Community penalties and Home Office research

Abstract

This article discusses recent research on community penalties in the UK, and in particular the contribution of the Home Office Research, Development and Statistics division (of which the relevant section is now known as RDS-NOMS following its recent relocation as part of the National Offender Management Service). Current statements of methodological preference are discussed in the light of the history of evaluative research in this field, and it is suggested that a perceived need for information management may be leading to an unhelpful narrowing of methodological choices. This approach risks neglecting features of community sentences which require investigation, and at worst could encourage a drift back towards a belief that `nothing works'.

‘A difficult trip, I think’: The end days of the probation service in England and Wales?

“…As for the What Works initiative -if this was intended to prove the effectiveness of probation then it was an unmitigated failure. It certainly stimulated a considerable amount of debate (for a critical examination of the initiative see the essays in Mair, 2004); it provided a lot of information and data (for a flavour of some of the research results see the essays in Burnett and Roberts, 2004); and it had a number of unintended (but positive) consequences, but it did not meet its stated objectives (see Raynor, 2004Raynor, , 2008. What Works -and the Crime Reduction Programme of which it was a part -was, of course, flooded by research, but academic criminology did not come out of it well.…”

Helping offenders into employment

“…This interpretation and the Home Office responseimposition of strict control over the delivery of an intervention and a simplistic belief that using randomized control trials will yield simple and certain research results-has been widely criticized (see, for example, Hollin, 2008;Raynor, 2008).…”

Reexamining Evidence-Based Practice in Community Corrections: Beyond “A-Confined View” of What Works

“…First of all, researchers have learned that more attention needs to be paid to the offender's motivation and to the impact of his or her social context on the outcomes of the intervention (Farrall, 2002) -in other words on what he or she brings to the programme and on the wider context in which he is she experiences it. Secondly, it is now well understood that there is more to effective programmes than designing them well; they also need to be run well and that requires the right organisational arrangements, the right staff skills and the right sort of qualities in the relationships between offenders and probation staff -both within programmes and beyond them (Raynor, 2004a(Raynor, , 2004b(Raynor, , 2008). McNeill's physiotherapist couldn't have done much good without having had the right sorts of training and access to the right sorts of equipment, and without spending enough time to understand the problem properly.…”