Reducing Reoffending Research Project: Action Learning Set 4

The agenda for Action Learning Set 4 was ambitious, forward-facing, and embedded in sharing and thinking about working practice. It started with an observation of the LifeChange Programme and ended with members of the Dutch delegation meeting with local Police and Security officials discussing approaches to tackling football violence and religious extremism, and in-between there was much detailed reflection on progress. With the project closer to its conclusion now than its commencement, as the day developed the emphasis really shifted towards the project outcomes, measures of impact, and the roles of partners in playing their part(s) in achieving these end goal

Reducing Reoffending Research Project: Action Learning Set 3

The ambition of ALS1 and ALS2 had been to showcase the integrated criminal justice practice operating in The Hague (Netherlands) and Knowsley (Merseyside, UK) respectively. With ALS3 the emphasis shifted to explore the capacity to import some of the examples of good/best practice - taken from Dutch and UK partners - into the Italian context. The Life Change Programme (LCP), developed and currently delivered by MALS Merseyside, has been previously identified as mode of working that can be introduced into the work the European Research Institute currently undertakes. However, a key objective of ALS3 was to raise collective awareness of the operation of the criminal justice system in Italy more generally so that delegates can make more realistic assessments of the potential for integrating different and innovative ways of working to reducing reoffending

Reducing Reoffending Research Project: Action Learning Set 5

The penultimate Action Learning Set (ALS) saw a return to The Hague and a city where the first gathering of partners was staged. With the venues of the 5th and 6th ALSs switched to allow the Life Change Programme in Italy the opportunity to fully bed itself in and recruit more participants the emphasis here was about allowing partners to delve deeper into the workings of the Safety House structure(s) in The Hague and provide opportunities for shared learning. With this objective in mind the emphasis was on showcasing Safety House projects that seek to reduce reoffending behaviour

European Reoffending Research Project: Action Learning Set 2

The objectives of the Knowsley based ALS 2 were threefold; firstly, for partners to reflect on emergent questions form the previous ALS; secondly, for hosts Knowsley to showcase the work of local criminal justice partners; and, thirdly to focus specifically on the (potential and real) use of mentoring and of the work of MALS (Mentoring Achieve Learn Support) Merseyside in particular. As a consequence the morning was taken up by presentations from representatives of each international partner - ensuring delegates were able to get a clearer sense of the respective offending profiles of the three areas - whilst a series of detailed insights from representatives from Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council, Merseyside Police, and Merseyside Probation Trust identified some of the partnership and innovative work to tackle re-offending being conducted in the Knowsley area. Electronic copies of these presentations are available and paper copies were produced for those in attendance, for this reason the commentary provided in this report (section 2) will summarise their key themes and identify the issues raised from the floor. The third objective of the ALS – to explore the potential of mentoring schemes – shaped the afternoon session(s) and emerged as the key theme to define the day’s learning/discussion. A presentation by the MALS team outlining their organisation’s origins, aims, and ambition(s) bolstered by drawing upon case studies to highlight tangible challenges in the delivery of mentoring provision gave the ALS real focus. In summarising the MALS presentation and drawing together the different strands of the wide ranging and stimulating questions/discussions that followed, section 3 of the report provides delegates with a snapshot of working practice to explore, reflect upon, and engage with. The presentation gave a real momentum to the discussion groups that followed that had as their aims the potential for exporting the MALS model to International partners and of then exploring the dilemmas and challenges raised by using such innovative interventions. Section 4 analyses and orders the emergent themes from these discussions and Section 5 teases out the very explicit questions for partners to confront. By way of conclusion section 6 of the report maps out some of the themes that have emerged from the first two ALSs that our next ALS will need to engage with

Propagating the Haze? Community and professional perceptions of cannabis cultivation and the impacts of prohibition

Recent decades have seen substantial changes in the UK cannabis landscape, including increased domestic production, the ascendancy of stronger strains (namely ‘skunk’) and the drug’s re-reclassification under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. Resultantly, cannabis retains significance in the consciousness, priorities and policy agendas of communities, drug services and criminal justice agencies. This paper presents an empirical study, which examined both perceptions and impacts of cannabis cultivation and its control within a North-West English borough. Drawing on qualitative research with professionals, practitioners, resident groups, cannabis users, cannabis users’ families and cannabis cultivators themselves, the findings suggest that cannabis cultivation was not a uniformly familiar concept to respondents, who had limited knowledge and experience of its production. Across all participant groups, the transmission of accurate information was lacking, with individuals instead drawing on the reductionist drug discourse (Taylor, 2016) to fill knowledge deficits. Consequently, some participants conflated cannabis cultivation with wider prohibitionist constructions of drug markets, resulting in the diffusion of misinformation and an amplification of anxieties. In contrast, other participants construed cultivation as making economic sense during austerity, justifying such tolerance through inverse adherence to the same narrow socio-cultural construction of drugs i.e. that cultivation carried comparatively less harms than real drug markets. Enforcement mechanisms also drew on generic prohibitionist conceptions, assuming cultivators to be unconstrained, autonomous actors in need of punishment; a belief which lacked nuanced understanding of the local terrain where vulnerable individuals cultivating under duress played a key role in the supply chain. The paper concludes with a call for the provision of accessible information/education; the need to challenge and reconceptualise the assumed autonomy and resultant punity directed at all cultivators; and a subsequent need to reassess established forms of legal (and increasingly social) enforcement

