Prisoners as citizens, big society and the rehabilitation revolution : truly revolutionary?

Given the government's commitment to localism, social inclusion and transfer of power from politicians to communities embodied by the Big Society agenda, we question whether these principles have been adequately translated within 'Payments by Results' and the supposed 'Rehabilitation Revolution' Green Paper. Of all the communities in our diverse society, offenders should specifically be included to encourage them to become more responsible citizens and, therefore, participate fully in creating a more responsible society? However, accessing offender voices in the prison setting can often prove challenging, as will be discussed. The authors have been involved in using qualitative methodologies in evaluations of predominately voluntary sector arts and media projects with prison communities since 2005. With these data, this article explores opportunities for encouraging citizenship status in the prison community. Prisoners engaging with these projects report significant impacts of their engagement, including increases in their feelings of self worth, hope and belief in their own personal capacity to alter the way they behave

Increasing the voluntary and community sector’s involvement in Integrated Offender Management(IOM)

As part of an undertaking to increase voluntary and community sector (VCS) involvement in service delivery, the Home Office set up an initiative to provide small grants to VCS organisations to work with IOM partnerships. The Home Office commissioned an evaluation of the initiative which aimed to: explore the strengths and weaknesses of the funding model; identify perceived barriers and facilitators to voluntary and community sector involvement in IOM; explore how the Home Office might best work with the VCS to encourage and support their capacity to work in partnership with statutory agencies; and identify any implications for the delivery of future similar projects

Process evaluation of Derbyshire Intensive Alternatives to Custody Pilot

The aim of this study was to critically assess the implementation and development of the Intensive Alternatives to Custody (IAC) pilot in Derbyshire. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) Penal Policy paper (May 2007) outlined the government’s intention to develop higher intensity community orders as an alternative to short-term custody. The IAC Order was subsequently developed and piloted, first in Derbyshire and then in six other areas.* The pilots were centrally funded until March 2011

ConnecTED at Distance? Transitioning Service Offers to include Telephone Befriending, 2021

This report considers the role of a specific form of delivery: telephone contact through the ConnecTED telephone befriending service TED established early in the pandemic, along with increased telephone use and befriending by TED’s commissioned delivery partners. It draws on 4 case studies of befriending (three through the ConnecTED service and one with Age UK Lindsey’s telephone befriending service), interviews with stakeholders, project case studies, good news stories and contract monitoring data. It looks at this form of delivery as both a ‘stand-alone’ service, and part of ‘blended delivery’. Doing so, the report reflects on one-to-one and group/conference calls

Prisons, their 'partners', and 'resettlement' : Study of four male prisons.

This jointly funded Hallam Studentship between Sheffield Hallam University and HM Prison Service Area Office: Yorkshire and Humberside was originally borne out of consultation undertaken to develop a Regional Resettlement Strategy (see Senior, 2002; 2003). Hence, significant moves had been made to improve awareness around, and the services involved in, prisoner 'resettlement'. This took place amidst re-emerging national interest in aspects of such provision and activities, and their effectiveness in reducing 're-offending' rates. Unlike the Regional Resettlement Strategy, this independent research examines the assumption that 'partnerships' enhance the delivery of 'resettlement' services within prisons. The thesis takes as its focus a period when prisons and their 'partners' were considering, and responding to, emerging central governmental proposals for a National Offender Management Service which resulted from the publication of Patrick Carter's (2003) 'Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime: A New Approach'. It makes problematic, and identifies, key features of 'partnerships' and shows disparate meanings are attached to the terms 'resettlement' and 'partnership'. These are influenced by a range of political, organisational, and individual factors.Recognising 'partnerships' have created, and continue to create, enhancements in the forms of more 'client-centred', 'holistic' services, exposing prison staff to broader skills/expertise and organisational values, it is acknowledged that these are often accompanied by increasingly complex relationships. These include those between staff within prisons, organisations, and service users' experiences of these. As a result, this thesis brings into question the suitability of existing theories in depicting the 'state' and the role(s) of 'partnerships'. The Action Research study utilises a basic text response survey, 'solicited' prisoner diaries, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participant observation to assess the opinions of participants from a range of backgrounds, be they staff members or service users from statutory, private, or Voluntary and Community Sector organisations. It juxtaposes action research with the adoption of a 'grounded theory' approach to data collection and analysis. The influences of self perceptions and personal attitudes are accounted for in both shaping, and responding to, the interactions and environments researched.Data revealed five key themes and each of these constitutes a chapter. These are, 'Perceptual Understanding', 'Data Management', 'Communication', 'Service Provision' and 'NOMS'. Within each of these themes lie apparently contrasting issues. However, the analysis reveals that prisons can experience aspects of these paradoxically. Two models of 'partnerships' are proposed by drawing on aspects of these paradoxes. These include a hypothetical 'worst case scenario' and one constructed from 'best practice'. Through appraising the disparate meanings given to 'resettlement' and 'partnerships' the thesis examines how various actors can make sense of 'partnerships', enhance practice, and sustain a 'holistic' vision of 'resettlement' provision. The 'best practice' model illustrates how this is more likely to be achieved, even during times of organisational change

