The SOTP was a six-month group therapy course taken by thousands of prisoners serving sentences for rape, child abuse, and other sexual offences from 1991 to 2017. Hopkins said she raised the alarm in early 2012 that it was not working — her initial findings suggested it increased reoffending and was a risk to public safety.



The court said: “We find that the claimant believed that the information she disclosed showed criminal offences were likely to be committed and that such belief was reasonable … The belief was reasonable because it was explicitly indicated by the preliminary results.”

It added: “We also find that the claimant disclosed information which in her reasonable belief tended to show the SOTP results were being covered up by not being published. She disclosed the findings, the fact that she had been asked to recalculate and address ‘red herrings’ for two years and that she had continually advised the results would not change.”

The judgment also addresses criticism of Hopkins’ research — and attempts to delay and stop its publication.

The court noted that the basis for the SOTP was “a theoretical paper written by a Canadian psychologist, Karl Hanson” where offenders had to role play their offence. It said, however, that “there was no empirical evidence as to whether such a programme would work or not.”

The court also noted that Hanson was one of two peer reviewers that Hopkins’ 2012 report was initially sent to and that he was the more critical of the two. The data risked undermining his own theoretical work. “He was particularly concerned regarding how to match offenders in both groups who had committed multiple offences, and also as to whether the decision to put an offender on a programme or not incorporated any unidentified factor,” the court said.

The judgment quotes emails from the prison service (then the National Offender Management Service, or NOMS) asking for publication to be delayed — and later for the research to be stopped. In May 2012, Ruth Mann, then head of evidence and offence specialism at NOMS, wrote: “I’ve said before, the findings from this analysis, if they hold up, have serious consequences for NOMS. I am not sure I have fully got across to you how difficult this could be to handle and how many people we will need to prepare.”



She added: “I understand ... that the aim is to publish the report in July — from NOMS point of view, this simply does not give us enough time to manage the internal handling issues … I was hoping and expecting that we could proceed slowly and carefully through the various stages of scrutiny (NOMSreview, peer review, discussion with CSAP) and that any or all of these stages may lead to reconsideration of parts of the analysis.”

In 2014 — after much reanalysis of her initial research — the court found that Hopkins was told to change slides and omit “firm implications” about the research findings from a presentation to MoJ and NOMS staff.

The judgment says: “The claimant was told that ‘at tomorrow’s presentation we do not draw firm implications on the impact of the programme’. Changes were also required to the claimant’s slide pack, removing the claimant’s conclusions.”

One of Hopkins’ slides states that there were two possible implications of the results: that the “core SOTP” either “does not work” or “makes things worse”, or that “the methods used have been unable to attribute cause and effect to the findings”. It was replaced with a slide stating: “Discussion. Q. What do the findings mean? Q. What are the next steps?”