European Reducing Reoffending Project: Action Learning Set 6

The final Action Learning Set (ALS) took place in Turin and allowed the Life Change Programme in Italy to showcase its progress to date, particularly in terms of its partnership working and efforts to create sustainable employment opportunities for ex-offenders within a difficult economic environment. This challenging context is made tougher by societal reluctance to give ex-offenders a second chance in the form of job opportunities for example

European Reoffending Research Project: Action Learning Set 1

The overarching aim of this project is to evaluate processes and procedures implemented to reduce reoffending rates through coordinated targeting of resources at offenders with the greatest criminogenic needs. Within this remit, the role of the Action Learning Sets is to increase mutual understanding and cooperation between the trans-national partners (Knowsley MBC, Merseyside Police, Municipality of the Hague NL, European Research Institute of Turino, Italy and MALS Merseyside) by testing different methods for reducing reoffending and reflecting on lessons learned. This first Action Learning Set was crucial to understanding the baselines, or starting points, of the partners in the European Reoffending Research Project. The research team explained the project methodology and each partner then provided an overview of their current contexts and provisions. These are summarised below

Working Together to Reduce Reoffending: Reducing Reoffending Project 2012-2015

The stated principal aim of the ‘Reducing Reoffending in the EU’ project since its inception has been To prevent crime by reducing reoffending rates through coordinated targeting of resources at those offenders whose criminogenic needs require additional intervention and support. The two objectives partners have been working towards to delivering during the 3-year life cycle of the project are: • To utilise a multi-agency approach to improve offenders self-worth, self-motivation, desire to change and willingness to engage, and increase their opportunities to receive education, training and employment opportunities. • To develop the Life Change programme with the voluntary sector, to assist with mentoring, re-integration through access to the 7 pathways out of reoffending, and improving public confidence that reoffending rates are reducing. The structure of the project was designed to prevent crime and reduce reoffending across Europe by developing a transnational partnership with Knowsley MBC, The Hague and the ERI. At its core has been the development and delivery of the innovative Life Change Programme (LCP), a programme developed by using best practice and drawing on evidence of effectiveness (see accompanying training guide for more detail on course content). The structured programme of work that ran through the project placed the emphasis on Knowsley based partners to design and pilot the LCP in Year 1 and to develop the training guidance (based on the pilot) that would ensure the course had a legacy of intervention work. Finally the Italian partners at the ERI would then deliver a pilot of the LCP in year 2 to test the validity of the programme and to explore the capacity for policy transfer. Throughout the lifecycle of the project the Action Learning Sets provided a forum for the methodology and tools for strategically fighting crime to be shared between partners to evaluate best practice in crime prevention. The role of the Dutch partners from The Hague was to contribute their experiences of operating the Safety House (as a model of good practice) to help share and develop learning throughout the whole of the project. What made the original project ambitions innovative was: • Use of offender rehabilitation as the primary purpose of crime prevention. • An emphasis on offender rehabilitation within the community post-release. • A multi-agency, multi-disciplinary approach covering various types of offender and crime. • A structure of pilot, best-practice exchange, peer review, and production of a portable model of working

Cannabis Use in an English Community: Acceptance, Anxieties and the Liminality of Drug Prohibition

Cannabis occupies an ambiguous social, cultural, economic and legal position, meaning that the way communities construct, interact with and interpret drug markets is a complicated and uncertain process. This article seeks to explain these ambiguities by investigating the place of cannabis use in a UK borough, drawing on qualitative empirical data collated from a sample (n=68) of practitioners, local residents, cannabis users and their families. In doing so, the article employs the concept of liminality (whereby individuals and spaces occupy a position at both ends of a threshold) to explore how community behaviours and norms relate to issues of space, harm and drug policy. The article contextualises the position of cannabis use within the fieldwork site, exploring a series of competing contradictions that divided participants between the rhetoric and reality of drug prohibition. Drug prohibition suggests cannabis use to be dangerous, which prompted concern. However, the lived reality of prohibition for residents sat in stark juxtaposition: the drug was used commonly and publicly; was effectively decriminalised; and its use (reluctantly) accommodated. This malaise placed residents within what is described here as the liminality of drug prohibition, in which notions of the licit and illicit became blurred and whereby the illegality of cannabis augmented anxieties yet simultaneously proved a barrier to addressing them. In conclusion, the current study provides further evidence of prohibitionist drug policy proliferating rather than mitigating drug related harms