Collaboration and Innovation in Criminal Justice

An Activity Theory Alternative to Offender Rehabilitation

Paulo Rocha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032033372
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000470864
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on original research on community-based alternatives to offender rehabilitation, this book provides an up-to-date depiction of the challenges faced by front-line workers at the interface between criminal justice and welfare systems striving to address needs and provide multifaceted solutions.

Using an innovative theoretical approach predicated on activity theory (AT) to dissect the problem, the book makes the case for co-created rehabilitation strategies that address the needs of offenders – which can only be achieved with the involvement of health and social welfare services as a means to provide a holistic support to individuals – and regard for the dilemmas front-line professionals face to deploy such strategies – which means shifting the top-down paradigm of policy implementation for co-created solutions. The book explores how AT can be used to help design commensurate interventions that give voice to all the interested actors involved in the rehabilitation process and provide readers with tools that help translate theory into practice.

This book is essential reading for students, researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders focusing on co-created, bottom-up alternatives to imprisonment that benefit both offenders, community and the state.

1
Introduction

Understanding offender rehabilitation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003186793-1

1.1 Empirical background

Offender rehabilitation is a strategy of paramount importance that the criminal justice system uses to promote the reintegration of individuals into the community (Armstrong & McNeill, 2012; Ministry of Justice UK, 2013). In this vein, motivating offenders to engage in rehabilitative interventions is a key step toward their potential desistance from further criminal behaviour (Fazel & Danesh, 2002; Fazel & Wolf, 2015; World Health Organization, 2005). As inmates are three times more likely to struggle with multiple vulnerabilities (which includes, for example, mental health problems, substance misuse and learning disabilities) than the population in general (Sinha, 2010), commensurate rehabilitation strategies ought to tackle clusters of correlated needs and provide multifaceted solutions (Andrews & Bonta, 2016). To that end, the involvement of professionals from multiple areas of care in the rehabilitation process is pivotal to enhance people’s odds of remaining crime free (Hean et al., 2009; Strype et al., 2014).

Policymakers worldwide strive to produce adequate policies that progress integrated care organised between criminal justice and welfare services (Department i Helse og Omsorg, 2013; Department of Health, 2010; World Health Organization, 2015). When interagency collaboration engenders co-provided care, mental health outcomes improve, reoffending rates decrease and the financial costs incurred by the taxpayers supporting prison and health services drop (Bond & Gittell, 2010). The challenge, however, is that policymakers and service leaders have focused on generic integration strategies that overlook the reality existent at street level, such as the mis-alignment of organisational working schedules, logistical issues and limited resources (Rocha & Holmen, 2020).

This book reflects on a case study was conducted in the context of offender rehabilitation in England and Wales to explore the perspective of front-line workers across criminal justice and welfare systems. The focus of the study was on a public service called Criminal Justice Liaison and Diversion (L&D), an organisation that supports vulnerable offenders when they are first in touch with the criminal justice system (e.g., police custody and court) by diverting them, if appropriate, to health and other care services as early as possible in their trajectory through criminal justice (James, 1999). As such, L&D is a model of funding, administration, organisation, service delivery and care designed to engender connectivity, alignment and collaboration within and between differentiated sectors (Kodner & Spreeuwenberg, 2002).

For over three decades, L&D services have been locally managed (Reed, 1992), which has produced varied results across sites. During this time, however, the national government has recurrently attempted to unify L&D practice over England (James, 1999). In its most recent attempt, the government has commissioned a review to assess the condition of people with mental health problems or learning disabilities in the criminal justice system (Carter, 2007), which resulted in a report (Bradley, 2009) confirming the relevance of L&D services at both police custody and courts to divert vulnerable individuals into care (McGilloway & Donnelly, 2004). Based on the findings of the review, policymakers and service leaders developed a national model for L&D services intending to unify practice across the sites (NHS England Liaison and Diversion Programme, 2014). The document specifies outcomes to be equally achieved nationwide and bases the funding of local services according to their performance. This formula was initially implemented in a few forerunner locations (called “wave one” sites) in England on April 2014 and has, ever since, been spread across all the sites.

In light of this, this book investigates how interagency collaboration between L&D and neighbouring services has been perceived by street-level L&D workers after the introduction of the new national model for liaison and diversion services. The focus is pointedly on the perspective of front-line workers to explore a different angle regarding models of interagency collaboration across criminal justice and welfare systems, as traditional research is prone to focus on service-level outcomes (Parker et al., 2018). In other words, by investigating the perspective of L&D front-line workers on the role of the service as a bridge between criminal justice and welfare services, this book is an attempt to develop a better understanding as to why interagency collaboration is still challenging to achieve at the street level despite the willingness demonstrated by organisations to work in tandem.

1.2 Theoretical background: interagency collaboration in offender rehabilitation

Interagency collaboration has been widely suggested as an appropriate means to address the challenges of vulnerable individuals coming in contact with the criminal justice system by the scientific literature (Department i Helse og Omsorg, 2013; Department of Health, 2010; World Health Organization, 2015). Notwithstanding, readers striving to make sense of the topic might find themselves dumbfounded by the wide range of interchangeable terms loosely adopted to explain the same phenomenon, that is, organisations working in tandem. This creates a conundrum for those attempting to differentiate interorganisational relationships from interagency collaboration. Terms such as interagency, multiagency and multisectoral, for instance, have been used to describe the relationship between different organisations (Statham, 2011; Williams, 2012). Moreover, terms such as cooperation, collaboration, coordination and integration have been adopted to describe the increasing levels of formalisation that such relationship embodies. Table 1.1 exemplifies the multiple levels of interagency working.

