Evidence-Based Skills in Criminal Justice

International Research on Supporting Rehabilitation and Desistance

Pamela Ugwudike, Peter Raynor, Jill Annison, Ugwudike, Pamela, Raynor, Peter, Pamela Ugwudike, Peter Raynor, Jill Annison

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781447332985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

How can evidence-based skills and practices reduce re-offending, support desistance, and encourage service user engagement during supervision in criminal justice settings? How can those who work with service users in these settings apply these skills and practices?

This book is the first to bring together international research on skills and practices in probation and youth justice, while exploring the wider contexts that affect their implementation in the public, private and voluntary sectors. Wide-ranging in scope, it also covers effective approaches to working with diverse groups such as ethnic minority service users, women and young people.

Part 1: Contextualising practice:
key theoretical, organisational
and policy developments

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ONE

Introduction: Effective practice skills: new directions in research

Pamela Ugwudike, Peter Raynor and Jill Annison

This edited collection brings together international research on evidence-based skills for working with people who are subject to penal supervision or other interventions in the justice system. The text focuses on skills-based practices that are empirically linked to rehabilitation and desistance from crime. The term ‘skills’ is multidimensional. But broadly conceptualised, the term refers to the proficiencies, capabilities and other attributes that contribute to positive outcomes such as active service-user engagement with supervision objectives, rehabilitation and desistance. We recognise that the term ‘desistance’ is also multidimensional and as Maruna and LeBel (2010, p 72) rightly note: ‘There is no single “desistance theory” any more than there can be said to be a single theory of crime or of poverty.’ While some desistance scholars highlight the role of agency in achieving desistance, some emphasise structural factors, and others emphasise the relevance of agential factors constrained by wider structural forces (see generally Giordano et al, 2003; Ugwudike, 2016).

That said, Maruna (2004) offers a useful conceptualisation of desistance as being characterised by primary desistance and secondary desistance. The former refers to a hiatus in a criminal career. According to Maruna (2004), individuals involved in offending inevitably undergo this hiatus at some point, or indeed, at various periods of their offending career. By contrast, secondary desistance is permanent desistance and it involves a transition from primary desistance (a temporary break from offending) to a permanent break from offending that is accompanied by adaptation to a prosocial self-identity – the ‘role of identity of a “changed person”’ (Maruna, 2004, p 274). This definition very much suggests that desistance is at best viewed as a process. The issue of whether or not criminal justice practitioners who supervise people undertaking court orders can contribute to the process of secondary desistance is perhaps open to question given the widely accepted view that most people involved in offending behaviour eventually desist from offending as they approach maturation and attain turning points in their lives (Thorpe et al, 1980; Sampson and Laub, 1993; Rutherford, 1986).

However, insights from the desistance literature indicate that practitioners can contribute to the process, or as some suggest, facilitate ‘assisted desistance’ (King, 2014). As Ugwudike (2016) observes, Farrall’s (2002a) longitudinal study of the impact of probation supervision on desistance found that probation practitioners can sow ‘seeds’ of desistance that germinate or are ‘fully realised’ long after the end of an order (see also Farrall et al, 2014, p 290). Furthermore, it has been suggested that practitioners can contribute to the maturation process by working with service users to help them improve their social networks and personal competencies (McNeill, 2014). Maruna and LeBel (2010, p 76) also argue quite persuasively that practitioners can encourage secondary desistance by deploying delabelling strategies such as positive reinforcements in the form of praise and rewards. They note that ‘desistance may be best facilitated when the desisting person’s change in behaviour is recognised by others and reflected back to him in a “delabeling process”’. In their view, a Pygmalion effect occurs whereby desisters adapt their self-identity and behaviour to the expectations of others, performing highly if others expect them to do so, and vice versa. Importantly, Maruna (2004) observes that the role of practitioners is crucial because delabelling strategies that are initiated by family members and informal sources of social control are perhaps not as valued or appreciated as those that originate from the formal sources of control that initiated the labelling process. He notes that ‘delabeling might be most potent when coming from “on high”, particularly official sources like treatment professionals … rather than from family members or friends’ (Maruna, 2004, p 275). He also acknowledges that the Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) literature provides guides on how this might be achieved, remarking that ‘the “what works” principles for evidence-based correctional practice suggests that positive reinforcement should outweigh punishments by a 4:1 ratio’ (Maruna, 2004, p 274).

