David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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I welcome Mr. Mark Johnson and thank him for his attendance at the meeting. The format is that we will ask him to make brief opening remarks of five or six minutes duration and then we will have a question and answer session with the members.

Before we begin, I draw Mr. Johnson's attention to the position on privilege. I ask him to note that witnesses are protected by absolute privilege in respect of their evidence to the committee. However, if they are directed by it to cease giving evidence on a particular matter and continue to so do, they are entitled thereafter only to qualified privilege in respect of their evidence. They are directed that only evidence connected with the subject matter of these proceedings is to be given and asked to respect the parliamentary practice to the effect that, where possible, they should not criticise or make charges against a person, persons or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable. Members should be aware that under the Salient Rulings of the Chair, they should not comment on, criticise or make charges against a person outside the Houses or an official either by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable.

Mr. Mark Johnson:

I thank the committee for asking me to come to present myself and the organisation today.

My name is Mark Johnson. I have a well-documented history, coming from disadvantage and being caught up in the criminal justice system at a very young age. I am the author of a book, Wasted, that, I think, I have seen in 20 different languages. I write for The Guardian newspaper and I am an Ashoka fellow. I am a visiting lecturer at Durham University on the psychology degree. I am an ex-offender and that is what I have come to talk about.

I set up an organisation on which I probably worked for six years. It has been registered as a charity in the United Kingdom for the past four years. It is called User Voice and its underline is, "Only offenders can stop re-offending", which will give the committee a brief on what it is about.

This has been my focus. From entering a period of rehabilitation in 2000, I got clean off drugs. I started an arboricultural business - tree surgery. In four years, I employed over 200 young offenders in the business and I developed what I would term a therapeutic work-based environment, that is, one not only works physically but engages mentally in a behavioural change programme that starts in the mind by talking about thoughts and feelings rather than what work one is doing.

From there, I wrote the book and started to consult with the British Government, and came up with this idea where I believe there is a gap in the criminal justice system, that is, to learn from the experiences and insight of those at the sharp end of the system. Often I have found that there is a gap between those who make the policy and those who must live the reality of the system, and my objective for the past six years has been to develop a model that brings them closer together.

I set up the organisation as a charity four years ago. This year we turned over £100 million. We work in the United Kingdom, from Northumberland, in a 100 mile geographic spread, to Kent and all in between. We represent probably 15% of the criminal justice system in England, that is, prison and the probation community, and now in youth justice as well.

What is it? We use a council model, a democratic process of service-user engagement. It is ordered. We go into prison and we use ex-offenders, who often are the best placed to help somebody who is currently offending to stop because it is that "walked in your shoes" experience. Offending behaviour, and stepping out of it, is so complex that often the most effective intervention is this communication that takes place between one who is a couple of steps further on than the other and who knows how to navigate his thoughts and feelings and provide information on what one must do to stop offending. We piloted it in the Isle of Wight in England to 1,600 prisoners on three different sites: Camp Hill, the under 12-months sentence prison; Albany, which is a sex-offender prison where the average length of stay is eight and a half years; and Parkhurst, which is a violent, maximum security prison.

In one year, there was a reduction in prisoner complaints in the sex-offender prison - it is an old-age group, a very articulate cohort of persons who submit many complaints and clog the system up, and cost a great deal of money in that time - by 37%. In Parkhurst prison, there was a reduction in the use of solitary confinement or segregation from 160 days to 47. At a £30,000 fee it suggested that by addressing problems closer to the cause and involving the community, one reduces the need and expense for punitive measures, and issues were dealt with swiftly by the community.

Another of my findings in working with this group is that one its characteristics is the low levels of resilience that exist within it and they find it very difficult to social situations without being violent or disruptive. Part of the programme, with the learning of this council model, teaches resilience and is, in itself, an intervention.

The prison governor would see what we do as a cost-cutting tool. The UK has seen some significant cuts in the prison budget. My challenge is that one cannot make the same amount of cuts or remove such a large amount of funding without taking a community along with those changes, otherwise one would get an increase in disturbances, etc. I believe that is why the prison governor highly values this tool.

