Offender management in and after prison: The end of ‘end to end’?

Introduction

It has long been recognized in the research literature that the successful resettlement and rehabilitation of prisoners depends critically upon continuity of sentence planning and case management during their time in custody and ‘through the gate’; but that unless determined efforts are made to counteract them, offenders are likely to experience major discontinuities in their relationships with case managers and their contact with rehabilitative services as they move into, through and out of prison (see, for example, Maguire and Raynor, 2006; Petersilia, 2003; Taxman, 2004). More often than not, they have been handed over from whatever sources of assistance are available in prison to different and usually inadequately connected arrangements at the point of release (which is immediately followed, for many, by the period of greatest risk of involvement in new offences). The impact of such dislocation can be further exacerbated by a tendency of staff within prisons to focus primarily on the custodial sentence itself rather than on preparing offenders for release. In a study of Pentonville published over 50 years ago, Morris and Morris (1963: 309) remarked that:

The prison staff are concerned not with what a man will do after he goes out of the gate, but with feeding, clothing, and housing him while he is inside, not with whether he will turn again to crime, but whether he will be up to mischief in the prison. Because the dominating concerns of the prison are not for tomorrow […] contemporary notions of […] after-care find great difficulty in taking root.

It was ostensibly to counteract long-standing problems of these kinds that the Carter report (Carter, 2003) recommended major organizational changes to the correctional services in England and Wales, designed to ‘join up’ the ‘silos’ of prisons and probation and to build practice around the concept of ‘end to end offender management’. This resulted in the creation in 2004 of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), the executive agency of the Ministry of Justice now responsible for commissioning and providing both prison and probation services in England and Wales (NOMS, 2015a). It also led to the introduction in 2005 of the NOMS Offender Management Model (OMM). Under the OMM (in its ideal form) each offender is supervised throughout his or her prison sentence and post-release licence period by the same community-based probation officer, who – assisted by a prison-based ‘Offender Supervisor’ – designs and oversees the implementation of an individual sentence plan (NOMS, 2006).

However, only a few years after these changes were implemented, their effectiveness was called into serious question by HM Inspectorates of Probation and Prisons in a series of highly critical joint reports on offender management in prisons. In their final report the Inspectorates ‘reluctantly’ concluded that:

the Offender Management Model, however laudable, is not working in prisons. The majority of prison staff do not understand it and the community based offender managers, who largely do, have neither the involvement in the process nor the internal knowledge of the institutions, to make it work. It is more complex than many prisoners need and more costly to run than most prisons can afford. Given the Prison Service’s present capacity and the pressures now facing it with the implementation of Transforming Rehabilitation and an extension of ‘Through the Gate’ services, we doubt whether it can deliver future National Offender Management Service expectations. We therefore believe that the current position is no longer sustainable and should be subject to fundamental review. (HM Inspectorates, 2013: 4)

Following the Inspectorates’ reports, it has been accepted by NOMS that practice rarely matches the ideal, and that major changes are again needed to offender management in prisons. In 2015, following an internal NOMS review, a new direction of travel was sketched out by the Chief Executive, including a suggestion that the core principle of the OMM (‘end to end offender management’) may be abandoned. The ideas he floated should be understood against the backdrop of much broader changes that are taking place in the correctional system in England and Wales. The probation system is still undergoing far-reaching change brought about by the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) programme, under which the delivery of probation services to the majority of offenders has been commissioned by NOMS on a ‘payment by results’ basis from 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs), ¹ leaving only the high risk to be supervised by the public sector National Probation Service (Ministry of Justice, 2013a). Meanwhile, plans have been announced for a ‘wholesale’ prison reform programme, based around modernization of the estate and much greater autonomy for governors, who will be incentivized to produce new custodial environments ‘conducive to rehabilitation’. ²

In this article, we briefly describe the existing offender management arrangements in English and Welsh prisons and discuss why they have failed to achieve what was expected of them. We then draw upon international theory and research on resettlement, case management and desistance from crime, in order to gain a clearer idea of what a more effective system might look like. In the light of this analysis, we offer some reflections on the new approaches being considered by NOMS and assess their chances of producing significant positive change.

