Integrated Offender Management: Effective alternatives to short sentences

The 60% reoffending rate of offenders given prison sentences of less than 12 months is a statistic that is increasingly attracting attention within the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. The substantially higher reoffending rate of short-sentence prisoners when compared to those of community sentences and longer custodial sentences, has led to the need to develop more effective and cost-efficient responses for this group of offenders – a cohort who account for 69% of the custodial sentences issued annually.

Integrated Offender Management (IOM) is one such initiative. It provides a framework to bring together a range of partners to deliver targeted interventions to repeat offenders in a local area. Piloted in six sites across England in 2009, IOM is being rolled-out in local areas across the country.  

Today, we are publishing Integrated Offender Management: Effective alternatives to short sentences, a briefing paper which draws together the evidence of the elevated levels of mental ill health, substance misuse and accommodation difficulties experienced by many short-sentence prisoners.  Examining the barriers a significant proportion of short-sentence prisoners encounter in accessing support services to address their offending behaviour, the paper considers ways in which partners at a strategic and operational level can come together within IOM to develop and deliver a range of interventions to interrupt the cycle of repeat offending.  Examples of IOM units that have developed innovative solutions and broad partnership approaches to reducing reoffending among the IOM cohorts are also provided, to offer guidance to those areas seeking to build on their existing IOM responses.