The prison staff would benefit from low levels of disturbance or occasions of assault on members of staff, and also a more respectable running community - I see prison as a community - where everybody is respectful towards each other and the end user, the prisoner, would get to play a role in something that is positive and contributive. There is much psychology on how a person doing something positive is less likely to go back and do something negative.

We have moved that out into the community. In London, there are 33 boroughs in London and there are 23 local delivery units for probation services. We are now in 18 of those boroughs in central London.

It is being used in all sorts of ways about which I could not tell the committee in five minutes. What I can say is that, as far as evidence is concerned, we work with Cambridge University, which is working on a measure in prison called measurement of prison quality of life, MPQL. It is one that the inspectorate uses in the prison. Through conversations I have had with the Irish Prison Service, I am aware that it is looking for a similar kind of measurement. This model is been measured against MPQL in three prisons: Aylesbury which is public-sector run, Maidstone, which is public-sector run; and Birmingham, which is a private G4S prison with 1,600 prisoners.

We will see the outcome of that pretty soon. We have had the worst economic climate, yet in this environment User Voice was started and now has a turnover of £1 million. Some 80% of my organisation is made up of ex-offenders and we have had 100% contract retention in those four years. Although many of the programmes, interventions, etc. are being cut, the people on the ground who need to have effective programmes that have resonance for those they work with have retained our service. That is all.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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That is interesting. Deputy Finian McGrath has a question.

Finian McGrath (Dublin North Central, Independent)
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I offer a warm welcome to Mr. Johnson and appreciate his coming to address the committee. I commend the work of his organisation. This committee is very interested in the causes of crime and in dealing with issues. It tries to assist prisoners and come up with new and radical ideas. I have some brief questions. Mr. Johnson mentioned the gap he wanted to bridge. Does he mean the gap between the political system and the prisoner or that between the prison service and the prisoner?

Mr. Mark Johnson:

Both. The way in which we start to look to solving the social problem is often done by a group of people who are not affected by that problem on a personal level. I do not want to be politically incorrect, although I probably will be, but the white, middle-class, academic-type person often has positions of power over a group of people who either do not have a political voice or do not feel they have one. They are more predisposed to criminal activity or disadvantage. This is a tool to try to bridge that gap. I wish I had some slides because I could illustrate this point. If we put the criminal justice world into this context, there is a commissioner who is charged with finding a solution to a social problem, a provider who is charged with providing that solution, and an end user. Those three different components make up criminal justice. I started User Voice based on the concept that the commissioner has the same agenda as the end user. Both have an absolute need to find something that is effective in helping a person enter a successful living. However, the provider is often driven by a sales pitch or a PR drive to look successful, given that the psychology of any business is to protect its own interest before giving any delivery. There is a dysfunctional environment between commissioner and provider and so the actual voice or insider experience of the end user often comes through the agenda of the provider. I ask commissioners to show me a robust mechanism in our society - where it has sunk down into this criminal sort of world - that can peel away or provide robust insight into what the real issues are and see what people need in order to stop offending. Often there is a resounding silence around that, which is where User Voice comes into this market.

Finian McGrath (Dublin North Central, Independent)
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As a politician who has been in prisons on a few occasions, I have been pleasantly surprised by the compassion shown, and the relationship between the prison officer and the prison. Recently we took a trip to Cork Prison where there was an energy and determination shown by the staff. My personal reaction was that this was really good public service. I watched the body language between the prisoners as we walked around, and I would be conscious of people putting on a show for the sake of it. I believed, both from what I saw and from other experiences, that here was a group of people who were very compassionate and truly determined to get these guys back on the road. Would that be the case in the UK?

Mr. Mark Johnson:

I would completely agree with the Deputy, having had that personal experience myself. One finds one has to enter the criminal justice system to meet, for the first time, somebody who shows a little bit of care or compassion.

Finian McGrath (Dublin North Central, Independent)
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That is the case.