Table 1.1 Increasing levels of formalisation (Frost, 2005)

Label	Features
Cooperation	Organisations working together, but independently, to achieve consistent goals and provide complementary services
Collaboration	Organisations working jointly to address the shared goal of mitigating issues of duplication and/or gaps in service provision
Coordination	Organisations working together in a planned and systematic fashion to achieve agreed-upon and shared objectives
Integration	Different organisations merging to enhance service delivery

This streamlined taxonomy serves to illustrate why it is possible to observe in the literature a degree of interchangeability among the mentioned terms, that is, the transferable characteristics to be equally observed in every joint initiative: information sharing, common decision-making and coordinated interventions (Statham, 2011).

In England and Wales, public policy has followed these notions and promoted various collaboration models to be operationalised by agencies in both criminal justice and welfare systems (UK Crown, 2007; Department of Health, 2013; Department of Health and Concordat Signatories, 2014; Home Office UK, 2014; Home Office, 2015; Home Office Department of Health, 2000). The shared goal of these models has been to improve health and social care outcomes for individuals and lowering service costs, which should be facilitated by information sharing, common decision-making and coordinated interventions (Home Office UK, 2014).

In other areas, the idea is the same. Models of collaboration between criminal justice and welfare systems, which generally tend to focus on prearrest/pre-sentence interventions to avoid unnecessary incarcerations (Earl et al., 2015; Herrington et al., 2009; Winters et al., 2015), also prioritise information sharing and integrated care, usually organised between the police and services in both criminal justice and welfare systems. In the literature, there is a lot written, for example, about the crisis intervention team, an American-based model of collaboration that qualifies police officers to manage vulnerable individuals and to provide them with treatment instead of arrest (Boscarato et al., 2014; (Laign et al., 2009; Winters et al., 2015). However, other models of prearrest/pre-sentence collaboration can also be found in Australia (Herrington et al., 2009), Canada (Winters et al., 2015) and the USA (Clayfield et al., 2005).

In England and Wales, there are studies done on both information sharing within welfare services and between welfare agencies and organisations in other sectors (Jenkins, 2014). Besides, there is also research on interagency work in the context of offender rehabilitation (Atkinson et al., 2007; Oliver et al., 2010; Phillips et al., 2000; Williams, 2009) and even on models of collaboration involving the police and mental health care organisations (Parker et al., 2018). Among the reported (James et al., 2010; Earl et al., 2015; Great Britain Home Office, 2015), the Criminal Justice Liaison and Diversion was a prominent example of collaboration attempting to avoid unnecessary imprisonment. In contrast with the crisis intervention team in the USA, L&D relies on the introduction of specialists in police custody and court settings to provide on-site assistance to criminal justice professionals in their goal to identify and support vulnerable individuals (NHS England Liaison and Diversion Programme, 2014).

Another particularity observed upon a review of the literature was the proclivity to suggest interagency collaboration as a means to tackle the inaptitude of criminal justice front-line workers to independently address the needs of vulnerable people (Fenge et al., 2014). In this aspect, researchers emphasise that it would be expected from professionals in the police and court to be trained to recognise and handle vulnerable individuals, since they are often the first public services to interact with people, but studies have shown that vulnerabilities are often unrecognised or poorly handled by front-line professionals in criminal justice systems. The consequence is the imprisonment of people who should be otherwise treated in the community. Hence the understanding that the involvement of welfare workers is crucial to improve health and social care outcomes (Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, 2009).

Above all, however, it is possible to notice that most of the studies are constrained to a perfunctory analysis limited to reporting and/or describing the existent collaboration models. There seems to be no scope for a deeper analysis of these collaboration models, despite their current implementation within policing. Furthermore, a considerable part of the literature seems to prioritise organisational/service-level outcomes (e.g., arrest rates, diversion rates and referrals to other services) as the parameters for assessment of the eventual success of the models and end up belittling the relevance of the role played by workers at the street level (Parker et al., 2018). In this sense, this book focuses on the perspective of front-line workers in response to the mentioned gap in the literature and offers more than a simple description of collaboration models. It explores the challenges of interagency collaboration realised at the street level, and it does so by innovatively using activity theory to make sense of the state of affairs.

1.2.1 The role of front-line workers in interagency collaboration and policy implementation

The idea that criminal justice services ought to collaborate with other agencies in the welfare sector in response to the increasing number of vulnerable individuals in the prison population is widely championed across countries. However, the operationalisation of such an objective does not seem to be straightforward. Traditionally, top-down policies are enacted by central levels of government to foster collaboration between organisations across sectors. Governments tend to surmise that these injunctions will be naturally picked up by workers at the street level of public service organisations and make no contingency plans. The challenge, however, is that generally circumstances occurring at the street level hamper the uncomplicated dissemination of policy instructions (Hill & Huppe, 2014).

In this book, the concepts “front-line workers” or “street-level professionals, staff and employees” are adopted interchangeably and refer to street-level bureaucrats in the public service sectors (Lipsky, 2010). According to Lipsky, street-level bureaucrats are employees at the operational level of public service organisations who are in direct contact...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: understanding offender rehabilitation
• 2 Theoretical framework: activity theory and innovation in the public sector
• 3 Empirical evidence: a detailed case study of a successful alternative to imprisonment
• 4 Moving the state of the art forward: suggestions on co-created alternatives to imprisonment as a means to rehabilitate offenders in the community
• 5 Final remarks
• Index