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

Market harms and market benefits

Our actions in the marketplace often harm others. For instance, buying and consuming petroleum contributes to climate change and thereby does harm. But there is another kind of harm we do in almost every market interaction: market harms. These are harms inflicted via changes to the goods and/or prices available to the victim in that market. (Similarly, market benefits are those conferred in the same way.) Such harms and benefits may seem morally unimportant, as Judith Jarvis Thomson and Ronald Dworkin have argued. But, when those harms or benefits are concentrated on the global poor, they can have considerable impacts on wellbeing. For instance, in 2007-2008, commodity traders invested heavily in wheat and other staple foods, caused a dramatic price rise, and thereby pushed 40 million people into hunger. In such cases, intuition suggests that the traders act wrongly. In this paper, I argue that market harms and benefits are morally equivalent to harms and benefits imposed through other means (contra Thomson and Dworkin). I also demonstrate that, in practice, these harms and benefits are often great in magnitude. For many common products, buying that product results in a considerable financial loss for one group and a considerable gain by another. For instance, for every $10 we spend on wheat, we cause the global poor to lose between$5 and $67 (in expectation) and the global rich to gain the same amount. In light of these effects, I argue that we have moral duties to adopt certain consumption habits

In Defense of Fanaticism

Which is better: a guarantee of a modest amount of moral value, or a tiny probability of arbitrarily large value? To prefer the latter seems fanatical. But, as I argue, avoiding such fanaticism brings severe problems. To do so, we must decline intuitively attractive trade-offs; rank structurally identical pairs of lotteries inconsistently, or else admit absurd sensitivity to tiny probability differences; have rankings depend on remote, unaffected events ; and often neglect to rank lotteries as we already know we would if we learned more. Compared to these implications, fanaticism is highly plausible

Egyptology and Fanaticism

Various decision theories share a troubling implication. They imply that, for any finite amount of value, it would be better to wager it all for a vanishingly small probability of some greater value. Counterintuitive as it might be, this fanaticism has seemingly compelling independent arguments in its favour. In this paper, I consider perhaps the most prima facie compelling such argument: an Egyptology argument (an analogue of the Egyptology argument from population ethics). I show that, despite recent objections from Russell (2023) and Goodsell (2021), the argument’s premises can be justified and defended, and the argument itself remains compelling

Can an evidentialist be risk-averse?

Two key questions of normative decision theory are: 1) whether the probabilities relevant to decision theory are evidential or causal; and 2) whether agents should be risk-neutral, and so maximise the expected value of the outcome, or instead risk-averse (or otherwise sensitive to risk). These questions are typically thought to be independent---that our answer to one bears little on our answer to the other. But there is a surprising argument that they are not. In this paper, I show that evidential decision theory implies risk neutrality, at least in moral decision-making and at least on plausible empirical assumptions. Take any risk-aversion-accommodating decision theory, apply it using the probabilities prescribed by evidential decision theory, and every verdict of moral betterness you reach will match those of expected value theory

Infinite aggregation and risk

For aggregative theories of moral value, it is a challenge to rank worlds that each contain infinitely many valuable events. And, although there are several existing proposals for doing so, few provide a cardinal measure of each world's value. This raises the even greater challenge of ranking lotteries over such worlds—without a cardinal value for each world, we cannot apply expected value theory. How then can we compare such lotteries? To date, we have just one method for doing so (proposed separately by Arntzenius, Bostrom, and Meacham), which is to compare the prospects for value at each individual location, and to then represent and compare lotteries by their expected values at each of those locations. But, as I show here, this approach violates several key principles of decision theory and generates some implausible verdicts. I propose an alternative—one which delivers plausible rankings of lotteries, which is implied by a plausible collection of axioms, and which can be applied alongside almost any ranking of infinite worlds

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