Multi-Agency Working in Criminal Justice

Theory, Policy and Practice

Aaron Pycroft, Dennis Gough, Pycroft, Aaron, Gough, Dennis, Aaron Pycroft, Dennis Gough

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781447340256
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Multi-agency working continues to be a core focus in criminal justice and allied work, with the government investing significantly in training criminal justice professionals. This fully revised and expanded edition of this comprehensive text brings together probation, policing, prison, social work, criminological and organisational studies perspectives, and is an essential guide for students and practitioners in offender management and other managed care environments. The contributors provide critical analysis of the latest theory, policy and practice of multi-agency working and each chapter includes case studies, key points, exercises and further reading.

1

Multi-agency working and the governance of crime control

Dennis Gough

Aims of the chapter

•To provide a theoretical context for the book.

•To analyse the political economy of developments in the governance of crime.

•To utilise Foucault’s governmentality thesis to examine the ways in which government seeks to shape and control organisations.

This chapter seeks to uncover and make sense of the theoretical underpinnings of multi-agency arrangements by analysing approaches to criminal justice policy which move beyond the state or what Rhodes has called the ‘governance’ of societal problems. Rhodes (1995: 1) states that ‘governance signifies a change in the meaning of government, referring to a new process of governing; or a changed condition of ordered rule; or the new method by which society is governed’. As such, the governance of crime control includes discourses relating to a wide ranging participation in partnership, contestability, marketisation and privatisation arrangements. As Pierre and Peters (2000) note, these new strategies will increasingly centre on the government’s efforts to steer the crime control endeavours of others. The chapter attempts to move beyond a mere tracing and description of the different institutional arrangements that serve to identify how, for example policing has changed. Rather, the chapter connects the development of complex multi-agency arrangements, found in antisocial behaviour and preventative work, the policing of public and private space and the punishment and rehabilitation of offenders with political and societal developments particularly in relation to the nature of contemporary government and the fluid relationships between the state and law and order (Crawford, 1999).

In order to achieve this, the chapter will utilise theoretical insights and perspectives which centre on the multiplicity of ways by which governments seek to control and shape organisations and citizens’ conduct afforded through the lens of Foucault’s notion of governmentality. This chapter firstly details the backdrop to recent societal, economic and political changes which challenge established and rational modernist criminological thought. Secondly, the chapter discusses emergent theoretical perspectives in criminology, centring around governmentality, which attempts to shed light on the contemporary mainstreaming of traditionally non-penal and non-state actors in the criminal justice system. The chapter concludes by highlighting how successive governments’ mainstreaming of non-state actors in criminal justice policy and practice requires a broader criminological imagination than has been afforded thus far in mainstream criminology. A broader imagination would incorporate and reflect a variety of governmental ways of thinking about policing, punishment and rehabilitation.

Late modernity and challenges to big government and crime control

Any analysis of the relationship between government strategies to reduce crime and the new mainstreaming of the private, voluntary and community sector groups needs to be situated against the political, economic and social changes which have challenged and reshaped the boundaries of criminology in the period described as late modernity. Only by outlining and analysing the sheer variety of political, social and economic challenges since the late 1970s can the involvement of voluntary organisations and volunteers in the field of community justice and rehabilitation be fully understood and articulated.

Contemporary criminology is emerging out of the new political, economic and social world of the 1970s and presents a set of significant challenges to the discipline. The rapid and profound changes to our society have been of significant interest to a number of sociologists and criminologists (Garland and Sparks, 2000; Stenson, 2001; Taylor, 1999). Indeed, Taylor (1999: 10) notes how

the analysis of crime itself (the object of analysis of any serious ‘criminological’ project) must be located in relation to the fundamental transformation of social formation that is currently in progress (resulting from a deep crisis in the pre-existing configurations of social and economic organization).

