What Else Works?

Creative Work with Offenders

Jo Brayford, Francis B Cowe, John Deering

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843927679
• eBook ISBN: 9781134029822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

What Else Works? has developed out of a growing awareness amongst practitioners that centralized notions of what works and 'one size fits all' approaches to work with offenders and other groups is inevitably limited in its scope and effectiveness.

The book seeks to dispel the view of probation service users as 'offenders', and socially excluded people as 'problems' to be managed and treated, and instead considers more creative alternatives to reduce both re-offending and social exclusion. These include working separately with women, black and minority ethnic groups, local community-focussed projects, in education and nature and conservation programmes. The reader is encouraged to think about past and current policy, practice, and the relationship between practitioners and offenders or other socially excluded people. Questions are raised as to whether, and how, practice could be different and contributors explore the theme of creative and change-focussed practice or focus on a particular approach to a practice.

This book will appeal to students on criminal justice, criminology and social work courses, professionals operating in these fields as well as the wider audience of professionals and academics who may engage with these 'service users' from a range of policy and practice perspectives.

Part One

Chapter 1

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Introduction

Francis Cowe, Jo Brayford and John Deering

This chapter provides some discussion of the central theme of the book as well as an introduction to Part One. The central argument presented is that more recent understandings of ‘what works’ have been dominated by policy and practice that have originated from ‘top-down’ initiatives and policy proposals. The origins of these processes can be located in the increasing tendency for government to centralise control over the probation service and youth justice services; practice over recent decades has become increasingly directed by politicians and central senior management rather than practitioners and local managements. Moreover, the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) at national level is populated overwhelmingly by staff with little or no professional experience of probation practice (McKnight 2008). This desire for centralised control and direction is located in the ‘logic’ of the new public management and managerialism. While this is influenced in turn by a desire to implement methods of practice that are based in evidence and effective in terms of the reduction of re-offending, the authors argue that these factors have led to an over-reliance on cognitive behaviourism as a theory of intervention and group work as a system of delivery, as well as the risk factor basis of current interventions with young offenders. In turn this has led to the exclusion of other theories and forms of intervention and the downplaying of the relationship between the supervisor and the supervised, something that is being increasingly seen as fundamental to effectiveness (see for example Downden and Andrews 2004). Further factors include the emphasis from government that the task of the probation service is mainly to protect the public and manage and punish (and label) ‘offenders’, although retaining rehabilitation as one of its aims. Most recently, the development of NOMS and the Offender Management Model suggests that the central consistent relationship between supervisor and supervised is under threat and that practice intervention may become increasingly fragmented.

Practice has increasingly become associated with interventions designed for ‘offenders’ or people perceived as ‘problems or problematic’ rather than practice that had been co-created or constructed from relationships with offenders, practitioners and policy-makers. Current top-down initiatives have the potential to exclude offender and practitioner rather than engage social agency and encourage creativity and personal responsibility- taking. ‘Top-down’ interventionist and/or surveillance-focused practice that lacks engagement with the person as a whole and ignores the wider context of people's lives may not only ignore real opportunities for change and development but may in fact work against long-term change and risk reduction.

Each of the following chapters will encourage the reader to think about past and current policy, practice and the relationships ‘these people’ have with practitioners. Apart from Vanstone (who outlines past ‘creative practice’ and discusses what he refers to as ‘lost opportunities’), each of the authors explores the theme of creative and change-focused practice, or explores a particular approach to practice. Readers will be encouraged to question whether, and how, practice could be different. Thus each chapter proposes, or at least offers, different perspectives from current orthodoxy and explores the kinds of activities practitioners are currently engaged in and ways in which they may be able to work more creatively. Some will be new perspectives; others will have been forgotten or hidden by current practice. The book as a whole will argue that it may be unhelpful to continually think of probation service users (and younger offenders) as ‘offenders’ per se or of socially excluded people as ‘problems’ to be managed in particular ways or who can be ‘treated’ in certain ways. Readers are invited to consider the extent to which the authors' suggestions are creative alternatives that could help reduce both re-offending and the wider, but related, risk of social exclusion. None of the content of the book should be taken as a call for a return to a mythical ‘golden age’ when the expert practitioner intervened effectively as he or she saw fit, but rather as a debate about the complexities of working to reduce crime and the necessity of a curious and flexible approach to such a significant social problem.

A brief history of current policy and practice

Before considering the range of topics and arguments within the main body of the book, it is perhaps worthwhile to consider some of the ways in which we have arrived at the point described above. While much of what follows discusses the evolution of probation practice, parallels may also be drawn with how successive governments and policy-makers have treated those considered to be outside some or many of the supposed norms of society, the socially excluded.

For most of its history, the probation service (including in its work with younger offenders) can be seen as an agency of modernity par excellence, in that it operated broadly within the positivist paradigm of expert diagnosis and assessment of the causes of individual offending, then seeking to reduce the likelihood of re-offending via a range of interventions. From roughly the 1920s and 1930s the casework approach was pre-eminent, based in psychological approaches. Casework was seen as representing professionalism and was regarded as effective, despite the absence of effectiveness research (Raynor and Vanstone 2002: 41). The main vehicle for this, the probation order, was not a sentence of the court before the Criminal Justice Act 1991; previously it had been an alternative and an opportunity to reform.