The past few years have seen the emergence of a growing corpus of international research on one-to-one skills (including delabelling skills). These skills are theoretically informed and empirically linked to positive outcomes such as enhanced engagement during supervision and reductions in rates of reconviction (see for example, Sorsby et al, 2013; Raynor et al, 2014; Taxman, 2014; Ugwudike et al, 2014; Trotter et al, 2015; Bonta and Andrews, 2017). The skills incorporate key elements that can support rehabilitation and the processes desistance scholars identify as vital for secondary desistance. Examples of these elements include delabelling using positive reinforcements (Maruna, 2004), building good working relationships (Burnett and McNeill, 2005), improving service users’ human capital by equipping them will problem social skills and competencies (McNeill, 2014), offering advocacy and brokerage services that put service users in touch with relevant social welfare services (Farrall, 2004; McNeill, 2014) and employing a client-centred approach that respects service users’ autonomy and agency while improving their self-efficacy (see generally McNeill and Whyte, 2007).

It appears that what is needed is a text that brings together the emerging research literature on these skills in one volume, which is what this text achieves. As such, the text is broad in scope; it provides theoretical and empirical insights derived from different models of rehabilitation (such as the RNR and desistance models), from diverse jurisdictions, and from a range of criminal justice settings including probation supervision settings and youth justice practice contexts. The text also comprises chapters on approaches to working with diverse groups such as ethnic minority service users and women to effect long-term positive change. Much of the existing research on supervision practice focuses on practices involving adult male service users. By incorporating chapters that explore evidence-based skills for working with diverse groups, this text addresses a key gap in knowledge. To ensure that it provides a contextualised account of effective supervision skills and practices, the edited collection also explores the organisational and wider policy contexts that might affect the implementation of effective skills and practices. As such, the text offers a good balance of theoretical and empirical insights alongside organisational and policy-related issues.

Reflecting the text’s international character, there are contributions from a strong international team of scholars based in jurisdictions such as Australia, Canada, the United States, England, Wales, Romania, Belgium and Spain. Some of the contributors have led recent scholarship in the field of effective skills for working with service users in prison, probation and youth justice settings. Some are also renowned for their contributions to criminal justice research, policy and practice across the world. Contributions from these and other respected scholars from diverse jurisdictions demonstrate the book’s wide-ranging coverage and relevance.

Indeed, this book grows out of the work of an international network of researchers, practitioners, policymakers and others interested in evidence-based supervision practice. The network is known as the Collaboration of Researchers for the Effective Development of Offender Supervision (CREDOS). Members of CREDOS have, over the years, worked hard to promote international knowledge transfer and the network was founded in 2007 after discussions at the European Society of Criminology conference in Tübingen in 2006. The initial suggestion came from Chris Trotter after a presentation on his research in Australia (Trotter and Evans, 2012) and one from Peter Raynor about the skills research that was planned in Jersey, which later became the Jersey Supervision Skills Study (Raynor et al, 2014; Ugwudike et al, 2014). Further discussion with Fergus McNeill led to contacts with other interested researchers and a plan to launch a research network.

The initial organisers of CREDOS were Fergus McNeill, Peter Raynor and Chris Trotter, and the first conference was organised in Prato in Italy, where Chris Trotter was able to arrange use of Monash University’s European Centre. This first conference was attended by a mixture of academics and practitioners from several different countries, and this has been a continuing feature of the network’s activity. Regular conferences have taken place in locations as diverse as Australia, Lithuania and the US, and the research done by members has appeared in several books and a large number of articles. The original Prato conference of 2007, as well as deciding the name of the organisation, produced a statement of aims about the kind of research we intended to carry out and encourage.

At that time, research on the effectiveness of work with offenders was dominated by evaluations of programmes and by meta-analyses that aimed to draw out broader principles of effective practice. Although most work with people under supervision was in fact carried out through one-to-one contact rather than in groups, less research had been done on such individual work, and CREDOS members were interested in filling this gap.

Some were mainly interested in how relationships with supervisors such as probation staff might help to promote desistance, while others were more focused on the detail of what practitioners were actually doing and what impact it might have. The statement of aims approved at the first conference is worth quoting in full, to see how far it has stood the test of time and how far the current volume still reflects it:

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 amongst offenders in relation to effective supervision.

