Developments in Social Work with Offenders

Peter Raynor, Gill McIvor

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781843105381
• eBook ISBN: 9781846426827
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Social Sciences

Developments in Social Work with Offenders explains the organisational and legislative changes that have occurred in social work and probation across the UK in the past 10 years, in the context of the accumulating body of knowledge about what constitutes effective practice in the assessment, supervision and management of offenders in the community.

Three different aspects of working with offenders are covered: developments in policy; assessment, supervision and intervention; and issues and needs. Contributions from experts in the field discuss issues such as community `punishment', case management, accreditation and resettlement. The continuing concern with promoting evidence-based solutions to crime is addressed, and this book will assist professionals working with offenders with making focused interventions supported by research.

This book will be essential reading for students of social work and probation and criminology, probation officers and social workers.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction and Overview

Gill McIvor and Peter Raynor

Introduction

A previous volume in the Research Highlights Series entitled Working with Offenders was published over ten years ago (McIvor 1996). Since then there have been major organisational changes in probation and social work across the UK, including the creation in England and Wales of a National Probation Directorate, the National Offender Management Service and the Youth Justice Board. In Scotland major organisational changes have included local government reorganisation, the creation of local authority criminal justice partnerships and, more recently, the establishment of Community Justice Authorities. At the same time, there has been an unprecedented amount of legislative change that has resulted in the introduction of new court disposals, changes in sentencing powers and an increased focus upon ‘seamless sentencing’ and its implications for offender rehabilitation and resettlement. These developments need also to be set against an accumulating body of knowledge about what constitutes effective practice in the assessment, supervision and management of offenders in the community. Increasingly this knowledge base is shaping the focus and content of social work with offenders against an ever-changing organisational, legislative and policy background and against increasing levels of government expenditure aimed at reducing re-offending and enhancing community safety.

The landscape in which social workers and probation officers practise (both in the UK and internationally) is therefore almost unrecognisable in comparison with a decade ago. This volume brings together the contributions of authoritative commentators in this field to chart these changes and to discuss how they have impinged upon social work with offenders, providing a key contemporary synthesis and analysis of recent legislation, policy and research.

Developments in policy

The first section of this book focuses upon developments in policy and practice in social work with young and adult offenders in different parts of the UK. The primary concern of the book is with social work services to adult offenders (that is, those who would be the responsibility of the probation services in England and Wales, criminal justice social work services in Scotland or the Probation Board for Northern Ireland). However, it is instructive also to examine how juvenile justice policy has evolved over recent years, particularly in the light of devolution and other significant constitutional or political changes across the UK (not least of which has been the creation of a Labour Government in 1997) and pre-existing differences in philosophy and practice in its constituent jurisdictions. For example, what difference has a Labour Government made to the treatment of young people who commit offences in England and Wales? Has the devolution of legislative and policy-making powers to a Scottish Parliament amplified or attenuated within-UK differences in juvenile and criminal justice policy? And how have criminal justice policies in Ireland developed following in the aftermath of civil conflict and cessation of paramilitary violence? These and other issues are addressed in the following five chapters of the volume, beginning with Barry Goldson’s critical analysis of New Labour’s youth justice policies in Chapter 2. In this chapter Goldson argues that the unprecedented level of legislative and policy reform in youth justice in England and Wales has been directed principally at supporting the government’s rhetoric of being ‘tough on crime’ (with little regard to the ‘causes’). This has resulted in organisational changes, including the establishment of Youth Offending Teams accountable at the national level to the Home Office and Youth Justice Board and therefore institutionally separated from child welfare services; new modes of risk classification with net-widening tendencies; the intensification of responses to minor offending and the expansion of custodial sentencing of children and young people (with particularly notable increases in the use of detention with girls).

