New Chair on offender rehabilitation

Professor Graham Towl has been named as the new chair of the Scottish Advisory Panel on Offender Rehabilitation. The panel (SAPOR), which is supported by the Scottish government, was set up in 2012 and gives advice on the development of rehabilitation programmes in prisons and in the community and accredits structured, largely, group-based interventions.

Towl (Durham University), the former Ministry of Justice Chief Psychologist, said he was delighted to take up the position and to get involved with evidence-informed approaches to working with people in prisons. Towl said he was also looking forward to working with the rest of the panel – which consists of those with psychology, social work and research backgrounds. 'I like working in multidisciplinary settings, it helps to bounce ideas off each other and bring new perspectives to the work. I'm also looking forward to getting back into prisons and speaking with prisoners and staff and those in community settings. Community settings are interesting as they tend to be less visible, but there are more people being supervised on probation than there are in prison.'

Towl said he had been a critical friend of the programmes industry in the past. 'I found the 2017 scandal around the Prison Service Sex-Offender Treatment Programme very disappointing –  the outcome data was sat on for five years which showed some programmes increased the risk of reoffending. That would not have been without consequences. That case was quite impactful… in my view, it damaged the profession, particularly forensic psychology, quite significantly. I've also worked on the frontline on a range of different interventions and know how demanding and challenging that can be, and how dispiriting it can be if staff hear that the plug needs to be pulled on certain programmes if they don't work. It's a tough area in some ways, but I feel it's one where we can make a real difference, and that's what I want to do.'

He added that he was keen to work with the government again, given his former role as a Senior Civil Servant. 'There were challenges to working in central government, and there are certain restrictions in those roles, but this position will provide me with an opportunity to be an impartial professional and an informed independent party.'