khulisa (www.khulisa.co.uk) and Strategy Director at The Social Innovation Partnership (www.tsip.co.uk).
You can view the full evaluation of Khulisa’s work under the Cabinet Office’s Rehabilitation Social Action Fund here.
An edited version of this post was published on Khulisa’s website, www.khulisa.co.uk