Scotland has its own separate judicial system and a distinctive approach to dealing with children and young people (in the main under 16 years of age) who offend. The Children’s Hearings, introduced in 1971 following the publication of the Kilbrandon Report, enable young people who offend and those who require care and protection to be dealt with within a single, welfare-oriented system characterised by lay decision-making. However, as Bill Whyte demonstrates in Chapter 3, there have been significant developments in youth justice policy in recent years, aimed primarily at assuaging criticism that the system was unable to deal effectively with persistent young offenders (though it had not been adequately resourced to do so) and strengthening its capacity to respond more quickly and effectively to youth crime. Whyte argues that while some developments can be viewed as progressive and are to be welcomed (such as the introduction of specialist youth justice managers and practitioners in local authority children’s services) other measures (such as the introduction of anti-social behaviour orders and youth courts for 16 and 17-year-olds) may serve to further criminalise young people for behaviour that might be more appropriately dealt with within an expanded (in terms of age) and well-resourced Children’s Hearings System. Although a policy commitment to the principles of Kilbrandon has not been totally abandoned, the broad thrust of youth justice policy in Scotland has been in a punitive direction and this, coupled with the range of initiatives and measures that have been introduced, is indicative of what Whyte describes as a ‘new and shared politicisation of youth justice’ that is lessening differences in policy and practice across the UK.

Sam Lewis in Chapter 4 describes the rather different trajectory of policy and practice for adult offenders in England and Wales. (Although most public services are devolved to the Welsh Assembly Government, criminal justice is not, and Wales is obliged to implement Home Office policies.) She shows how social work approaches, albeit under other and more politically acceptable names, initially played a part in New Labour’s ‘evidence-based’ approach, but have gradually been pushed into the background by an increasing focus on populist policy initiatives, punitive legislation and contestability. In particular, some serious attempts were made to correct the historical neglect of short-sentence prisoners, a risky and needy group for which virtually no resettlement provision was being made until the ‘Pathfinder’ projects of 1999–2003. These promising glimpses of ‘joined-up’ thinking were reflected in aspects of the 2003 Criminal Justice Act and in Patrick Carter’s Correctional Services Review, but at the time of writing have been swamped by a rather depressing surge of populist initiatives: more prison places, a postponement of arrangements for the resettlement of short-sentence prisoners, and a preoccupation with breaking up the Probation Service to provide opportunities for the private and voluntary sectors to take over its work.

Significant and far-reaching organisational change has also featured prominently in Scotland over the last ten years. This has included local government reorganisation in 1996, followed by the creation of administrative groupings of local authorities to deliver criminal justice social work services and, most recently, the introduction of Community Justice Authorities (CJAs) with responsibility for the setting the strategic direction, resourcing and monitoring of services within their local area. These and other Scottish developments, including the introduction of a National Advisory Body on Offender Management and the establishment of a Risk Management Authority (to provide national guidance on the effective assessment and management of risk among serious violent and sexual offenders), are discussed by Gill McIvor and Fergus McNeill in Chapter 5. As in England and Wales, more recent Scottish developments (including the CJAs) are seeking to better align practices in prisons and in the community. While agreeing that this is a laudable aim, McIvor and McNeill are concerned by the absence of an explicit commitment to custodial reductionism in recent policy documents. They are also, however, heartened by sustained policy reference to the importance of enhancing offenders’ social inclusion which at least implicitly signifies a continued role for social work in the supervision of offenders in Scotland.

Partly as a result of its unique political circumstances (but also due to other distinctive characteristics such as a relatively low crime rate), certain aspects of probation practice in Northern Ireland have historically differed from other parts of the UK. As Gadd (1996) observed, for example, probation officers in Northern Ireland did not supervise parolees and, more generally, had no statutory role in the supervision and assessment of those involved in politically motivated crimes. An important feature of policy and practice has been the extensive involvement of partnerships with community groups in the provision of services to offenders and their families. In Chapter 6, Tim Chapman and David O’Mahony indicate how post-conflict legislation has, as in other parts of the UK (and, indeed, more widely), placed a particular emphasis upon public protection and how the Probation Board for Northern Ireland’s (PBNI) relationship with communities has weakened while its relationship with and accountability to government has been strengthened. (This has also been a marked feature of probation reorganisations in England and Wales.) With respect to youth justice, which is administered by the PBNI, significant developments, especially since the easing of the troubles, have included the replacement of indeterminate residential training school orders with short determinate juvenile justice centre orders, the expansion of community supervision of juvenile offenders and creation of a Youth Justice Agency in 2003. The most fundamental changes have, however, arguably been brought about by the legislated introduction (via a newly established Youth Conference Service) of restorative justice as the primary method for dealing with young people in the criminal justice system.

