"This is a court of law." "Pull up a chair." "With an extraordinary judge." "Easier to think when you're not wasted, isn't it?" "He keeps people out of prison." "These folks didn't grow up like I did or you did." "All they know is sheet for life." "In hang' em high Texas, they're turning to rehabilitation." "The only thing prison does is just throws you in somewhere, tells you what you need to do, you can do it, that's it." "They don't care." "Now a British minister is here to see tough love in action." "With our prisons overflowing, could this model offer a solution?" "We use prison as a first option, when in doubt let's lock people up." "You need to turn that on its head." "That takes some political bravery." "I'm a journalist who's been following the Texas prison revolution." "Tonight on Panorama, I am:" "Should Britain import some" "Texan-style justice?" "Texas is the home of tough justice." "The Lone Star state executes more people than anywhere else in America and locks up more criminals than any other state in the country." "But I'm here because they've unleashed a criminal justice revolution, one that is closing down prisons, letting out inmates and cutting crime." "I was the driver of a van..." "Meet Adams, a former gangster " "Alfred Adams a former gangster." "In south Dallas he shows me his old haunts where he hutled and hung out with a vicious Jamaican street gang." "I was doing anything and everything." "Like what sort of thicks?" "" " Things?" "We were selling drugs in and out of this house." "It was real dark up there." "We did a lot of crime." "We did a lot of shootings, I lot of robbings, a lot of stuff right there." "Alfred started using crack in his 30s." "He's been clean now for almost six years, but memories of his old life are never far away." "I got stabbed at and I turned my head and it caught me right there and cut me all the way." "This whole side was split open." "That still didn't stop you?" "Oh, no, no." "I set up in the hospital with the mask on and was figuring out how I could use it to smoke through." "Did you succeed?" "Yes, I did." "Crack cocaine in the hospital?" "Yes, I did." "I asked my girlfriend, at that time, to bring me some." "That's how vicious it is." "Alfred's life had descended into a world of degradation, desperation and gang violence." "It was some guys that came up here one time and we had to get rid of them the best way we could." "Out there in that world, it's a whole another world." "You do or be done." "You shot them?" "Yes." "How many people?" "Three of them." "You killed them?" "I didn't actually see them." "I believe that they didn't make it." "How many people do you think you've shot and killed?" "Several, I mean, I don't have a number for them." "I wouldn't even want to say it." "It's hurting in my heart for what I was involved in." "Alfred says unlike in the movies, there was nothing demram Russ about his depraved -- glamorous about his depraved activities." "He insists he was always seeking an escape route." "I felt for years that I was in a wet, slimy hole and the only rope someone would throw me was slimy." "I never really had a good way of getting out." "Amen." "Let the church say amen..." "Today the 60-year-old grandfather says his turn from gangs and guns to gardening and God, he's rebuilt his relationship with his son, a pastor at a local church." "Oh, man, he's great." "He's much better." "It's amazing that God has really blessed him and helped him to change in a lot of ways." "He's better now than I knew him when he was Superman to me." "Key to his rehabilitation has been a fresh approach to crime in Texas." "For Alfred is one of the poster boys for a specialist drug court in Dallas, run by larger than life judge bobby Francis." "My goal is for you to succeed and change your life and do better." "You've got to be here and you've got to tell me the truth for us to work with." "Like Alfred, most of these offenders have spent their lives in and out of prison." "Almost half have used weapons or violence, all have addiction issues." "There's no reason for me to bull hit around and waste time." "Let's do it this way." "What are you on probation for?" "Aggravate add salt." "You're looking at pen time, right?" "Yeah." "My guess is that's not what you're dying to do." "No I did that for years." "That kind of destroyed me." "When I got out I didn't have a chance." "The court has a zero tolerance approach to alcohol and drugs." "Banned." "Well, it would seem to me that you have incentive then not to drink." "Right." "Why would you go drink?" "I guess, because I wanted to." "OK." "I just wanted to." "You know there's no other options that the point." "You either have to step up and do it or you're going to prison." "That's what it boils down to." "The court helps these people rebuild their lives with therapy, alongside assistance with housing, families and jobs." "But if they lie to the judge, do a runner or fail drug and alcohol tests they can be sent straight back behind bars, like" "Geoffrey Durham." "Mr Durham." "Yes, sir." "I guess you never really planned on sticking round long, did you?" "I didn't mean you." "Judge Bobby describes his approach as like parenting for people who mostly come from abusive, broken add chaotic family backgrounds." "What do you want to talk about?" "I'm doing well, June." "I got back on track again." "I'm on focus." "I'm not going to make nothing let me slip away and be off focus again." "Everything is where