Rising prison numbers and high rates of re-offending illustrate the need for criminal justice reform. In the social care sector, the ‘personalisation revolution’ has resulted in the near eradication of long-term, institutional care for the majority of people with disabilities and many frail older people, increasing satisfaction. This paper examines what this has entailed and considers the case for introducing personalisation in the criminal justice system. It concludes that criminal justice reformers can learn from the social care experience and suggests how personalisation might fit within the current criminal justice reform agenda. However, introducing personalisation will pose significant challenges, perhaps the biggest being the need to change criminal justice culture.
words max)Various approaches to personalisation are well-established in the UK social care sector and are now starting to 'travel' to othe 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 coproduction 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 wider rollout. Person-centred Practice:Person-centred practices were adopted by selected and trained staff and managers within a single team managing a mixed caseload. A strong emphasis was placed on staff and service users co-producing a rehabilitation plan and professional discretion to tailor supervision to the holistic needs of the service user. The pilot explored the effect of person-centred practice on the process of co-production of rehabilitation plans for service users as well as on staff in the CRC. Person-centred Practice with access to an Enabling Fund:In addition to the model of personcentred practice implemented in the first pilot, this pilot also included an enabling fund, a form of personal budget. The enabling fund was designed to support rehabilitative goals that could not be progressed through existing services such as accredited or non-accredited programmes, welfare payments or referrals to other agencies. The pilot explored the effect of person-centred practice and access to a form of personal budget on the process of co-production for staff and service users.
This paper reports on the early stages of a project to develop a model of offender rehabilitation that operationalizes the concept of desistance. The concept of desistance is influential but operationalising it remains a challenge. The aim of this paper is to assess whether personalisation of offender rehabilitation has potential as a mechanism for operationalizing the concept of desistance. We identify learning from the design and implementation of personalisation in social care, but challenges including 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.
When the Coalition government's 'rehabilitation revolution' was first articulated, innovation was an important theme, encompassing innovation by frontline staff, by organizations working within a mixed economy and even social entrepreneurs. Under 'Transforming Rehabilitation' innovation remained a stated aim of criminal justice reform, but the scope of innovation envisaged seemed to narrow. This paper describes the early stages of a socially innovative project to develop and implement a personalised approach to offender rehabilitation in the context of TR. It draws on the concept of 'desistance'. This in turn leads to consideration of community capacity building and market development that draws on experience from the social care sector. A number of early challenges and plans to overcome them are discussed. Challenges include the inherent uncertainty of the innovation process; the importance of collaborating with a wide range of stakeholders including service users and local community organisations; innovating during a period of organisational change and wider public sector cuts; and the public presentation of personalised working with offenders. Plans to address these challenges include moving gradually from small-scale proto-typing to larger pilots and close collaboration between service providers and evaluators.
Individual budgets allow the service user to take control and make decisions about the care that they receive. Manchester was one of 13 local authority development sites chosen by the Department of Health to trial individual budgets. The pilot has ended but the scheme remains strong. Here, Caroline Marsh describes how one individual's life has been transformed through the power of choice.
EPARTMENT N EW PUBLIC HEALTH LEGISLATION IN NSW ,he new Public Health Act and Regulation 1991 replaced a system of public health controls which had operated in NSW since 1902. Over the past 90 years the health issues of concern to legislators have altered significantly. The changing face of Government throughout the 20th century has witnessed myriad legislative and regulatory controls on issues relating to public health, not all of which have been administered by the Health Department. Other bodies such as local governments have taken on certain public health functions and in many cases the duplication which occurred has been administratively cumbersome and has also detracted from the objective of effective public health control. Advances in health care and technology have eliminated or contained many problems, such as plague and smallpox, which were of concern in 1902. However despite this progress a variety of issues-for example AIDS, Legionnaires' disease and the sale of tobacco products-still requires a framework of legislative and regulatory controls which addresses genuine community concerns and provides precautions against the spread of communicable diseases.
As part of a large pan-European project on co-creating public services we supported the design of a programme in England that attempted to operationalise research on desistance, through a model of co-created, strengths-based working. We then evaluated its implementation and impact. The programme was implemented in a Community Rehabilitation Company. It was delivered in the context of rapid organisational change, often in response to rapidly changing external events and a turbulent policy environment. These factors impeded implementation. An impact evaluation did not identify a statistically significant difference in re-offending rates between the intervention group and a comparator group. However, in-depth qualitative evaluation identified positive examples of co-production and co-creation, with individual case managers and service users supportive and noting positive change. Taken as a whole our findings suggest that a co-created, strengths-based model of probation case management is promising but needs to be accompanied by wider systems change if it is to be embedded successfully.
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