Mr. Mark Johnson:

However, this is dysfunctional. The real aim for society should be to invest in an outcome whereby when that person leaves prison, he or she becomes a contributor to society, whereas what we have is a very positive relationship that occurs behind four walls. The problems occur when those doors open and the person re-enters society. Then the reference point is: "Somebody cared for me while I was locked up." When I have no structure, my lifestyle is chaotic and I am on drugs, etc. outside, I will want to go back to this reference point where I know I had a healthy relationship. That is pretty dysfunctional and I do not believe it is where we need to go for the successful re-integration of offenders and to stop crime.

Finian McGrath (Dublin North Central, Independent)
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Mr. Johnson mentioned the I-walked-in-your-shoes experience of people like him and other ex-prisoners who are trying to influence current prisoners or young people. Do these people really listen? Will a person aged 17 or 18 years listen to an ex-prisoner who is 35 or 40? Before I got involved in politics I worked in a disadvantaged school that was involved in a project called Breaking the Cycle. We used to save 85% of the children at risk because we put a lot of extra work into them. However, about 15% of the children came from chaotic, violent, dysfunctional families. By the age of 13 these children were stabbing people and at 16 they were on the way to jail. There was no saving them, but there was the 85% who could be saved with a bit of extra care and attention when we brought all sorts of help and supports into the school. Is there any way of turning around the children who come from dysfunctional families in crisis? They will see their mother being battered when they are four or five years of age, or will hear cocaine-fuelled rows. Does Mr. Johnson have any advice on that? The third question relates to what comes up within the Irish prison system. In Mr. Johnson's life experience in prisons, has he come across people who have an intellectual disability or other serious mental health issues?

Mr. Mark Johnson:

If I can remember, the first question was-----

Finian McGrath (Dublin North Central, Independent)
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The walked-in-your-shoes experience.

Mr. Mark Johnson:

-----about the younger age group, and how to match people. I have been involved in mentoring. One of the first programmes I designed for the Prince's Trust in England has young offenders being mentored by ex-offenders. There is some matching to be done within that. My organisation is completely reflective of the community we aim to serve. Young people do young people's work, although not all the time. We have a very healthy mixture, which is the point. Young people are employed within the organisation - that is the seeing-is-believing bit. Often the charities that claim or aim to help this disadvantaged group do not contain any such people, yet if there is a young person to whom other young people can relate because of their experience and their facing some of the same challenges, when they see this person is employed and has a prospect of growing into the person he or she wants to be, that gives hope. I find that often it is the unspoken word that does the most. One could offer any short intervention to a young person but if it includes one ex-offender who has changed his life, to whom others can relate, it will have more effect than any other intervention. That is my experience.

As to the 85% against the 15%, I believe everybody has a potential to change and I absolutely stand by that. My belief is based on the axis that everybody has the potential to change if they have the capacity to get honest with themselves. Often what I have experienced in working with this group, especially the younger age group, is a delusion, that is not challenged, namely, that living a life of crime is successful. I believe that many of the young incarcerated people I have encountered live with this delusion. They spend whole sentences, either in the community or in prison, and their minds are completely unchallenged. That is the place I would start. In my own journey, I call it the "teachable" moment. We all have opportunities and it is through time and circumstance that we become teachable and open.

As a criminal justice system, it misses that whole journey.

I will give an example. A facial injuries surgeon in Glasgow told me that the teachable moment for them is in the hospital waiting room after a knife attack or the crime when somebody's adrenaline is gone, and they can communicate with people and get some form of honesty. That change process should take place at that point or the first night in prison when one can actually crack the delusion and speak to somebody and say: "Do you want this for the rest of your life?"

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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We have come across a listener service run by the Samaritans. They mentioned prisoners crying themselves to sleep on their own in their cells when the penny dropped that this was it.

Ivana Bacik (Independent)
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I thank Mr. Johnson for his excellent presentation. I was also thinking about a listener service in Wheatfield which seems to operate on similar principles as the peer mentoring Mr. Johnson has been running. It is very impressive to hear about the councils and peer mentoring as a twin-track approach. Is this likely to be rolled out in Irish prisons and when might that go ahead?