Current Arrangements and Key Problems Identified

Largely due to resource constraints, only limited categories of prisoners have been designated as fully ‘in scope’ of the OMM: those assessed as posing high risk of serious harm to the public; Prolific and Priority Offenders; and those serving indeterminate periods of imprisonment for public protection. Each prisoner in these categories is thereby subject, in theory at least, to ‘end to end’ case management by the community-based Offender Manager (OM) who will eventually supervise him or her on licence after release. This means that the OM is responsible from early in the sentence for the production of a full risk and needs assessment and the creation and periodic review of a formal Sentence Plan. The OM also maintains broad oversight of the progress of the Plan, although during the custodial phase of the sentence its implementation is placed in the hands of a prison-based ‘Offender Supervisor’ – usually a prison officer. In 2012, English and Welsh prisons were directed to extend formal case management and sentence planning arrangements to all prisoners serving 12 months and over (NOMS, 2012a, 2012b, 2014). However, this move did not signify extension of the ‘end to end’ principle to a wider range of prisoners: full responsibility for the application of these arrangements to medium and low risk prisoners was given to Offender Supervisors within prisons, rather than community-based OMs. ³

The concerns raised by the Inspectorates relate to problems both inside prisons and in the role of outside OMs. The former can be summarized as follows:

Where the role of community-based offender managers (OMs) is concerned, the Inspectorates defined the main problems as:

The above problems stem from a variety of roots, all of which are common to many prison systems across the world. These include deeply ingrained features of prison culture which are not conducive to cross-departmental collaboration or to the development of trusting personal relationships between prison officers and prisoners. Overcrowding and shortage of staff and resources are also major factors. Perhaps most important, however, is the basic fact that prisons, and those who live and work in them, are inevitably cut off to a significant degree from the outside world. As will become clear from the following review of relevant research literature, such obstacles combine to create daunting challenges for the design and implementation of the kinds of offender management and resettlement processes that are widely agreed to be most effective.

The Resettlement Literature: Some Key Messages

The importance of understanding resettlement as a process that starts well before release, and includes work with the offender in prison, is a central conclusion of the research carried out by Joan Petersilia, one of the leading US researchers on resettlement, or ‘re-entry’ as it is called there. In her overview of the subject, Petersilia (2003) argues that improvements in re-entry require reforms in four key areas. Although these are discussed under the heading of re-entry, they actually provide guidance for the whole process of offender management through and beyond the prison sentence: this underlines the point that resettlement is part of offender management and should not be separated from it. One of her suggested reforms, which will not be discussed here, is the introduction of systems of discretionary release and revocation based on consistent guidelines and risk assessments. The three others are:

A similar understanding of resettlement as a multi-stage process beginning well before release is set out by Taxman (2004) in her work on engaging offenders’ active participation in reintegration. Her ‘five-step offender active participant model’ includes:

Both of these US examples show that successful resettlement is, in effect, a coherent case management process which begins early in the sentence, and in which each stage builds on the last. Neither specifies exactly how the process should be managed, but continuity of assessment, planning and implementation is clearly required. They also identify two other key issues that need to be addressed. One is the need for a positive climate within prisons to motivate and encourage offenders to reconsider their attitudes to crime and to make genuine plans to change their lifestyle. This highlights the daunting challenge of creating the ‘rehabilitative prison’ as a consistent reality across a system dogged by cultures resistant to change and by shrinking resources, staff and accommodation – a topic to which we return later. The other key issue is the disadvantaged situation of most ex-prisoners on release. The Social Exclusion Unit’s (2002) report on reducing re-offending by ex-prisoners pointed to education and training, employment, drugs and alcohol, mental and physical health, attitudes and self-control, institutionalization and life skills, housing, benefits and debt, and family relationships as priority areas of concern which, if not addressed, could contribute to recidivism. It is now widely recognized that in preparing prisoners for release, it is essential to give them practical advice and bolster their resilience to overcome such problems. Clearly, though, however much work of this kind is undertaken while they are in custody, its benefit may be dissipated if nothing is done to follow it up after release.