Alongside major changes in the organisational arrangements for the supervision of offenders in different parts of the UK, the accreditation of probation programmes and programme providers represents a further mechanism for promoting greater uniformity of practice with increasingly centralised control and as such can be conceived to be a further form of governance of social work practice. In Chapter 7 Susan Rex and Peter Raynor offer an appraisal of accreditation’s positive contribution and its limitations. Susan Rex was part of the research team which carried out the pioneering evaluation of the Correctional Services Accreditation Panel in England and Wales for the Home Office, and Peter Raynor has been a member of accreditation panels both in England and Wales and Scotland. Again there have been contrasts in approach between these two jurisdictions, reflecting the different ways in which the shift towards evidence-based practice has been handled. The chapter aims to illustrate both the positive opportunities offered by accreditation processes and the difficulties which arise when it is combined with a top-down managerialist approach to practice development.

Assessment, Supervision and Intervention

Government concern with promoting evidence-based solutions to crime is reflected in its promotion of focused interventions (notably prison-and probation-based programmes) that are supported by research, in the development and evaluation of pathfinder initiatives and in the accreditation of services and interventions. The infrastructure and resources that are deemed necessary to support policy and practice developments such as these are being created through the increasing replacement of generic models of service delivery by more specialised and differentiated arrangements which support programme delivery. Traditional methods of supervision are being superseded by case management and service brokerage (e.g. Partridge 2004) while the range of community penalties has expanded, the aims of some disposals (for example, community service) have changed and increasing attention is being paid to issues such as compliance and attrition (e.g. Hedderman 2003; Kemshall and Canton 2002).

The second section of the book is concerned essentially with aspects of contemporary social work/probation practice. In this regard, one notable development in recent years has been the use of structured methods of assessment to identify the risks (of re-offending and of harm) posed by offenders and their needs, with the latter providing the focus for targeted interventions. In Chapter 8 Jim Bonta and Stephen Wormith, both from Canada, describe the approaches to risk and need assessment which have informed the development of the Level of Service Inventory (LSI) and its variants, which are the most wisely used and fully evaluated instruments for helping practitioners to carry out risk/need assessments as a regular part of their work. They outline an approach to integrated assessment and case management which should help practitioners to concentrate on those aspects of an offender’s difficulties which contribute most to the risk of getting into trouble again. Recent research (Raynor 2007; Raynor et al. 2000) shows how repeated assessment can be used to measure changes in needs and risks, so that evidence of positive or negative responses to supervision can be gathered without necessarily waiting for a reconviction follow-up, thus putting a powerful evaluation tool into the hands of practitioners themselves.

The use of structured and targeted methods of intervention (usually involving cognitive behavioural methods and focusing upon changing offenders’ attitudes and behaviour) has occupied an increasingly prominent position within the repertoire of techniques available to probation officers in their supervision of offenders. In addition to general programmes which aim to provide offenders with insight into their offending and to equip them with the skills to avoid engaging in similar behaviour in the future or programmes which address issues linked to offending (such as anger management) more specialised programmes have also been developed to addresses particular types of offending, such as domestic violence, drink driving and sexual offending. In Chapter 9, James McGuire provides a comprehensive overview of programmes that are being used by probation services across England and Wales (and, in some cases also in Scotland) and a summary of more recent programme evaluations, which have tended to produce somewhat mixed results. In acknowledging the criticisms that have been advanced regarding the use of offending behaviour programmes he nonetheless argues for interventions of this type as a means of reducing re-offending and promoting social inclusion, which would clearly be compatible with social work values and aims.

The widespread use of structured programmes in probation has resulted in revised arrangements for the supervision of offenders in the community. Whereas traditionally probation officers or social workers would assume responsibility for both supervising and enforcing orders and undertaking interventions aimed at reducing the likelihood of re-offending, these tasks have become increasingly differentiated (Robinson 2005) with a greater emphasis upon the role of case management in facilitating offenders’ access to programmes and services and linking together diverse strands of an order. In Chapter 10 Frank Porporino and Elizabeth Fabiano, both internationally known as programme designers and pioneers of the movement towards evidence-based practice, discuss what motivates offenders to become active collaborators in the attempt to change their lives for the better. They outline an approach to the process and skills of case management which focuses particularly on motivation – arguably a neglected feature in the management of probation’s offending behaviour programmes in England and Wales, which have suffered from damagingly high level...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Other Books in the Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction and Overview
• Part One Developments in Policy
• Part Two Assessment, Supervision and Intervention
• Part Three Issues and Needs
• The Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index