Offender Supervision

New Directions in Theory, Research and Practice

Fergus McNeill, Peter Raynor, Chris Trotter, Fergus McNeill, Peter Raynor, Chris Trotter

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781843929369
• eBook ISBN: 9781136840074
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This major new book brings together leading researchers in the field in order to describe and analyse internationally significant theoretical and empirical work on offender supervision, and to address the policy and practice implications of this work within and across jurisdictions. Arising out of the work of the international Collaboration of Researchers for the Effective Development of Offender Supervision (CREDOS), this book examines questions and issues that have arisen both within effectiveness research, and from research on desistance from offending. The book draws out the lessons that can be learned not just about 'what works?', but about how and why particular practices support desistance in specific jurisdictional, cultural and local contexts.

Key themes addressed in this book include:

• New directions in theory and paradigms for practice
• Staff skills and effective offender supervision
• Different issues and challenges in improving offender supervision
• The role of families, 'significant others' and social networks
• Understanding and supporting compliance within supervision
• Exploring the social, political, organisational and historical contexts of offender supervision

Offender Supervision will be essential reading for academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students, policy makers, managers and practitioners interested in offender supervision.

Chapter 1

Introduction: ’What’s new and exciting?’

Fergus McNeill, Peter Raynor and Chris Trotter

The story of this book

The origins of this collection lie in the development of an international network of researchers interested in one way or another in ‘offender supervision’. The initial idea to establish such a network was Chris Trotter’s. During the European Society of Criminology’s Annual Conference in 2006 in Tübingen in Germany, Chris discussed the idea with Peter Raynor and Fergus McNeill. The initial discussions centred on a common concern; although the ‘what works?’ movement in probation (or correctional) research had achieved a great deal, new impetus seemed to us to be necessary to allow the effectiveness agenda to develop beyond its historical emphasis on the principles of effective programmes. Reflecting our different backgrounds, interests and experiences – both in practice and in research – we saw broader questions and issues arising both from effectiveness research itself (for example, about the role of workers’ practice skills, styles and approaches, and about the organisational contexts of interventions) and from research on desistance from offending and how it can be best supported (for example, about the significance of personal and professional relationships in the process, and about the importance of developing social capital).

In order to explore the potential for developing such a network, we contacted as many probation or corrections researchers as we could and organised a day seminar at the Monash University Centre in Prato, Tuscany on 13 September 2007. Those who attended the seminar included very eminent and well-established scholars, doctoral researchers and others early in their careers, and researchers and analysts within private and governmental institutions as well as more traditional academic settings. Importantly, several of the attendees worked across the research/practice divide. Those present included Loretta Allen-Weinstein (New South Wales Juvenile Justice, Australia); Jill Annison (University of Plymouth, UK); Jim Bonta (Public Safety Canada); John Deering (University of Wales at Newport); Philippa Evans (Monash University/NSW Juvenile Justice, Australia); Liz Fabiano (T3 Associates, Canada); Loraine Gelsthorpe (Cambridge University, UK); Nigel Hosking (London Probation Area, UK); Gill McIvor (then at the University of Lancaster, UK); Trish McCulloch (University of Dundee, UK); Fergus McNeill (University of Glasgow, UK); Margaret Malloch (University of Stirling, UK); Helen Miles (Swansea University/Jersey Probation Service); Dave Morran (University of Stirling, UK); Briege Nugent (then at the University of Edinburgh, UK); Frank Porporino (T3 Associates, Canada); Peter Raynor (Swansea University, UK); Colin Roberts (University of Oxford, UK); Jenny Roberts (formerly Chief Probation Officer, Hereford and Worcester, UK); Gwen Robinson (University of Sheffield, UK); Shelley Turner (Monash University/NSW Juvenile Justice, Australia); Chris Trotter (Monash University, Australia); Pamela Ugwudike (Swansea University, UK); and Bill Whyte (University of Edinburgh, UK).

Several of these initial participants have contributed to this volume, and the first versions of some of the chapters herein were discussed at that first meeting. Importantly, however, the group also used that first meeting to discuss and agree their shared agenda. Settling on the acronym CREDOS (Collaboration of Researchers for the Effective Development of Offender Supervision), the founding members agreed on the following statement of objectives and principles:

CREDOS is an international network of researchers, and policy and practice partners in research, who share a common interest in the effective development of offender supervision. We believe that this interest requires us to engage in high quality, collaborative and comparative research and scholarship exploring:

• How best to measure effectiveness in offender supervision.

• The nature and features of effective offender supervision.

• The characteristics, styles and practices of effective offender supervisors.

• The qualities and features of effective relationships between offenders and those that work with them.

• The social, political, cultural, organisational and professional contexts of effective offender supervision and how these contexts impact upon it.

In pursuing this agenda, CREDOS is committed to:

• Pursuing our research agenda through a diverse range of research methods, recognising that methodological pluralism is necessary to yield the insights required to move policy and practice forward.