it should be." "Yes, sir." "All right, good deal." "Michael Johnson is an alcoholic and drug addict, whose own father introduced him to crystal meth." "He has a string of convictions for assault, burglary, pimping and theft." "Good to see you." "Five spells in prison did nothing to change his destructive behaviour." "Prison don't make you think." "Don't make nobody think anything." "The only thing prison does is throws you in somewhere, tells you what you can do, when to do it." "That's it." "They're not concerned." "They might have AA groups or church in, there but they don't sit there and try to engrave anything in you at all." "Michael says judge Bobby's regime is tough, with random drug tests, counselling, regular court visits and constant monitoring." "He's found a new job and a new partner with a child, but he's had to totally change his lifestyle to avoid temptations." "I don't socialise with a lot of people." "I just socialise with family and I don't have any friends, my boss, you know, the people that work for my boss, I socialise with them." "Why do you have no friends?" "I just don't want any friends." "Michael's not used drugs for two years." "Go and play buddy." "Judge Bobby says he tries to help such people live normal, productive lives." "I think it works because myself and my staff truly want these folks to succeed." "These folks didn't grow up like I did or like you did." "They didn't have two parents living together, raising them up." "They have what I call genetic contributors, two people met, they mated, there was a baby. , mine noes later and a grandmother or aunt raised that child with six, seven, eight, ten," "12 other kids." "All they know is sheet for life." "Give me sugars." "My analysis of this is all it is is parentally." "There's no deep secret to what we do." "If you can be a good parent, you can do this." "I had a desire to change but I didn't know how." "I didn't have the tools to." "I didn't have nobody that cared to show me the ropes and show me what I need to do and how I needed to go about doing it." "If there was something like you're now doing with judge Bobby, 10, 15 years ago, would that have changed your life earlier?" "Absolutely, I believe so." "Tell me, what are these animal skins you have here and here?" "These two here are aye wroties. -- coyotes." "But Judge Bobby is a typical Texan Republican who loves hunting and shooting." "His court is successful with eight in ten offenders graduating." "Not everybody can be saved." "A fellow comes to mind." "He had been, I think 54 years old, he had spent half of his life in principles." "I liked the guy." "I bonded with him." "He didn't do well." "So I sent him back to relapse and started him over." "He came back." "I said look, this is it." "You're looking at a life sentence." "We worked with him, worked with him, worked with him, everything." "He wasn't equipped to handle it." "He ended up getting revoked." "I gave him 35 years in prison." "This new approach to criminal justice was promoted by right-wing Republicans." "Eight years down-the-line it's cut the rate of imprisonment and made big savings for taxpayers." "Crime is also falling sharply." "No wonder new Justice Secretary," "Michael Gove, has arrived in Texas to find out what they're doing. ..." "That you can have prisoners being assets not liabilities..." "He's going to meet the Conservative politicians behind the rehab revolution." "I'm very, very interested in the way in which the debate in criminal justice has shifted in America." "We went overboard." "So you look at it, in the" "United States from roughly the mid-70s to the mid-2000s there was a six fold increase in the prison population." "The growth crowded out the very things that could keep people out of prison safely." "We saw on average 90% of budgets going to incarceration." "These ideas relate to individual liberty, fiscal restraint, to redemption, to keeping families together." "So these are all core pillars of conservative thought." "This is the result of the reforms - one of three prisons shut down in Texas." "Ten years ago, Republicanier wri Madden was " "Republican Jerry Madden was put in charge of the justice programme." "But he was warned - don't build new prisons, they cost too much." "These eight words changed the crime debate across America, tilting the emphasis from prisons to rehabilitation." "Previously my education was as an engineer that, I asked the questions - well, what works?" "And what doesn't work is equally important to ask." "We quickly figured in Texas the way to do it was slow them down coming in." "Could we do that?" "Because it would not be popular to open the doors and let people out." "We just knew that wasn't going to fly in tough on crime" "Texas." "So the state took some cash for building new prisons and put it into the specialist courts, such as Judge Bobby's, plus probation and rehab projects proven to work." "We have 30% of guys that are really bad and 70% that are knuckle heads." "We got people that we're afraid of and mad at." "Why don't we take the ones we're afraid of and keep them locked up for a long time." "Those we're mad at, figure out a way to change them so we would no longer be mad at them." "This makes financial sense." "Prison costs 17 times more than community supervision and yet almost half the inmates re-offend." "Crime is falling across the Western world changing the political climate." "But have the tough guys in Texas just gone soft