Mr. Mark Johnson:

I am an Ashoka fellow. I am not sure if any members are aware of that - I was not until I was made one. Ashoka is part of Change Nation and change makers. I came over here to do a keynote address in Wheatfield. Basically the criminal justice system is mainly the Prison Service, the director general, etc. I brought over a prison governor to outline his experience and there was some resonance. I returned and gave a talk at Trinity College where I spoke to senior members of the Probation Service and Prison Service. We have submitted a proposal to look at the Mountjoy Prison campus with the three different groups of people - young offenders, women and adult males. Our model is about coming in, upskilling the community and then leaving. It is not a static service where we are there forever.

My mission is to try to get prison joined up with the community. In the UK that is not the case because a person sent to prison there can be sent anywhere in the country and therefore a prisoner when leaving will not necessarily go back into the community in which the prison is based. However, in the Mountjoy campus there is significant capacity to do work on entry into prison, which is when rehabilitation should start by having this peer-led mentoring and support and then actually working within the community outside also. In that process it is ringing out its full potential. It adds benefit to the prison as a community and makes better services. It makes better services on release and people are more in tune because people are communicating with the horse's mouth, so to speak. It also produces this intervention and this peer-led approach to breaking the cycle of crime. Peer-led approach is probably the most underestimated intervention that has ever been exposed and yet it is completely underfunded because it does not fit in the confines of how we procure services. However, for me, it is the real answer. There is all manner of evidence, including the 12-step fellowships of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous - worldwide programmes on alcohol and drug treatment - that are completely peer led and among the most successful programmes on the planet. Taking some of that approach of people, who have shared some experience but actually live successfully, has proven hugely successful.

Ivana Bacik (Independent)
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Does that mean there are plans to roll it out in the Mountjoy campus?

Mr. Mark Johnson:

We are going to talk and will have a meeting after this one. We have talked to a few third sector funders, who are very positive on the innovative properties this has in that it approaches an old problem in a new way involving the right people. If my organisation can help here, I am completely committed to doing that.

Katherine Zappone (Independent)
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I thank Mr. Johnson for his presentation and I congratulate him on his personal journey as well as the work he has established. From his contribution, it is clear there is a very strong inspiring vision underlying the practicalities and ideas. The councils seem to be an integral and critical aspect of his work. What are the barriers to getting those councils effective in their work and how can those be pushed through?

Mr. Mark Johnson:

We use the term "hard-to-reach group" and for me they are easy to reach. The group that is hard to reach is the staff of the services. It comes down to a person's personal sense of security. Often the dysfunctional sort of conversation that one might have is: "You can do this better than me, so what am I doing?" That shows a lack of understanding about being a professional. By far the biggest barrier and the thing that can allow the council concept to stagnate are staff and power holders blocking it. While I could not have imagined this, I met representatives of the Prison Officers Association here who were really positive about this. In the UK we have had contrasting conversations where the representatives have not been supportive. However, here the conversation was with the general secretary who said they would support anything that would reduce staff assaults or disturbances in prisons and improve the environment in which people work. We have evidence to suggest that this model does that.

Katherine Zappone (Independent)
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The peer mentoring that is essential is clearly based on the assumption of the goodness and the capacity of the offenders, which in itself is counter-cultural and probably part of the power of what Mr. Johnson is doing. The handout we received referred to the social return on investment ratio. What would be the components of creating value from the investment?

Mr. Mark Johnson:

That could be any figure. While I do not know how the committee feels about this, I have seen some very weird and wonderful figures on social return on investment, and it is all guessing. That is an economic figure that was done independently with KPMG in the UK. However, I would challenge whether the mechanism used was fit for purpose. It may not extract the full social return on investment. There are areas of change and rehabilitation that we cannot measure. How is it possible to measure the impact of someone changing his life around, going back to a community, being a son to his mother, being a father to his children and breaking the cycle of the peer-led criminal chains of conditioning? We cannot put a figure on it. It is the same as how we measure recidivism rates, etc. I question whether the mechanisms by which we evaluate programmes are fit for purpose, never mind accurate. That was one independent company that looked at a council but just measured it in prison and did not take into account the full picture. So that gave the £1.02. I have actually seen third sector programmes coming out with results of £9.