• Undertaking collaborative and comparative research wherever possible, so that lessons can be learned about what works in specific national and local contexts and about whether and to what extent there are practices in and approaches to offender supervision that work across diverse contexts.

• Exploring issues of diversity among offenders in relation to effective supervision.

• Working to engage offenders and their families in the research process, recognising the value and importance of their insights into effective practice and what works for them.

Since its inception, CREDOS has convened annual meetings (in Glasgow in 2008, in Prato in 2009 and Melbourne in 2010) in order to progress these objectives, principally by enabling its members to engage in ongoing discussion about their work and, where possible, to encourage them to work together. The network also allows for electronic communication about ongoing relevant research – theoretical and empirical (more of which below). Importantly, CREDOS is an inclusive network – open to any and all researchers with an active interest in these issues – and one that is keen to maintain or establish close and mutually respectful engagements with policy and practice in any and all jurisdictions. Since our inaugural 2007 meeting, the network has expanded to include about 40 members from Australasia, Europe and North America – and we hope to reach out beyond these three continents in the near future. We recognise the need to address the over-representation of anglophone jurisdictions in our network; an over-representation that reflects our own identities and networks but deprives us of access to extensive bodies of research and experience – and other ways of understanding and constructing the issues and practices that concern us.

This collection is essentially the product of the first three CREDOS annual meetings (most particularly the third meeting in Prato in 2009 which was generously supported by a small grant from the British Academy/Association of Commonwealth Universities), though it has been seasoned and supplemented by contributions from scholars who for one reason or another did not attend these meetings. Reviewing the contents of the collection, it is encouraging to recognise the extent to which CREDOS has already begun to achieve its objectives – and how much it has stayed true to its principles. All of the chapters of this book address the network’s original objectives. Moreover, the methodological diversity reflected in the collection is in keeping with the principles we established. Perhaps partly because of our anglophone bias, it might be said that we have failed in one area: despite our expressed commitment to address issues of diversity, they are tackled in a somewhat partial and piecemeal fashion in this collection – clearly, this is something that we should seek to remedy as our work moves forward.

A problem with the book’s title

Rightly in our view, some members of CREDOS have questioned the merits of entitling this book Offender Supervision. As will quickly become apparent to readers, all of the contributors to this collection are committed not just to the belief that human beings can change but also to the pursuit of evidence about how, why and when we change, and about how positive change can be best supported. Does it make sense therefore to collude with uses of language that arguably serve to confirm and cement precisely those identities and behaviours that we are concerned with changing? If we want people to leave offending behind, why do we insist on labelling or defining them as offenders; why do we define our core interest as offender supervision?

One principled answer to this challenge is that the term ‘offender supervision’ at least serves to remind us that those people supervised by probation, parole, correctional or criminal justice social work services are rarely undergoing supervision by choice; ‘offenders’ are in most circumstances ‘involuntary clients’ of human services (Trotter 2006). They are being supervised because they have offended. Researchers and practitioners do well to remember this for two main reasons. First, such recognition serves to balance the proper aspirations of offender supervisors to serve and to support their ‘clients’ with recognition of their obligations to supervise also in the interests of the broader community, preserving its safety. Second, and equally important, the offending and only the offending is what justifies the intrusion of involuntary supervision, its inevitable deprivations of liberty and privacy and the other ‘pains’ (intended, incidental and obiter) that it entails (Durnescu 2009; Raynor 1978, 1985). Although the aspirations of offender supervisors for those people being supervised are and should be much broader than the mere cessation of their offending – and may include enhancing their lives in all sorts of ways – supervisors should encourage but have no right to require more than the cessation of offending. If the European history of criminal justice under totalitarian regimes has taught us to appreciate the proper limits of the State’s right to compel change in the individual, then the North American history of criminal justice under the influence of too unrestrained a version of the ‘rehabilitative ideal’ (American Friends Services Committee 1971) perhaps teaches us a parallel lesson.

More pragmatically, we have called the book Offender Supervision in an attempt to escape at least some of the vagaries and variations of terminology across jurisdictions. In some countries the business of supervising offenders in the community lies firmly within social work; in others it is a function of probation and/or parole agencies; in others the relevant organisations are defined as (community) correctional services; in one jurisdiction the business has become known as ‘offender management’. For some, the term supervision may invoke surveillance and discipline (pace Foucault) rather than rehabilitation, but the latter term is also ambiguous, contested and problematic (see Raynor and Robinson 2009). That said, both supervision and rehabilitation seem better terms than mere ‘management’, particularly when set in the context of contemporary critiques of changes in penal systems that are seen as representing the emergence of an ‘actuarial regime’ (Feeley and Simon 1992, 1994) or a ‘culture of control’ (Garland 2001); both critiques suggest that the dominant concern has become the management of risks rather than the promotion of positive change.

None of these arguments satisfactorily addresses the problem of negative labelling in the book’s title, but perhaps this brief acknowledgement of our own discomfort serves to provide some useful qualification and clarification of what the title is and is not intended to convey.