Finally, a large body of research underlines the importance, both in custody and outside, of directing attention to how offenders think and react as well as to their social and practical problems. For example, an influential Canadian study of factors influencing post-custodial recidivism (Zamble and Quinsey, 1997) provides useful insights into the relationship between social circumstances (structure) and individual decision making (agency). Most of the released adult male prisoners in their study encountered obstacles of various kinds; the recidivists tended to react emotionally to them, for example with anger or despair, and to become pessimistic about their chances of managing a crime-free life. This frame of mind, and the accompanying beliefs that circumstances or people were always against them and gave them no chance, often led them into further risky behaviour and offending. Zamble and Quinsey (1997: 146–147) sum up the relationship between circumstances and thinking in this way: ‘[f]actors in the social environment seem influential as determinants of initial delinquency for a substantial proportion of offenders […] but habitual offending is better predicted by looking at an individual’s acquired ways of reacting to common situations’.

In somewhat similar vein, Maruna’s (2001) well-known qualitative study of recidivists and desisters in a probation population emphasized the role of internal narrative, or the way that people understand and talk about their own lives: put very simply, recidivists tended to believe that they were victims of circumstances with little control over whether they got into trouble again, while desisters believed they were responsible for, and in control of their own lives: ‘desisting interviewees had a plan and were optimistic that they could make it work’ (2001: 147). In Britain the Probation Pathfinder study of the resettlement of short-term prisoners, which evaluated seven different projects, found that the more successful projects were those which tried to address attitudes and thinking as well as linking the prisoner with appropriate resources (Lewis et al., 2003). It is possible that a service which focuses only on circumstances and resources will tend to reinforce beliefs that circumstances completely determine what happens; on the other hand, a focus on thinking alone neglects the fact that a decision to stop offending needs to be supported by the resources and opportunities that would make this possible (Bottoms and Shapland, 2011).

This brief and selective survey of resettlement literature serves to illustrate three key points. The first is that the resettlement process, properly understood, encompasses the whole sentence. The second is that well-planned case management is an integral part of this process. The third is that effective resettlement requires detailed attention to the practical problems of access to community resources and to offenders’ thinking, attitudes and management of emotions. As will be discussed later, workers in offender management and resettlement need the skills and training to do both.

Effective Case Management: Insights from Experience, Theory and Research

Alternative Perspectives

Since Carter’s work in 2003, a number of other sources of knowledge have contributed to the emergence of a somewhat different view of offender management and of its role in reducing re-offending.

Policy Changes Signalled by NOMS

With both the Inspectorates’ reports and the above insights from research in mind, we now discuss some provisional plans for significant changes to offender management in prisons which were outlined by the Chief Executive of NOMS in a letter to key stakeholders in September 2015 (NOMS, 2015b). The letter largely reflected the conclusions of an internal review of offender management in prisons which had been set up in response to the Inspectorates’ reports. It set out five ‘key principles’, together with the bare bones of a possible delivery model to turn them into practice. The principles were expressed as:

The first three of these principles are highly reminiscent of the direction of reform advocated by a growing body of academics and researchers in both the USA and the UK, as outlined earlier. For example, the following paragraph from the letter, expanding on the principle of collaborative working between staff and prisoners, closely reflects core messages and terminology emerging from desistance theory and research:

There must be a much greater focus on personal relationships and contact between prisoners and staff, to motivate and support the prisoner; to offer hope, empowerment and opportunities to rehabilitate; to challenge pro-criminal attitudes and behaviours; to help prisoners take responsibility for their lives; and to reflect with prisoners on next steps. We also need a greater emphasis on prisoner agency and engagement in a collaborative approach with staff. (NOMS, 2015b, emphases added)

This indicates that senior NOMS managers are now embracing the basic argument put forward by McNeill (2006, 2009) and many others that rehabilitative work with offenders should be seen as a process of ‘co-production’, in which the key architects and owners of plans to desist are offenders themselves, the role of staff – who require appropriate skills and training – being to engage, motivate and support them through the process.

The letter also emphasizes that these kinds of relationships can only flourish in prisons that are ‘safe, decent and rehabilitative’, this being described as ‘the essential foundation for empowering prisoners to turn their lives around’. This echoes the message of previous NOMS publications expressing the aim of creating custodial institutions which are modelled as far as possible on an ideal of the ‘rehabilitative prison’. The features of such a prison have been represented in talks by NOMS staff in the form of a pyramid, as shown in Figure 1. A safe environment with a rehabilitative culture and rehabilitative prisoner–staff relationships are presented as fundamental to the model and ‘resettlement’ is included at the apex. Again, this idea, although obviously raising questions about feasibility, is congruent with messages from research, including those from Petersilia (2003) described earlier.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

‘The features of a rehabilitative prison’ as represented by NOMS.

