Can the recruitment of ex-offenders enhance offender engagement? An assessment of the London Probation Trust’s engagement worker role

Research has long established that the most effective strategy for reducing reoffending is to develop collaborative relationships with service users. Practitioners need to exhibit empathy, mutual respect, and an appreciation for the life, perspectives, and needs of service users. However, the balance between trusted confidante, and enforcer is a difficult one to achieve. With this in mind, the London Probation Trust (LPT) developed the role of engagement worker in order to provide practitioners with another resource to be utilised towards their attempts to establish successful working relationships with their service users. The engagement workers are former users of the Probation Service themselves - a life experience that allows them to successfully engage current service users, in a way that practitioners are not always able to do. Furthermore, in addition to supporting individuals to change, the experience of being an engagement worker may contribute to the engagement workers’ own desistance. Following a year of the engagement worker experiment, the project was evaluated by the LPT (now London CRC) research analyst. This chapter asks whether employing ex-offenders in this way can enhance engagement and improve outcomes.

Evidence-based skills in Welsh youth justice settings

This chapter presents the findings of a study that examined supervision skills within three youth offending teams. The study focused on youth justice practice in Wales and its objective was to explore how best to integrate research evidence into frontline practice. It found that participating practitioners employed mainly relationship skills. This is a positive finding but there was limited use of evidence-based skills embedded in what is described as the ‘structuring principle' of effective interpersonal interactions (Bonta and Andrews 2017). The skills are change-focused and they impact on what young people learn during interactions with practitioners and the quality of the influence the practitioners exert over them. This chapter examines the factors that impede the application of structuring skills and concludes with a discussion of the ways in which gaps between research and supervision practice can be bridged to enhance the quality of youth justice practice.

Understanding emotions as effective practice in English probation: the performance of emotional labour in building relationships

In this chapter we study the performance of emotional labour by probation practitioners to reveal the complex emotion management undertaken to develop the officer-offender relationship. We begin by discussing the rise of managerialism and its effect on how emotions should be used in the officer-offender relationship, before focusing on Skills for Effective Engagement and Development and Supervision programme. We use data generated through interviews with probation practitioners to analyse one aspect of SEEDS: the development of the professional relationship through getting to know and understand the client and the need to create clear boundaries. By analysing the data through the lens of emotional labour we focus on the use of surface and deep acting in order to create effective professional relationships as required by the SEEDS model. We found that practitioners are required to perform considerable emotional labour which has, until now, remained unacknowledged in probation policy and discuss what needs to be done if SEEDS were reintroduced following the implementation of Transforming Rehabilitation. (164)

Supervision face-to-face contacts: the emergence of an intervention

Face-to-face contacts are the cornerstone of community supervision. As community supervision in the United States and Canada emerges into a new behavioral management approach, new training curricula have emerged to conceptualize the techniques of supervision and develop the skill sets of officers. This chapter reviews five such curricula--Proactive Community Supervision (PCS) (Taxman, Shephardson, & Byrne, 2004; Taxman, 2008), Strategic Training Initiative in Community Supervision (STICS) (Bonta et al., 2011); Staff Training Aimed at Reducing Rearrest (STARR) (Robinson et al., 2012); Effective Practices in Community Supervision (EPICS) (Smith et al., 2012); and Skills for Offender Assessment and Responsivity in New Goals (SOARING2) (Maass, 2013). The comparison reveals similarities but major differences in an emphasis on the operational components for client-level change. The question remains as to which supervision intervention components are mechanisms facilitating client level change.

Implementation uptake: organisational factors affecting evidence-based reform in community corrections in the United States

As community corrections organizations adapt to changing times, probation/parole agencies work to reform both organizational policy and practice. However, reform is much easier planned than implemented. With little or no formal training on strategic implementation, most community corrections agencies face a complex web of inter- and intra-organizational dynamics and contexts that make implementing reform challenging and sustaining reforms nearly impossible. Using survey and interview/observational data from both adult and juvenile probation in two U.S. states, this chapter examines organizational factors such as culture/climate, cynicism and commitment as key internal issues to consider prior to implementation of reform and during reform uptake. Using dual methods reveals while organizational actors respond similarly on organizational survey response measures, the observational data detail a more nuanced story for understanding implementation. Specifically, findings suggest a need for new training approaches, continued leadership development and improved communication at all organizational levels.

The search for impact in British probation: from programmes to skills and implementation

Social scientists have often had difficulty evaluating the impact of probation services, partly because expectations and political circumstances change and partly because appropriate methodologies have been slow to develop. This chapter outlines the history of evaluative research on probation. It describes the limitations of early probation research which led to erroneous conclusions that ‘nothing works’, and goes on to show how more recent research has been based on a fuller understanding of practitioner inputs through research on programmes, skills and implementation. This is starting to lead to a better understanding of which practices are effective (‘What Works’). The chapter advocates a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology for evaluative research which combines understanding, measurement and comparison. Finally, it points to some risks to evidence-based policy which arise from current populism and post-truth politics.

The effective practice of staff development in England and Wales: learning from history and contemporary research

This chapter endeavours to construct a history of staff development in probation through a critical assessment of past models. It draws on the lessons of that history to argue that the effectiveness of practice provides potentially useful ideas about how the improvement of staff skills can be achieved. Among other things, these include focussed training, rehearsal, observation and feedback on either live or recorded performance, refresher training and expert tutoring

Staff supervision in youth justice and its relationship to skill development: findings from Australia

This chapter presents the findings of a systematic review of the literature on supervisory practices for supporting criminal justice staff. It reviews the key approaches to professional supervision within the helping professions; paying particular attention to supervisor competencies associated with ‘what works’ in enhancing practitioner skill development within youth justice. The findings indicate that supervisory practices motivated by a performance management agenda could undermine reflective practice, skills development and service-user engagement.

Desistance-related skills in Romanian probation contexts

This chapter briefly present the results of a research study that took place between 2012-2014 in Romania. More specifically, the chapter will analyse the extent to which probation practice in Romania follows the principles of desistance. The chapter starts with an overview of what the desistance literature suggests is required for effective probation practice. It then goes on to present the findings of a study that was based on external observations of practice using a checklist. Based on this study it seems that although the right premises are there, probation practice is still distant from the desistance principles and practices. In its conclusion, the chapter explores the implications of the study’s findings for practice.

Professional practices and skills in first interviews: a comparative perspective on probation practice in Spain and Belgium

This chapter focuses on the professional practices and skills employed by probation officers (PO) during first interviews with individuals serving probation orders. Its focus is comparative and it draws on the results of research conducted by the authors in two different jurisdictions, Belgium and Spain (Catalonia). The study employed an observation schedule to observe first interviews. The schedule was collaboratively developed by researchers from various European jurisdictions in the context of the COST Action Offender Supervision in Europe (Boxstaens et al., 2015). This chapter includes some methodological reflections on the strengths and limitations of using structured observation as a method for collecting comparable data and focuses on the actual results of employing the observation schedule and interviewing POs in the two jurisdictions. Data will be analysed comparatively to assess the skills the practitioners employed, and attention will also be paid to variations within jurisdictions and between individual practitioners. Results and implications are discussed in terms of the different cultural, legal, and institutional aims and settings existing in the two jurisdictions involved, and interpreted in terms of POs' dual role (support and control), and the working alliance between the professional and the sentenced individual.