Probation Service Reinvigoration Campaign
CROPS Newsletter No.3 : May 12th 2009
Hello, everybody.
Some of you have joined: some of you are receiving this as their first contact: some of you are intending to join....I attach the invitation to join letter in case you would like same...
To all those who have sent their one-off subscription of £10,or more, once again, hearty thanks!
FIRST EXCITING NEWS:-
The website of www.recreateprobation.com
will be up and running by the end of this week. Hurrah !!
However, we still need money to pay him, so please do divvy up and join the campaign ??!!
SECOND EXCITING NEWS:-
Chris, Martin and I had a good meeting with The LibDem shadow Justice spokesperson, David Howarth, at Portcullis house yesterday.
He believes in the Probation Service, and is generally in favour of our movement: he admitted he didn't have a policy about horrible NOMS, but we thought we persuaded him to get it abolished IF the LibDems come to power.
[NOMS is the agency which has turned the Probation Service into nothing more than the junior arm of the prison service].
We have learned from Napo that the NOMS civil service department cost over a BILLION pounds last year -more than the whole of the Probation Service [990 million]... Bureaucracy gone mad...
We heard Jonathan Aitken speak about his paper "Locked up Potential", which has excellent things to say about prisons, but nothing about Probation: we are following that up, and will see where the Conservative party will go with this.
Remember, J.Aitken is the first public figure to say out loud "ABOLISH NOMS".
The Criminal Justice Alliance is interested in us , and that too we are following up.
Chris Hignett is contacting Paul Hayes , ex-PO, big man in the antidrug addiction world, re the whole business of drugs and the law.
We are on the road !
Please join us if you have not already!
Best wishes
from
Will.
[attachment - CROPS Invitation]