I work with venture capitalists and social investors who would probably agree with me that much of it is questionable.

Ivana Bacik (Independent)
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I was interested in that figure too. They are still saying that it is double value, £2 for every £1 invested. Is Mr. Johnson saying that has to be an understatement because they are only looking within the prison at the savings generated? It is very crude.

Mr. Mark Johnson:

Yes. The sex offender prison, Albany, is an example. If there is a 37% reduction in complaints with no information from the prison service about the cost of the traditional complaints procedure, one has to be underselling it. They have measured only what they can see but one can see the full impact on that cost saving in a prison. I spoke to the English Minister this week and said that we have had 100% contract retention with people on the ground who need answers and they see the effects. We are working back on ourselves to provide the science behind this innovation. Cambridge University is involved. For instance, what is the measurement of somebody's experience of coming into contact with the criminal justice service? We do not have one. The prisons have measurement of prisoner quality of life, MPQL, which I would question on the basis that is underselling. We work with the probation service in the UK to find a community-based measurement but we are far from that and from youth services. The MPQL is probably the straightest measurement we have. Martin O'Neill from the Prison Service here is doing an MSc at Cambridge and is very interested in bringing MPQL to Ireland.

Marcella Corcoran Kennedy (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)
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I thank Mr. Johnson for sharing his story. It is inspirational to see how he has come from being a young offender to where he is now. I look forward to learning more from him. It would be interesting to get more information as his work with Mountjoy deepens. Perhaps there will be a mechanism through which he can feed back his results to the committee.

If I am a young offender spending my first night in Mountjoy and I have heard that Mr. Johnson is coming in and I want to engage with him, how does that happen? How does he make that connection with young offenders? How do they hear about it? What do they do if they want to engage with him but are not good at communicating? How does he get through to them? What techniques does he use? Does he explore their personalities and what they need through the arts or music? Could he expand a little on that?

Mr. Mark Johnson:

I am not sure if I provided detail of the structure of the programme in my notes. It starts with an ex-offender entering the prison who then starts with inspirational storytelling about himself or herself to see if that resonates. Then we use a survey. Arnstein developed the ladder of citizen engagement which is about engagement and its value. At the bottom is written "informing feedback survey". It is a tokenistic form for getting insight. It has no value for the person involved but we use surveys because they introduce us to people. We cover all members in a prison face-to-face and get them to complete a questionnaire. That gives us their contact information and whether they are willing to do a little more. From there we can use a few different tools, some of which are quite colourful, depending on the age group and location. We run focus groups. We use a storming and forming concept, taking the million and one issues and gripes and complaints that a governor often hears and work with the focus group to fold those personal gripes and complaints into issue-based complaints.

The council is not personality-based which would be corruptible where there are forceful criminal characters involved. It is issue based. Often four parties form. Their world can fall into four areas, housing and resettlement, training and education, drugs and alcohol, community and environment, the prison community itself. Every gripe that I have ever heard could be housed under one of those headings. We teach them campaigning techniques and strategising. We bring local politicians into the prisons and the community to talk about canvassing, how they respond to the public, etc. A steering group then does a dummy run of a council election, going out to canvass and telling the public what they are standing for and it goes to a vote. They get proportional representation on the council. It is quite interesting to watch a group of people who have never voted or had an interest in voting start to emerge and strategise. One party that is smart will be the biggest but it will run for only one term because everybody starts to figure out that it will put its proposals forward if they do not jump in. Interesting dynamics start to occur within the prison. In that process we are teaching people resilience and how to resolve conflict non-violently, which is sometimes a completely new and fresh approach for many of these people.