on crime?" "We definitely have gone smart on crime." "When you look at it, there are surveys of offenders many of them would prefer to be in prison rather than be in a work release programme, where they have to hold a job, pay restitution, pay child support." "Unfortunately, the things that kind of work for people to survive in prison, like getting people to protect them, which often involves gangs in prison, those skills are not necessarily the same that will help new society." "I think that's one of the reasons we see such high recidivism rates." "The biggest drop in numbers has been with juveniles." "Part of an attempt to get them off the ladder of crime at an early stage." "Today Michael Gove is on a tour of one of five remaining young offender units." "Nine others have already been closed in" "Texas." "Quite Barack." "Quite basic." "Yes." "The guys are not allowed to put posters up except from on this space?" "Yes." "And here just a copy of the Holy Bible?" "Yes, and any books they would have." "And a James" "Pattison thriller, and that's it." "We are at Giddings juvenile correctional facility." "We are told some of the worst juvenile offenders in the state." "What was your Ono fence that led to you being here?" "Murder." "I believe my girlfriend was pregnant with my child and her stepfather tried to sexually abuse her, so I felt I had to do something." "To protect her?" "Yes." "Thank you for being so honest." "When he said, I'm here for capital murder, he's an 18-year-old." "It happened five years ago." "If you are 13 and your girlfriend's pregnant, whether or not it is true that her father is abusing her, you are growing up in horrific circumstances." "Your innocence has disappeared." "Looking me in the eye and talking, if not articulately, certainly with composure." "And eloquently." "Absolutely." "You can tell there's been in the time they've been here a big change this their lives." "In their lives." "As I drive to a high-security women's jail it strikes me that here in get tough Texas the language and approach to crime and punishment has changed dramatically." "No longer are all offenders written off and locked up." "Instead there are attempts to guide them back into helping, not hin herring, nor harming society." "Let's go." "They train dogs to assist injured military veterans." "Come on, get closer in the horseshoe." "Come on." "These inmates live with the dogs, sleep with them in their dormitories, care for them and teach them 65 basic tasks to help them with wounded or trawl amazed veterans." "She's going to get her phone." "Cindy was sentenced for 20 years for embezzle.." "It has completely changed my life, how I feel about myself." "I am not selfish any more." "I want to give back and help others." "If you're not with the dogs in a regular prison environment, in a regular dorm, you just do a job and you come back to your dorm." "You don't have anything to do, so you continue to get into trouble." "Good dog." "The scheme might look like fun, but it teaches these prisoners to take on responsibility while giving something back to society." "For some it is the first time they have had unconditional love." "And it is having dramatic effects on reoffending rates, under 3% in the two years the programme's been running." "Now the organisers are being asked to set up similar projects in prisons across the country." "I think you're going to decide on what you want coming out of your penitentiaries." "We believe in being hard on crime." "However, we understand that you have to rehabilitate." "It is not always lock 'em up and throw away the key." "I think we are going towards rehabilitation and this programme, Patriot paws, is giving something back to the community, that they may have taken from." "It is time to catch up with Michael Gove." "He spent three days with the people who've delivered these reforms, and now he has come to see Judge Bobby's court in action." "Mr Joiner, third row." "Mr Wetherall, not here." "Geoffrey" "Wetherall hasn't turned up for his court appearance." "When I met him a week ago it was clear he was struggling, but desperate to stay clean." "The incentive, I wanted to live in society." "I don't know what it is like to live out here, you know?" "Wanting to have a better life" "Tired of looking at television and looking at these beautiful relationships and missing Christmas and Thanksgiving and new year behind prison walls." "It is a long time since I've seen Christmas or Thank giving at home with my mother." "So at the age of 48 it is the first time you are discovering life now?" "I'm just learning how to live." "But now" "Judge Bobby and his team discovered that Geoffrey may have slipped back into his bad old habits." "The belief is he is back out." "He told people in the house that he was going to visit Ms Miracle." "What profession is she in?" "His favourite prostitute." "The likelihood that he is using is probably there." "Geoffrey faces returning back behind bars, and could get up to ten years." "That's a lot of Christmases with his mum he'll be missing." "What is that you're signing there, judge?" "These are warrants for arrest, so Mr Wetherall, who we think that wandered off probably with dodgy women of the evening, it is disheartening that they become institutionalised." "The things we think of as freedom of choice they think of as it is almost a punishment, a detriment to their succeeding, because they are not used to or are incapable of making choices." "You