The other two ‘key principles’ and their consequences, however, are more open to question. Of course, the principle of ‘targeting resources effectively’ is at face value difficult to dispute, but it tends to be used by NOMS as a synonym for the narrower principle of ‘resources follow risk’, which has been espoused in UK prisons and probation policy for many years. Indeed, the NOMS Offender Management Model (NOMS, 2006) stipulates explicitly that the level of support and services that any offender receives should be determined primarily by the risk category into which they are placed (risk here referring mainly to risk of harm, though risk of re-offending is also a factor in the decision). In a clear reversal of the expansion of sentence planning announced only three years earlier, the letter anticipates that a major distinction will be made in future between the high risk offenders allocated to the National Probation Service and all other prisoners serving six months or over. The idea is that the former will receive a ‘specialized offer’, incorporating a full needs assessment, formal sentence plan and structured supervision by a skilled case manager based in the prison. They will also have priority in access to offending behaviour programmes. By contrast, the remainder will receive only a very basic (Layer 1) OASys assessment and what is described in the letter as ‘a simple, prisoner-owned progression plan, instead of the more formal sentence plan’: in short, what might be characterized as an ‘assessment lite’ and a ‘sentence plan lite’.

The idea of giving prisoners more responsibility and ‘ownership’ of their plans for rehabilitation is clearly a positive one, but the reality is that, without assistance, many would be unable to progress their plans either because of lack of capacity or motivation, or because they are unable to overcome the many barriers that face inmates in attempting to access facilities and services. Presumably in recognition of this, the letter introduces the idea of creating in prisons a new role of ‘key worker’. Unlike the current Offender Supervisor remit of ‘delivering a planned programme of rehabilitative interventions’ (albeit more of an ideal than a reality), the task of the key worker would be: ‘to engage, motivate and challenge the prisoner. The main purpose should be effective prisoner engagement.’ Although details are not included in the letter, NOMS is considering the radical idea that large numbers of prison staff could be appointed to act as key workers alongside their main job. After a short training period, they would each be allocated a caseload of prisoners and tasked to act as a motivator and facilitator as these prisoners attempted to implement their ‘progression plans’. Again, this is in many ways a positive and evidence-informed idea, in accord with the concept of a ‘rehabilitative prison’ in which all staff play a part in assisting prisoners to desist from offending. The obvious practical concerns, however, are that many current staff may not have the skills or willingness to undertake such a role effectively, and that as prison culture takes a long time to change, the aim of ‘empowering’ prisoners may be frustrated by the traditional tendency of prison life to suppress individual agency. In the meantime, there is a risk that many medium term (and even long term) prisoners would ‘drift’ through their sentence with little being done to address their rehabilitative needs.

The fifth ‘key principle’ – that responsibility for the case management of prisoners should sit with the prison, rather than community-based probation staff – raises different concerns, in that it represents a major policy shift in a different direction to that suggested by research. The Chief Executive states in the letter that: ‘[w]e remain absolutely committed to maintaining a multidisciplinary delivery model utilising both Prison Officers and Probation Staff but the current arrangements which rely on an Offender Manager in the community and an Offender Supervisor in prison will change’. This clearly signals the abandonment – even for high risk prisoners – of a central plank of the existing OMM, namely the principle that as far as possible, responsibility for sentence planning and case management of prisoners should remain with one person ‘end to end’ (i.e. in custody, through the gate and after release) and that those best placed to perform this role are community-based offender managers. The need for such an arrangement, to make the transition from custody to community as ‘seamless’ as possible, also formed part of Carter’s (2003) core rationale for the creation of NOMS itself. What is now being proposed is, in essence, a ‘handover’ model rather than one based on continuity of supervision.