•Working to engage offenders and their families in the research process, recognizing the value and importance of their insights into effective practice and what works for them. (McNeill et al, 2010, pp 2–3)

Papers based on work discussed at the early CREDOS conferences were published in the edited collection Offender Supervision: New Directions in Theory, Research and Practice (McNeill et al, 2010), which contains a mixture of theoretical work, policy discussion and empirical studies. Chapter Three of the current volume discusses some of these differences in approaches to research. The next book to be explicitly identified with CREDOS was Understanding Penal Practice (Durnescu and McNeill, 2014), which contains reports on several studies, including the Jersey supervision skills research discussed at the European conference in 2006. The work of CREDOS has also benefited from close contact and overlapping membership with other organisations, particularly the European Society of Criminology’s working group on community sanctions and measures, and the network of European researchers brought together in a research group on offender supervision in Europe funded by the European Community’s Cooperation in Science and Technology programme. Books produced from these groups (for example, McNeill and Beyens, 2013; Robinson and McNeill, 2016) have contributed a great deal to our understanding of the topics addressed by CREDOS, and other publications have involved its members and methods (for example, Ugwudike and Raynor, 2013). CREDOS is distinguished from the European organisations by its pattern of membership, which is worldwide but almost entirely from Anglophone countries.

The idea of the current book grew out of discussion at the CREDOS meeting in Porto in 2015. That meeting also marked a change in the leadership of the network, Fergus McNeill and Peter Raynor having passed their organising roles on to Pamela Ugwudike and Jill Annison, with Chris Trotter continuing to organise CREDOS activities in Australia and the wider Pacific region, and Faye Taxman overseeing the network’s agenda in North America. The editorial team for this book reflects the energy and enthusiasm of the new organisers, plus some continuity from the original team.

One issue first noted in the introduction to Offender Supervision, and still unresolved, is the use of the term ‘offender’, which implies a continuing offending identity, when the activities we are describing and studying are explicitly intended to promote the opposite, namely desistance and the development of non-offending identities. We are very conscious of this problem of labelling; on the other hand, there is still no generally recognised alternative that is readily understood. ‘Service user’ will work in some contexts, but is often inaccurate, and also applies to other users of public services; ‘people under criminal justice supervision’ and similar formulations are cumbersome and do not necessarily avoid labelling.

We are very pleased that we have been successful in attracting a distinguished international group of contributors to this book. The contributors are a mixture of academics and practitioners, including some who have moved between these roles. The variety and vigour of research represented in this volume allow us to continue to be optimistic about the future of this kind of work. Our intention is to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive guide to the current state of research on effective supervision skills in criminal justice contexts around the world. We seek to assemble theoretical and empirical evidence that should support principled policymaking.

The ‘new criminology’ of the late 1960s was dismissive of so-called ‘administrative criminologists’ (Young, 1988). These were researchers who were concerned with how to improve policy and make services more effective. They were seen as uncritical, and as accepting the official view of crimes and criminals without question. This criticism was always oversimplified: for example, the development of diversion in the youth justice system by applied criminologists and practitioners depended clearly on a critical understanding that labelling and processing behaviour as a crime was a social process that could be modified (Thorpe et al, 1980; Rutherford, 1986). It now seems that roles have changed. In a post-truth world where policies can be developed and implemented on the basis of no evidence at all, driven by ideology and by perceptions of political advantage, systematic empirical evaluation has acquired critical force and is part of the rational opposition to irrational policies. In other words, ‘administrative criminology’ now has a critical edge, and better evaluation can inform better practice. We hope that readers will find plenty of examples in this book, and that research in this field will continue to grow and to deliver results that are useful to service providers and service users alike.

The book comprises three sections. Part 1 sets the scene and focuses mainly on the key issues affecting the development of skills research. This section begins with the current chapter, which describes the developments that provided the impetus for this text. A key development is the dearth of empirical insights into evidence-based skills despite the importance of these skills to effective practice and outcomes. Maurice Vanstone extends the discussion in Chapter Two, which focuses on probation practice and locates the paucity of research on evidence-based skills within the historical and contemporary developments that have transformed probation practice. The chapter describes the ways in which probation services in England and Wales, currently swamped with a deluge of policy upheavals, could develop, sustain and apply evidence-based skills.

In Chapter Three, Peter Raynor extends these themes by mapping the trajectory of evaluation research in Britain, from the focus on identifying the outcomes or impacts of probation to the more recent emphasis on studying the previously ignored contents of one-to-one supervision or uncovering...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Notes on contributors
• Part 1: Contextualising practice: key theoretical, organisational and policy developments
• Part 2: International research on evidence-based skills
• Part 3: Evidence-based practice with diverse groups