‘What’s new and exciting?’

So what is this book all about? Towards the end of January 2010, while this collection was in preparation, Don Andrews emailed some colleagues a message entitled: ‘What’s new and exciting?’ His request was as follows:

Don Andrews: Hello everyone. I agreed to do a paper for James McGuire for a special edition of Legal and Criminological Psychology on non-programmatic factors and treatment outcome. I can’t find anything new but for Jim’s training project (STICS [see Chapter 5]) and a few others noted below. Have I just been out of it for too long and hence I am too far removed from the action? HELP! Is there anything new in the correctional treatment/crime prevention area? I am not asking you to do my job. I just can’t find much post-2006. Am I simply missing some great new stuff? …

Jim Bonta forwarded Don’s message to the CREDOS network. Over the course of the ensuing weeks, there was a series of responses from CREDOS members. In the first response, as well as directing Don to a recent literature review commissioned by the Scottish Government (McNeill 2009), one of us offered the following suggestion:

Fergus McNeill: Aside from the importance of developing debates about the implications of desistance research for ‘correctional’ practice, I’m inclined to think that the main emerging area relates to the interfaces between the effectiveness literature (specifically your work on CCPs [core correctional practices – see Chapter 2]) and the literature on the importance of legitimacy in other CJ areas (you’ll probably know Tom Tyler’s work in this area?). It seems to me that we need to think a bit harder about the moral qualities of organisations, of practitioners and of interventions, since I think there is now pretty strong evidence that offenders (like everyone else) assess and respond to certain moral qualities of those that have authority over them.

Don Andrews: … As you might expect, I am pleased to see your references to core practices. I know that Chris Trotter has developed some of the ideas into a model of social work practice with reluctant clients. Now you too make reference to core practices in your model of offender supervision. The motivational and desistance pieces should prove very valuable. Needless to say, I am very pleased … [but] I don’t understand the programming versus supervision issue that you refer to in relation to RNR [the risk-needs-responsivity model – see Chapter 2]. Do you think that RNR only applies to formal treatment programmes? It applies to human services, social services and clinical services and the supervision of offenders. I think it also applies to crime prevention services outside of corrections. Indeed, we can use the same principles in analyses of the impact of family, school, neighborhood etc. on future criminal activity. Looking forward to the book and seeing what everyone is up to. You have created a very interesting group ….

Fergus McNeill: … In terms of the programmes/supervision issue, maybe I haven’t been clear enough in terms of separating the theory or model from the way it was implemented – over here at least. You probably know this story, but my take on it is that your work (essentially RNR) got mixed up with public sector reforms in the UK (more specifically England and Wales) which were focused on saving costs and reducing the power of the professions – all part of the managerialisation and mechanisation of human services. The result was that … assessment and intervention systems … were superficially based on RNR but … lacked sensitivity to the complexities of offenders’ lives and neglected the need for professional reflexivity and ingenuity in individualising the generalised messages from research (and in applying the tools and programmes sensitively). To put it crudely and probably exaggerating a little … the significance of the ‘human’ in human services (and their social and organisational contexts) somehow got lost. Accreditation systems belatedly tried to correct this (by insisting on recognition of the wider context, the links to supervision and social supports), but of course by their nature they too placed all the emphasis on programmes.

I guess that sometimes, in discussing RNR, I (like many others) may mix up the model as designed [with] the model as applied! That said, I do think that the desistance perspective (basically forefronting the change process and how we understand and support it, ahead of thinking about interventions [see Chapter 4]) and the GLM [the Good Lives Model, see Chapter 3] do add something new and move the debates on – but these approaches are just as vulnerable to misappropriation and misuse. For example, I have to work quite hard when presenting desistance material to prevent practitioners from taking away the message that they ‘just’ need to have good relationships with offenders and to offer a bit of practical help.

Shadd Maruna: What an interesting question [What’s new and exciting?]. I’d like to echo Fergus’s points and throw in a couple of plugs for books that are forthcoming … Both books are in the sex offender treatment field, but to be honest (because of the investment in that area of treatment and the resources at their disposal) they are really streets ahead of the rest of us in many regards, and I would say that 95 per cent of the arguments in the two books apply fully to rehabilitation work with ordinary prisoners as well (whatever ordinary is).

The first book is all about the importance of non-programmatic factors (therapeutic alliance, relationships, etc.) and makes a strong case for the significance of these factors over the content of actual programming. It is (ironically) the work of four Canadian authors (W. L. Marshall, G. A. Serran, L. E. Marshall and M. D. O’Brien), all eminent [practitioners and scholars], and is exceedingly well researched. Curr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: ‘What's new and exciting?’
• Part One New Directions in Theory
• Part Two Staff skills and effective offender supervision
• Part Three Improving offender supervision
• Part Four Significant others and social networks
• Part Five Offenders' compliance with supervision
• Part Six Offender supervision in its contexts
• Index