Criminology has witnessed a profound set of cultural, political and social undertaken changes in Western capitalist democracies brought about by the changing nature of capitalist production, such as mass consumerism, globalisation, the restructuring of the labour market and the growth of unemployment. The cumulative impact of such profound transformations is something which Lea and Hallsworth (2013: 19) have termed ‘rewriting the scripts governing social structure, class relations and politics in the advanced capitalist countries of the industrial North’. Similarly, Garland (2001) notes the economic and ideological force of capitalist production to be the most basic transformative force in the modern times. For Garland (2001) many of the profound economic and social changes during the latter part of the 20th century can be ascribed to the process of capital accumulation, the unerring search for new markets for capitalist growth including previously sacralised public sector work. In short, during the post war period government was conceptualised to be ‘big’ in that it assumed both an active and central role in managing economic and social life, guaranteeing opportunities to create markets and profit while ensuring that the population were guaranteed health, wellbeing and prosperity (Garland, 2001: 81). Since 1945 in Western Europe and USA, the interventionist welfare state was central to the delivery of what had previously been deemed as private actions and behaviour. Whether one considers the fields of policing, punishment, education or health, the post war interventionist state can be conceptualised as incorporating a variety of national, regulatory agencies assuming a degree of expertise and control of formally unregulated activity. Thus this Keynesian interventionist state is best exemplified by the creation of a welfare state, an expanded ‘public sector’ and the rapid development of a largely state sponsored professionalised middle class in society.

However, this post war settlement of remarkable growth in both capital accumulation and living standards in Western capitalist economies was abruptly ended in the early 1970s. This crisis in economic growth arose as a result of the cumulative effects of the rise in the price of oil, economic recession and negative growth and finally the competition from newly competitive economies of developing countries in a globalised economy. As Hobsbawm (1994: 15) noted, global capitalism undermined national institutions and interests and ‘for many purposes, notably in economic affairs, the globe is now the primary operational unit and older units, such as the national economies defined by the politics of territorial states, are reduced to complications of transnational activities’.¹ Whole industries which had been the mainstay of the industrialised economy had all but disappeared. Importantly during the fiscal crisis in the 1970s, public expenditure outran income from taxation and led to a radical and accelerated restructuring of the labour market with the shedding of millions of predominantly male, heavy manufacturing jobs and created a labour market that was characterised not by stable, high paid careers with significant employment protections but by precarious, low paid and part time positions (Taylor, 1999: 14).

Since the 1970s crisis in capitalism, Western nations have borne witness to great transformations in class relations. Increasingly, the skilled working class have shifted their interests away from a sense of collectivism in favour of ‘asocial individualism’ (Hobsbawm, 1994: 15) and free market economics. As such, we are used to the favouring of individualistic rather than collective tendencies in how we live our lives or solve societal problems (Garland, 2001). Indeed, while such freeing up of old collectivism could be seen by many as liberating and offering opportunities to progress and consume, it also brought with it new problems linked to these new individual freedoms.

In addition, and interwoven with the political and economic changes outlined above, we have born witness to social changes to the family, epitomised by increasing numbers of women wanting or needing to enter the workforce, increased rates of divorce and family structures, a decrease in family size and a rise in different family formations, and the creation of the teenager as a separate and largely unsupervised member of society. Moreover, a society characterised by profound changes in the stretching of time, space and communication brought about by mass ownership of cars, technological developments and affordable travel. Transformations in communities and families have at their core the entry of women into the labour market to fill the burgeoning jobs in the service sectors.² The rise in work for women impacted on family structure. Garland (2001) highlights a noticeable decline in birth rate during this period with women beginning a family later in life, having fewer children and returning to work after childbirth. Possibly the most startling social transformation relating to the family structure during this period is the rate at which marriages ended in divorce. In England the rate of divorce and separation increased sharply as did the number of children being raised in single parent households.³ As Garland (2001: 83) notes, the scale of the transformation in family life was so significant that

in the space of only 40 years the traditional image of the nuclear family – a married couple living together with children – had come to bear little relation to the real domestic lives of most of the population in America and Britain.

