Only 1 in 13 jailed sex offenders completed the course aimed at tackling their offending

[IwantToRetire]

Figures published last week show that 1,098 people completed an accredited offending behaviour programme targeting sexual offending during 2024/25. The number of sentenced prisoners convicted of sexual offences in March 2025 stood at 14,863.

The figures, issued by the Ministry of Justice and covering England and Wales, show that the number of people taking part in sex offending courses in prison has still not recovered to the level seen before the Covid pandemic in 2021, when most courses were suspended due to prisoners being isolated in their cells.

More than half of the sex offenders taking courses were placed on the Horizon programme. The next most commonly used was Kaizen, followed by Healthy Sex Programme.

Article continues at https://insidetime.org/newsround/just-1-in-13-jailed-sex-offenders-took-a-course-last-year/

I suspect also, that although the article concentrated on courses, support in prison, the other area of underfunding is support after leaving prison.

And from other threads on FWR it is yet another area where underfunding has made post prison support work stretched.

I am not in a position to say what type of support works best in the community, but suspect it is quite different from someone who has sexually assaulted a woman or women, to someone who goes on line and can acess any number of obscene and degrading images of women and children.

So even if someone has had some benefit from a course in prison it doesn't meant that once released they dont need further support.

Not wanting to derail the thread but assuming this news report isbasically true, even if told in a rather dramatic style, it indicates that prison is not going to be (and maybe even more so in the future) somewhere that prisoners turn up to attend any sort of course.
https://www.channel4.com/news/chilling-rise-in-uk-prison-drone-incursions-bringing-in-contraband

Scary.

Suspect the amongst the other banned items mentioned some of that will be pornography.

@RawBloomers I don’t know what is out there but there is a podcast called the forensic psychology podcast that has an episode discussing Building Choices. It was trialled before being rolled out. Like I said, it’s built on all the current available evidence of what works, based on many years’ worth of research.

@IwantToRetire yes, follow on supervision on release is vital and insanely underfunded.

I looked before I asked you and saw a fair amount of criticism of it that it wasn't assessed for efficacy, just for whether it was implemented as intended on roll out. Given the prison service's some times shocking history on this stuff (e.g. SOTP mentioned above) and the evaluations I've seen and been involved in the public and NGO sectors, I'm fairly cynical. Not making any evaluation that did take place publicly available adds to the impression it's unlikely to be particularly robust/favourable.

The problem is you can’t fully assess for efficacy until it’s up and running. It’s been trialled and tweaked. All I can say is that having delivered SOTP, Horizon, Kaizen and other programmes, it’s a constantly evolving landscape based on the best current available evidence. It’s this or nothing. I choose this.

in my experience, trials in the public and NGO sectors generally focus on whether a program can be delivered as intended, what the impact is on the organization delivering and how much people like it. There is rarely any real test of efficacy. Hardly ever a proper control to compare against and never a look at long term outcomes (I understand why this last one isn’t done before a larger role out, but it ought to be set up with the trial so that long term outcomes become known as soon as possible). But that test of efficacy, at least in the short to mid term, could and should happen before a program is decided on for an entire population.

If you’re involved in delivering are you measuring efficacy now? Are you collecting data for an analysis of whether it helps or encourages recidivism rates? Whether the impact is different on different types of prisoner? Whether you can identify within the course which individuals are going to be helped? Etc.? Since you can’t deliver to everyone, is that scarcity used to enable randomly assigned control groups?

@RawBloomers data is collected and evaluations ongoing. Beyond that I don’t know because that’s done nationally not on a local level. One of the reasons Building Choices was developed was in response to research into the efficacy of the previous programmes, taking what was identified as the most successful parts and including up to date research into recidivism.