Sentencing Women in the Transformed Probation Landscape

In 2013 the government promised that new reforms would ‘deliver better outcomes for women offenders’ (Ministry of Justice, 2013b, p.16). This was a bold statement and a laudable ambition. However, this strategy – called and aimed at Transforming Rehabilitation - will only be successful if sentencers are aware of (and support) the options that new providers put in place to achieve its goals. This chapter considers current levels of awareness of the new reforms among magistrates. Highlighting reservations about the suitability of community provision, and a lack of awareness about developments under Transforming Rehabilitation, it emphasises the lack of information that magistrates receive on this issue. Supplementing the findings of a recent research project conducted with 168 magistrates (see Birkett, 2016), this chapter provides a post-Transforming Rehabilitation ‘update’, drawing on 24 semi-structured interviews and a survey of 86 magistrates sitting across England and Wales. As such, it places particular focus on developments that followed the implementation of the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014, the legislative measures underpinning the government’s flagship Transforming Rehabilitation policy agenda

Exploring the dynamics of compliance with community penalties

In this paper, we examine how compliance with community penalties has been theorized hitherto and seek to develop a new dynamic model of compliance with community penalties. This new model is developed by exploring some of the interfaces between existing criminological and socio-legal work on compliance. The first part of the paper examines the possible definitions and dimensions of compliance with community supervision. Secondly, we examine existing work on explanations of compliance with community penalties, supplementing this by drawing on recent socio-legal scholarship on private individuals’ compliance with tax regimes. In the third part of the paper, we propose a dynamic model of compliance, based on the integration of these two related analyses. Finally, we consider some of the implications of our model for policy and practice concerning community penalties, suggesting the need to move beyond approaches which, we argue, suffer from compliance myopia; that is, a short-sighted and narrowly focused view of the issues

The treatment of male and female defendants in the magistrates' court

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How not to assess probation performance: Constructing local reconviction rates

Much of the responsibility for securing reductions in offending and reoffending is being devolved to local statutory services. It follows that robust and timely local measures for assessing reoffending must be created. To this end, for the last three years the National Offender Management Service has produced quarterly reconviction reports for individual probation areas based on `snapshots' (cross-sectional samples) of the supervision caseload. An independent examination of the data for the East Midlands Region reveals that the way cases have been selected and followed-up departs from the conventions employed in all previous (`longitudinal') reconviction studies in England and Wales. In particular, the `crosssectional' or snapshot approach led to the `at risk' period varying from one offender to another; and those on longer sentences stood a much greater than usual chance of appearing in several samples over time. This, together with other problems associated with not following a conventional longitudinal approach, leads to the conclusion that it would be unwise to use the quarterly figures produced thus far to draw conclusions about probation areas' performance

Building on sand: Why expanding the prison estate is not the way to 'secure the future'

Building on sand: Why expanding the prison estate is not the way to 'secure the future

Government policy on women offenders: Labour's legacy and the Coalition's challenge

After 13 years of a majority Labour government, a minority Conservative government was elected in the UK in May 2010. Within weeks, the Conservatives had created a Coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. In developing its policies on a range of social issues, the new administration will need to take account of what its immediate predecessor achieved and the lessons that Labour failed to take from its forerunners. In relation to women offenders, such an analysis shows that, while towards the end of its third and last term, Labour began to deal more effectively with the social exclusion needs of women offenders, through a range of community-based initiatives, its approach to diverting women towards such assistance and away from custody was, at best, halfhearted. The result is that more women than ever are being remanded and sentenced to custody. This came as a surprise only to those who had not noticed that this approach had also failed in the 1980s and 1990s. The Coalition might like to take note

Investigating the impact of custody on reoffending using propensity score matching

Although a range of opinions about the impact of incarceration on later offending have been articulated, there have been very few studies of sufficient methodological quality to allow the effect to be examined empirically. Drawing on a sample of 5,500 male offenders from 1 of 10 regions in the United Kingdom, propensity score matching was used to balance the preexisting differences between two groups of offenders: those who had been incarcerated for their index offense and those who had received community orders involving supervision. Both methods of balancing the group differences (matching/stratification) suggested that 1 year after release, offenders who had been incarcerated were significantly more likely to have committed another (proven) offense. These offenders also tended to commit more offenses and started reoffending earlier than those supervised in the community. Moreover, offenders who had originally been incarcerated were much more likely to be reincarcerated. In line with other emerging evidence, it was concluded that incarceration tends to slightly increase rather than decrease the chances of future offending. Limitations of the research are considered and directions for future research are explored

Helping offenders into employment: How far is voluntary sector expertise valued in a contracting-out environment?

The Probation Service has, for some years, worked with external service providers in partnership. One strand of this work has involved collaboration with voluntary sector organizations in helping offenders into education training and employment (ETE). Underlying this work is a slim but important evidence base, which shows that offending diminishes when offenders gain employment, and that being in work may trigger longer term desistance. Drawing on an evaluation of a government-sponsored `Employment Pathfinder' and on other relevant research, the article argues that recent governmental pressure to contract out services, and to adhere to certain `what works in reducing re-offending' principles, has given rise to tension within this collaboration attributable to conflicting ideology and practice. Specifically, this has created a context in which there is limited scope to adopt practices which are informed by knowledge about `what works' in getting people into employment. A less prescriptive approach from the centre about what should be delivered, and how, would restore effective teamwork and might also open up probation practice to empirical and theoretical insights into the desistance process. Wider implications of these findings for the future involvement of organizations with expertise in the provision of services for offenders are discussed