Piloting different approaches to personalised offender management in the English criminal justice system

© 2018 University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’. Various approaches to personalisation are well-established in the UK social care sector and are now starting to ‘travel’ to other sectors. In this paper we report findings from an evaluation of a pilot to test elements of personalisation in the management of offenders in probation services within the English criminal justice system. Following a review of evidence from social care, three different approaches to personalised-practice were developed and tested on a small-scale in three separate sites. The evaluation finds that all three approaches were implemented reasonably successfully, but challenges were identified including that personalised approaches are more time-consuming, that staff need support to exercise professional discretion and that balancing greater choice with managing criminogenic risk requires new ways of conceptualising the relationship between case manager and service user. Overall, ‘deeper’ approaches to personalisation, such as co-production, will take time to emerge. This paper makes two important contributions to the debate on personalisation in public services. First, it addresses the question of how transferable the concept of personalisation is from the social care sector to other sectors in the UK, in this case the criminal justice system. Secondly, it outlines a methodology for developing and evaluating personalisation pilots, prior to a wider roll-out

Operationalising desistance through personalisation

This article reports on the early stages of a project to develop a model of offender rehabilitation that operationalises the concept of desistance. The concept of desistance is influential but operationalising it remains a challenge. The aim of this article is to assess whether personalisation of offender rehabilitation has potential as a mechanism for operationalising the concept of desistance. We identify learning from the design and implementation of personalisation in social care, but challenges include the roll out of personal budgets, developing a local market to support consumer choice and the limited evidence base on the effectiveness of personalisation. We specify a project to pilot personalisation in the English probation sector that tests concepts relating both to the design and commissioning of personalised services, including community capacity building to support the supply of personalised services at the local or even micro level. A project evaluation design is also outlined