These assumptions became undermined with the ‘nothing works’ paradigm of Martinson (see Lipton et al. 1975) and the work of Brody (1976) and Folkard et al. (1976) in the 1970s. These studies purported to show that no transformative intervention had been shown to be effective in reducing re-offending. At the same time, the psychological approach was seen as being theoretically slack, ignorant of wider social context and possibly coercive, rather than humanitarian (Wootton 1959, cited in Raynor and Vanstone 2002: 42; American Friends Service Committee 1971). Although ‘nothing works’ was criticised and then recanted (see for example McGuire 2001) it nevertheless had a considerable impact on official policy. The government came to see the probation order as an ineffective ‘treatment for crime’ and turned its attention elsewhere (Raynor and Vanstone 2002: 58). Home Office funding for research into rehabilitation virtually ceased and it became more interested in criminal justice systems and the probation service as a cheaper alternative to custody. Managerialist concepts of efficiency and effectiveness became increasingly important, and outputs rather than outcomes were to become the main indicators of success via the 1984 Statement of National Objectives and Priorities (SNOP) (Newburn 2003: 138).

However, it is far from clear how much impact the ‘nothing works’ debate had on the majority of practitioners, many of whom probably continued to see their role as rehabilitative (Vanstone 2004). In his chapter Vanstone covers the recent history of ‘creative work’, pointing out that there had been a strong strain of innovation in practice throughout the service's 100-year history. This was in the main ‘idiosyncratic and individualised’, but it revealed a continuing curiosity and search for improved and more effective methods of supervision. While most of this period saw practice concerned with the personal, there were some signs of engagement with the social, something that has perhaps been lost in the recent moves to managerialist control.

Overall, the ‘received wisdom’ is that in the period since the SNOP (Home Office 1984) the service has become a ‘law enforcement agency’ concerned with the management and punishment of offenders and the protection of the public (Home Office 2000; Garland 2001; Rose 2000). However, there is some evidence that the reality of this situation is more complex, with some practitioners at least continuing to work towards behavioural change in individual offenders via a more individualised manner approach based on offender needs and responsiveness and their own use of professional judgement and discretion (see Lynch 1998; Kemshall and Maguire 2002; Robinson 2002; Deering 2008). Overall, in the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, probation practice may be seen as characterised by some continuity in terms of individualised interventions despite major organisational and policy changes (Vanstone 2004).

Of course, the government and management of the service have not moved to a purely managerial, law enforcement position, and a commitment to ‘rehabilitation’ (usually seen as synonymous with ‘reducing re-offending’) has been retained. However, this commitment is in the main rooted in the use of cognitive behaviourist approaches to personal change, along with more practical access to support services in areas such as accommodation, drug and alcohol misuse and training. Furthermore, this commitment is seen as ultimately subsumed by a managerialist agenda (Lewis 2005) and an underlying belief in government that crime is committed deliberately and rationally by ‘bad people’ (Faulkner 2008). The ‘what works?’ (it originally had a question mark) movement had begun to emerge from Canada in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Based in cognitive behaviourism, claims were increasingly made that something could indeed ‘work’ (see McGuire 2001). ‘What works’ aimed to rehabilitate persistent offenders and saw itself as far more than an alternative to custody. In the early part of the 1990s, however, its use was limited to a small number of probation services with chief probation officers who had a personal interest, until it came to be seen as central to a New Labour approach (Newburn 2003: 152–4). According to Raynor and Vanstone (2002: 94), one major influence on the change of status of ‘what works’ from a minority interest to one of central importance was the support of the probation inspectorate, which helped persuade the New Labour government to set up ‘pathfinder’ projects of certain cognitive behavioural programmes, with the intention of evaluating their effectiveness in reducing re-offending. In due course, the Home Office embraced ‘what works’ via the Effective Practice Initiative (Home Office 1998). These developments met some hostility (Gorman 2001; Mair 2004; Merrington and Stanley 2000) on the basis that the programmes had a thin evidence base, employed a pathological model, and that not all individuals were suited to a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. They have also been called into question by adherents of the ‘desistance’ approach to offending, who question the treatment model's effectiveness as essentially missing the point about why and how offenders decide themselves to give up offending (see Farrall 2002; and in this book the chapters by Porporino and Weaver and McNeill).

However, these objections had little influence and the accredited programmes initiative represented a huge investment in transformative work and the probation service itself. While this might at first be seen as an endorsement of the probation officer ‘relationship role’, what has been called the ‘new rehabilitation’ (Vanstone 2004) was not based on unconditional assistance, but on cognitive behavioural programmes backed up by rigid enforcement. Furthermore, the emphasis on enforcement, breach and toughness is seen as a political and value-laden one, rather than having any evidence base; the link between tough enforcement, compliance and subsequent re-offending is both under-researched and highly contested (Bottoms 2001; Mair 2004; Hedderman and Hough 2004; May and Wadwell 2001; Merrington and Stanley 2007). Of course, this description is one that takes a macro, or at least mezzo, level look at practice: that is, one outlined by government and senior management. The extent to which practitioners subscribed to the ‘new’ part of the ‘new rehabilitation’ is far less clear and practice may have had more continuity in terms of providing broad notions of ‘help’ than has been assumed (Deering 2008).

With the election of the Labour government in 1997, there could be discerned differences in policy and attitude towards the service, but also some continuity. Rhetoric from government throughout this period continued about the need for the criminal justice system to become even tougher and to be ‘re-balanced in favour of the victim’ (and against the offender) (NAPO 2006a, 2006b; Travis 2006). At the same time and in an example of the government's acknowledgement of the wider social context of crime (and not just of the ‘need to punish’) it published the Reducing Re-offending: National Action Plan, followed in Wales by Joining Together in Wales, which invo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Part One
• Part Two
• Index