Investigating the prisoner finance gap across four prisons in the North East

Within the underpinning context of reducing re-offending of released prisoners, the Prisoner Finance Gap (PFG) has been identified as an issue that is likely to present a significant barrier to the effective resettlement of offenders. The Hallam Centre for Community Justice at Sheffield Hallam University was therefore commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions to conduct an investigation into the PFG within four prisons in the North East: Her Majesty’s Prison HMP Durham, HMP Acklington, Her Majesty’s Young Offenders Institution HMYOI Castington and HMP Low Newton. The research was conducted between April 2009 and May 2010 and included a literature review, semi-structured interviews with strategic and policy stakeholders, staff from prison, probation, voluntary sector agencies and Jobcentre Plus, 51 prisoners and 21 ex-prisoners, and an online survey

Housing & Residence Life Impact Report: Fall 2017 to Spring 2018

Introduction: Living on campus is considered a high impact practice for student success. Student success is believed to emerge from “the amount of physical and psychological energy that the student devotes to the academic experience” (Astin, 1984), housing and residence life programming facilitates this type of devotion. However, creating this type of living experience requires administrators understand the complexities of how housing can affect specific student groups and their decision to either persist at or leave an institution. This report explores the impact of housing and residence life at Utah State University on students living on campus. It disaggregates results to identify which segments of students benefit most and it explores the impact by living community and dormitory style. METHODS: Students who lived on campus were compared to similar students who did not live on campus. They were compared using prediction-based propensity score matching. This technique matched students who lived on campus with non-users based on their persistence prediction and their propensity to participate. The difference between predicted and actual persistence rates were compared using difference-in-difference testing. FINDINGS: Students were 98% similar following matching. Those who lived on campus were significantly more likely to persist at USU than similar students who did not live on campus, (DID = 0.0119, p \u3c .001). The unstandardized effect size can be estimated through student impact. It is estimated that housing assisted in retaining 46 (CI: 21 – 71) students each year who were otherwise not expected to persist

A social licence for science: capturing the public or co-constructing research?

The “social licence to operate” has been invoked in science policy discussions including the 2007 Universal Ethical Code for scientists issued by the UK Government Office for Science. Drawing from sociological research on social licence and STS interventions in science policy, the authors explore the relevance of expectations of a social licence for scientific research and scientific contributions to public decision-making, and what might be involved in seeking to create one. The process of seeking a social licence is not the same as trying to create public or community acceptance for a project whose boundaries and aims have already been fully defined prior to engagement. Such attempts to “capture” the public might be successful from time to time but their legitimacy is open to question especially where their engagement with alternative research futures is “thin”. Contrasting a national dialogue on stem cells with the early history of research into bioenergy, we argue that social licence activities need to be open to a “thicker” engagement with the social. Co-constructing a licence suggests a reciprocal relationship between the social and the scientific with obligations for public and private institutions that shape and are shaped by science, rather than just science alone

Tracing chemical evolution over the extent of the Milky Way's Disk with APOGEE Red Clump Stars

We employ the first two years of data from the near-infrared, high-resolution SDSS-III/APOGEE spectroscopic survey to investigate the distribution of metallicity and alpha-element abundances of stars over a large part of the Milky Way disk. Using a sample of ~10,000 kinematically-unbiased red-clump stars with ~5% distance accuracy as tracers, the [alpha/Fe] vs. [Fe/H] distribution of this sample exhibits a bimodality in [alpha/Fe] at intermediate metallicities, -0.9<[Fe/H]<-0.2, but at higher metallicities ([Fe/H]=+0.2) the two sequences smoothly merge. We investigate the effects of the APOGEE selection function and volume filling fraction and find that these have little qualitative impact on the alpha-element abundance patterns. The described abundance pattern is found throughout the range 5<R<11 kpc and 0<|Z|<2 kpc across the Galaxy. The [alpha/Fe] trend of the high-alpha sequence is surprisingly constant throughout the Galaxy, with little variation from region to region (~10%). Using simple galactic chemical evolution models we derive an average star formation efficiency (SFE) in the high-alpha sequence of ~4.5E-10 1/yr, which is quite close to the nearly-constant value found in molecular-gas-dominated regions of nearby spirals. This result suggests that the early evolution of the Milky Way disk was characterized by stars that shared a similar star formation history and were formed in a well-mixed, turbulent, and molecular-dominated ISM with a gas consumption timescale (1/SFE) of ~2 Gyr. Finally, while the two alpha-element sequences in the inner Galaxy can be explained by a single chemical evolutionary track this cannot hold in the outer Galaxy, requiring instead a mix of two or more populations with distinct enrichment histories.Comment: 18 pages, 17 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap

CHEMICAL CARTOGRAPHY with APOGEE: METALLICITY DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS and the CHEMICAL STRUCTURE of the MILKY WAY DISK

Using a sample of 69,919 red giants from the SDSS-III/APOGEE Data Release 12, we measure the distribution of stars in the [/Fe] versus [Fe/H] plane and the metallicity distribution functions (MDFs) across an unprecedented volume of the Milky Way disk, with radius 3 < R < 15 kpc and height kpc. Stars in the inner disk (R < 5 kpc) lie along a single track in [/Fe] versus [Fe/H], starting with -enhanced, metal-poor stars and ending at [/Fe] ∼ 0 and [Fe/H] ∼ +0.4. At larger radii we find two distinct sequences in [/Fe] versus [Fe/H] space, with a roughly solar- sequence that spans a decade in metallicity and a high- sequence that merges with the low- sequence at super-solar [Fe/H]. The location of the high- sequence is nearly constant across the disk