sign a warrant because the choices they make are wrong." "Why do you think you have had this blip that makes me think you are drinking?" "I have no idea." "I haven't had a drink in three-and-a-half years." "OK." "Michael Gove, his stories of success, failure and struggling." "I don't have an excuse for missing court." "I was disorganised." "Okay, so you owe they three days and you know it." "Yes." "As wrong as you know." "Yes." "Afterwards, the British Minister is keen to talk to the Texan offenders." "Listening to Judge Bobby it seems like he was the father that lots of people in this courtroom didn't have?" "I call him daddy Francis." "It is like a man taking care of a little kid that their dad don't want." "If you were going to say what makes Judge Bobby so successful, what is special about the judge?" "The teaching." "It starts off with the first two rules, don't run and don't lie." "You start building from that and then you learn that he cares about you and you learn that the programmes that are set up are programmes to help you succeed." "Anybody done anything exciting so far this week?" "He is clearly impressed." "I think the fact that he has changed the lives of the people in front of him is probably the most powerful testimony about anyone could have about the redemptive power of the right sort of intervention." "Michael Gove says he wants to change lives in the UK by cutting crime and reducing reoffending." "England and Wales have the highest imprison." "Rate in" "Western Europe." "A system that's seen this man like alfriend locked up for much of his life." "I was born in Hackney." "I started offending at the age of ten, when I got my first conviction." "Spells in Borstal led to his first prison sentence when he was still a teenager." "I started taking drugs in Wandsworth prison in 1981." "I was in a small cell, a dark cell, gloomy." "That was my introduction into smoking drugs or taking drugs of any sort." "Drugs are common in UK prisons and, like" "America, nearly half of prisoners released go on the commit more crime." "Prison is the University of crime, because people are talking to each other, talking about their crimes." "If someone wants to take on board a particular crime or say look, I know X and B, when we get out we can marry the two together, that conversation takes place in prison all the time." "Frank is now reformed and meantors young offenders to stay out of prison." "But senior judges say our system is failing to stop the revolving door of reoffending." "Over the course of 30 years I've seen grandfathers, fathers and grandchildren all from the same family who I have had to sentence at one stage or another." "You get to know families in the local court." "It is dispiriting." "Because it shows that sentences are not had any effect." "This austere" "Victorian prison is where Frank started taking drugs and it is where" "I meet Michael Gove again after his Texas trip." "You have to say that prison is failing our society, when almost half of those who are in prison then go on to reoffend." "You've got to look at the way prisons are operating at the moment and say, there's a state failure there." "We've got to have space for fresh thinking." "So could that fresh thinking be Texan style?" "The thing I took away from America is that the idea that courts should be problem-solving institutions as well as criminal justice institutions was a powerful one." "I've talked to members of the senior judiciary and asked, how can we take lesson and ensure that when people are in court there's a teachable moment, where they recognise that they have done wrong?" "And if custody is not the right answer for them there are other things we can do?" "Specialist courts have been tested here and faltered." "Getting the judiciary on board for another attempt could prove a challenge." "Perhaps it would be better for the Minister of Justice instead of going off to far-flung jurisdiction which is may be very different from our own, but to take the time to come closer to home and to go round some of the" "Crown Courts in England." "I don't think it is likely that we could recreate the Texas system in written successfully." "If it means that the judges have got to become father figures to the defendants." "We must not queues judges with, confuse judges with welfare officers." "Some of those who've worked within the prison system want to see reform." "At the moment we use prison as a first resort, the first option." "When in doubt, let's lock people up." "We need to turn that on its head." "We need to have a system whereby we incarcerate only when we really have to, when there's no alternative, and that takes some political bravery." "And many who've been inside the prison system wants to see changes, too." "When I was growing up it would have been great to have some kind of role model, someone to speak to me and say, the road you're going down is going to lead you to years of incarceration, addiction," "homelessness, and all those kind of things." "Now Panorama understands" "Michael Gove was so impressed with the Texas reforms and Judge Bobby he wants to roll out similar specialist courts across England and Wales." "It remains to be seen if innovations from Dallas will work in Dagenham and Dudley." "Understandably victims of crime want to see perpetrators punished." "But if reforms changed the behaviour of some offenders, leading to less crime, surely that would be the best result for all of us."