I can give a lot of anecdotal material about how I have watched these very small things develop. A quote I often hear from a prison governor is "I am amazed that it is the smallest things have the biggest impact in the prison environment." One example is a deep clean of a visitors' hall when somebody's loved ones and children are coming. That has a huge impact on the prison environment. I have seen a group of prisoners at Parkhurst win a can-opener. It may be an absurd instrument but when one is serving a life sentence and is allowed to buy tins of fruit in the canteen but there is no way to open them, it causes a lot of frustration.

There are big effects too, for example, in Parkhurst, the council was instrumental in voting in and doing the groundwork in the community to bring vulnerable prisoners in with mainstream prisoners. The cohort in Parkhurst are violent armed robber types and very high level sex offenders but the council was instrumental in voting the community of vulnerable people in. That is another thing on which we cannot put a cost but it is massive. In one wing it was like running two separate prisons but they are now integrated which cuts the amount of staff time required to manage them. That came through the communities saying that they are respectful towards one another.

I could not describe the sophistication of the model in an hour but I can provide any information that the committee requires. Four or five years within this environment trying to get this group of people into prisons, never mind produce outcomes, has been difficult but it is well thought out.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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How does Mr. Johnson's group deal with people who are addicted to various substances?

Mr. Mark Johnson:

No matter what situation one is in one can use it to benefit the services provided. If one is a drug addict who does not comply with an order and uses street drugs rather than get a methadone prescription one can provide insight into how to make a better service that might potentially help one, whether or not one is cured or can get off it. I am a recovering drug addict. I have been clean for 13 years. I used heroin at the age of 11.

That is well documented. When people start a programme of change, that is the best measure that offenders have been successfully rehabilitated. If the drug and alcohol addictions are removed, all of the cryogenic factors are removed. Some of my staff, although not all, I can manage through my experience of being an employer, and I have employed hundreds of people. If they are clean, they are okay. When their behaviour changes, I know if it is time to offer help or remove them from a high-risk job.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Are there prisoners who will not co-operate and who cannot be reached?

Mr. Mark Johnson:

Not on a personal level. The whole concept is based on my belief that everyone can change if they have the capacity to be honest with themselves. Politically, we are not working with sex offenders. That is a political and systemic issue rather than a lack of willingness. We work in sex offender prisons and a large proportion of the English system contains sex offenders who would be difficult to recognise as such. Outside in the community, however, there is a much greater aversion to that.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Costs were mentioned earlier, and the fact that prison governors were interested in tangible savings. Could we hear more about that?

Mr. Mark Johnson:

There is a lack of access to information that could prove that model. Without being unco-operative, the issue in Britain is complex. To look at costs in one place would require funding so we could undertake research on the economic savings to a prison. Would a third sector organisation receive funding for such work? Perhaps it should be undertaken by the public sector, or at least done in conjunction with the public sector. When I had an arboricultural business, it was successful based on the finances, and everything should be run on that basis. We can do more for less. I can create more relevant interventions for people if they are allowed to be involved themselves but we have a bar that stops them. To offer services a person must do a three-year degree to become a social worker or probation officer. He or she is then put in control of someone who has 20 years of microscopic insight into that lifestyle. For me that is wrong. There is no opportunity for the second person to feed his or her insight and experience back in.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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Except through what User Voice is doing.

Mr. Mark Johnson:

Yes.

David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael)
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We thank Mr. Johnson for coming today. It was very interesting and we will follow the project's progress carefully and might invite Mr. Johnson back to review that progress.

We are fascinated by this issue. We have come across a number of organisations here in our work on penal reform that are doing other work in a similar way, such as the Cornmarket Project in Wexford, which is very impressive, which uses motivational interviewing techniques that are very powerful. We have Ashoka in Dublin and the Probation Service and Prison Service are also quite progressive. We have engaged with the Irish Prison Officers Association and found all of those bodies to be forward thinking. Hopefully we can all work together for a better outcome.

I also wish to acknowledge the presence in the Public Gallery of Mr. Daniel Hutt from User Voice, Ms Erin Fornoff and Ms Rose Lemly from Ashoka Ireland, Mr. Andy Brennan from the Irish Prison Service, and Mr. Brian Dack and Ms Alison Bonar from the Irish Probation Service.