Payment by results in the prison system – challenges of calibrating success and failure

Last week the Ministry of Justice published its interim evaluation of the ‘payment by results’ (PBR) pilots at Peterborough and Doncaster prisons. Designed to test out how PBR might create sustainable mechanisms to reduce prisoner reoffending, the pilots can now tell us something about reconviction outcomes. The results, says Simon Bastow, are modest and hardly the stuff of revolution. Indeed, they show how affecting change in a complex policy system is an incremental game.