As already outlined, handover models are generally assessed in the research literature as problematic, mainly because they disrupt the continuity of trusting personal relationships that is increasingly recognized as important to effective rehabilitative work with offenders. For this reason, this remains the most questionable component of the changes outlined in the letter. It should however be conceded that it is not inevitable that a handover model will have all the negative features of what Robinson (2005) calls ‘pass the parcel’ offender management. If handovers are undertaken sensitively and in person, through (ideally more than one) three-way meetings, they may have a better chance of retaining offenders’ confidence. This is clearly recognized in other fields where handover models are used. For example, police management of informants has moved in the last two decades from a situation where individual detectives cultivated long-term personal relationships with their own ‘sources’, to one in which the latter are now considered to ‘belong’ to the police force rather than to one officer, and should eventually be managed by specialist ‘handlers’. This entails handover meetings at which the officer introduces the source to the new handler, with the aim of reassuring him or her that the same kind of trusting relationship can be maintained with a different person (Home Office, 2010). It is doubtful whether a standard system of three-way meetings in prisons is feasible in the current context of shrinking resources, but it is something that needs to be seriously considered as a way of ameliorating the relational discontinuity that will follow from NOMS’ adoption of a handover model. This seems particularly important for the high risk National Probation Service cases, where public protection issues are paramount.

Broader Aspects of Successful Resettlement

The history of efforts to resettle and rehabilitate prisoners is replete with examples of policy-makers focusing too closely on one particular kind of approach or intervention at the expense of other equally important considerations. For example, the emphasis on improving thinking skills which drove the growth of the ‘What Works’ approach in the early 2000s created a tendency towards what Morgan (2003) called ‘programme fetishism’, whereby accredited offending behaviour programmes became regarded almost as a ‘silver bullet’, while the equally vital elements of case management and ‘wrap around’ services were neglected (see also Raynor, 2012). Again, resettlement policy for short term prisoners has tended to focus on addressing immediate practical problems at the expense of attention to cognition or emotions (Maguire and Raynor, 2006).

There is a similar danger that growing enthusiasm for ‘desistance theory’ could lead to policies which pay strong heed to some of its widely known messages, but miss others that are less often discussed. NOMS’ provisional plans for reform of offender management have so far been built around recognition of the importance of supporting prisoners’ motivation to change, placing emphasis on collaborative staff–prisoner relationships and the development of a ‘rehabilitative culture’. However, successful resettlement depends on far more than this. A ‘rehabilitative prison’, in which supportive relationships motivate prisoners to plan for crime-free lives, is perhaps best regarded as a necessary but not sufficient condition for reducing reoffending rates. The research literature we have outlined underlines the need for a ‘holistic’ approach to offender rehabilitation, based on a full understanding of each individual’s circumstances and needs, and the facilitation of access to a broad range of services and opportunities, in prison and after release. These include offending behaviour programmes; help with problems such as mental health, substance abuse, limited education and training, unsuitable accommodation or debt; emotional support; assistance to prisoners in maintaining contact with partners and children; and opportunities for employment or for greater involvement with local communities. Such an approach is consistent not only with research findings on resettlement, but also reflects messages from the desistance literature that successful and sustained desistance often requires not only motivation and changes in self-identity, but help in building both personal and social capital (see, for example, Farrall and Calverley, 2006).

Discussion and Conclusions

Achieving the effective rehabilitation and resettlement of prisoners is a goal that has eluded penal systems throughout their history. In the light of this, the tendency of government to hyperbole when introducing reforms in this field (‘rehabilitation revolution’, ‘transforming rehabilitation’, the ‘rehabilitative prison’ and so on) seems misplaced. Nevertheless, the last two decades have seen the articulation by theorists and researchers of a broad set of principles which are widely agreed to offer useful building blocks for the design of a considerably more effective system. These relate both to work within prisons and to the links between prisons and the outside world. At their heart – and providing the glue that holds everything together – is what is referred to in current policy language in England and Wales as ‘offender management’, or more widely as ‘case management’. The main messages to emerge can be summarized as follows:

As shown by the letter from the Chief Executive of NOMS, senior policy-makers are now paying serious attention to at least some of these messages – especially those relating to rehabilitative work inside prisons (NOMS, 2015b). The proposed changes to offender management are likely to form part of the much wider programme of prison reform announced in 2016, based around the creation of new ‘reform prisons’, modernization of the existing estate and incentives to governors (who will be granted much greater autonomy) to build regimes strongly focused on education and rehabilitation. Consideration is also being given to the transfer of more probation officers into prisons both to assist in building staff skills and to play a direct role in custodial offender management. Such plans hold out the promise of some meaningful progress in a field notoriously impervious to change. At the same time, however, some serious doubts need to be raised. The plans are being devised in the shadow of overcrowding, limited facilities and significant cuts in staff, the consequence of which is that only a minority of prisoners are likely to receive anything approaching a desirable level and quality of services, particularly in terms of individual sentence planning and case management. For the remainder, hopes are pinned on a major cultural transformation of prisons and prison officers, as well as the empowerment of prisoners to devise and progress their own plans for rehabilitation with relatively little help. Useful as it may be to identify such a ‘transformation’ as a policy goal (which may in itself help to focus motivation and effort), this has little chance of realization without strong and sustained political commitment; major and continuing investment in infrastructure, recruitment and skills training; and a significant reduction in the prison population. The discouraging history of previous attempts at prison reform, combined with the failure of successive governments to tackle the population issue, only serve to emphasize the scale of the task.

The Chief Executive’s letter has rather less to say about the other key component of prisoner rehabilitation, the creation of effective links and continuity of case management ‘through the gate’. An obvious area of concern among his proposals is the likely abandonment of the ‘end to end’ principle of offender management that underpins the OMM. It is stated in the letter that ‘things need to change, so that we can focus our efforts on improving outcomes for prisoners and ensuring greater continuity between court, prison and community OM work’, but it is not clear how this ‘greater continuity’ will actually be achieved. The main hope is that the recent advent of ‘resettlement prisons’ will make it easier to join up service provision inside and outside. The aim is for the great majority of prisoners to be transferred for the last few months of their sentence to the resettlement prison closest to their home, where custody-based CRC resettlement workers prepare them for release (in many cases helped by mentors who meet them at the gate and accompany them to their first appointments). ⁶ However, these arrangements – which do not necessarily involve close liaison with either Offender Supervisors inside or offender managers outside – are focused mainly on immediate practical assistance, and lack the continuity of personal relationships and broader rehabilitative work which research suggests is important to successful resettlement in its fullest sense: what might be called ‘rehabilitative resettlement’. At the same time, many community-based OMs in the CRCs have been burdened with high caseloads, ⁷ leaving them little time to develop more than superficial relationships with most of their supervisees after release, let alone visit those still in prison (Dominey, 2016). There are also indications that the competitive market in services to offenders created by Transforming Rehabilitation has fostered fragmentation of provision and distrust between agencies (Burke and Collett, 2016), making it more difficult for OMs to coordinate inter-agency work with released prisoners. ⁸

In short, it seems unlikely on present evidence that, however badly the ‘end to end’ principle has worked in practice, simply replacing the OMM with a ‘handover’ model will produce greater continuity between prison and community-based rehabilitative work. Even if current problems of high caseloads and shrinking resources are ameliorated, the fundamental problem remains of how to design and implement an effective coordinated system of offender management ‘through the gate’ and – equally important – how to ensure that it will be experienced by service users as a coherent and ‘human’ process, built on trusting relationships with those assisting them. A great deal more innovative thought is needed on this question, including consideration of ideas such as appointing staff (whether trained as prison or probation officers or other kinds of service provider) to work partly in resettlement prisons and partly outside, so that at least some offenders can be genuinely supervised ‘end to end’ by the same person.

Finally, it is emphasized that use of the term ‘rehabilitative prison’ itself raises questions about the essential nature of prisons, and brings to mind academic debates in the 1970s, where some argued that phrases of this kind were misleading oxymorons or euphemisms to hide a harsher reality – and sometimes to justify the use of imprisonment when community sentences would have been both more just and more effective. For example, Wright (1973: 51) wrote of new language which was being used to describe elements of California prisons: ‘[t]he California “correctional officer” is still a guard; the “adjustment center” is still the hole; the “inmate” is still a prisoner; and above all the “correctional facility” is still a prison’. In other words, it is important that the notion of a rehabilitative prison does not obscure the basic fact that, however well trained and caring the staff may be, prisons are not benign institutions. Inmates are there against their will, cut off from normal life, and housed with large numbers of other offenders – all of which are significant obstacles to rehabilitation. While it is obviously right to attempt to create as positive an atmosphere as possible for the people who are there, it is arguably even more important to pursue policies aimed at greatly reducing the use of imprisonment. This would have the dual benefits of allowing more offenders to access rehabilitative services in a community setting and at the same time improving the chances of rehabilitating those who remain in prison by freeing up resources and reducing the pressures of overcrowding.