New economic and social realities and the relationship to crime

The period of late modernity has then witnessed the coexistence of rising consumption, general affluence and a concomitant rise in the overall crime rate in every Western industrialised nation, something Garland (2001) has termed an ‘epistemological crisis’. Indeed as Taylor (1999: 16) notes, it is a sociological and cultural shock to find the uncritical acceptance of a constantly developing and improving society to be a fallacy. The rise in recorded crime during a period of a general rise in general living standards and prosperity is significant. In England and Wales the police recorded crime rate doubled between 1955 and 1964 from 500,000 to 1 million crimes (Reiner, 2007: 62–63). By 1965 the crime rate had doubled again and then doubled again by 1990 as a result of the increase in absolute and relative deprivation rates (Taylor, 1999: 16). Late modern economic and social transformation had clearly made society a more criminogenic milieu with increased opportunities for crime and reduced levels of social control afforded by the family and church. In addition, an ever increasing number of individuals were losing out in the changes to the labour market and welfare restructuring, and were ‘at risk’ of crime. This included an increasingly large number of teenage males enjoying time outside of the home and hence outside of family and work controls. As Currie said, as a result of the interconnectedness of the economic, the social or community and the familial when discussing violent crime,

we are likely to see great structural inequalities and community fragmentation and weakened ability of parents to monitor and supervise their children – and a great many other things all going on at once, all entwined with each other, and all affecting the crime rate (Currie, 1997, cited in Reiner, 2007: 80)

Neoliberal and conservative mentalities as an antidote to the late modern problem of crime

Dean (2010) and Reiner (2007) have outlined the increasing turn to a duality of conservative and neoliberal rationalities of government since the 1970s as a way to solve political, social and economic challenges in Western states. As Crawford (1999: 25) notes, the challenge to the post war interventionist state has been found in a rejection of the expectation that the state was expected to hand down answers to ameliorate society’s problems and meet human need. Rather, since the 1970s, political thought has centred on how all sectors, communities and citizens have become implicated and mobilised in the task of resolving them.

While the neoliberal term or concept has been used in a multiplicity of ways which often incorporate communitarianism or neo-conservative political ideology, here the term is used to refer to a sea change in the government of liberal democracies since the 1960s and 1970s. After the Second World War, government was largely understood as an activity undertaken by a national welfare state acting on behalf on a singular ‘domain’ understood as society (Dean, 2010: 176). Indeed, the Keynesian attempts to govern and intervene in the health of the economy and society is encapsulated in the attempts to secure full employment and care for people from the cradle to the grave. As such, the state took on a wide range of social and economic obligations principally by the use of state investment in sectors such as transportation, public utilities, housing and manufacturing that were vital to mass production and consumption. Harvey (1989, in Smart, 2003: 122) notes that ‘governments also moved to provide a strong underpinning to the social wage through expenditure covering social security, health care, education, housing and the like’.

However, by the late 1970s this post war settlement of centralised state planning, high levels of economic development and the provision of social care from the cradle to the grave was coming under increasi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Multi-Agency Working and the Governance of Crime Control
• 2. From a Trained Incapacity to Professional Resistance in Criminal Justice
• 3. A Time of Change: The Expanding Role of Police and Crime Commissioners in Local Criminal Justice Delivery
• 4. Integrated Offender Management: A Brave New World or Business as Usual?
• 5. MAPPA: Sex Offenders and Managing ‘The Other’ in the Community
• 6. Protection and Prevention: Identifying, Managing and Monitoring Priority Perpetrators of Domestic Abuse
• 7. Policing a Diverse Society: The Community Based Rationale For Multi-Agency Working
• 8. The Development of the Police Role in Safeguarding Children
• 9. Hate Crime, Policing and Multi-Agency Partnership Working
• 10. The Complexity of Partnerships in the UK Counter Terrorism Strategy. What Might We Learn From Contemporary Efforts to Counter Hate Crime?
• 11. Interviewing Children as Suspects: The Need for a Child-Centred Approach
• 12. Culture Club Assemble! The powerful Role of Multi-Agent Relationships in Prison Habilitation
• 13. Integrated Secure Care Pathways for People With Complex Needs: Service User, Policy and Practice Perspectives
• 14. Removing The ‘Dual’ and Working With the Presenting Diagnosis: Core Processes of Change
• 15. Offenders With Mental Health Needs in the Criminal Justice System: The Multi-Agency Challenge to Provide Solution-Focused Responses
• 16. Enforcement and Rehabilitation: Challenges to Partnership Working With Substance Using Offenders
• 17. The Decline of Youth Offending Teams: Towards a Progressive and Positive Youth Justice