Select Committee on Home Affairs Third Report


APPENDIX 15

Note by Mr Graham W Smith CBE, HM Chief Inspector of Probation

EXTRACT FROM A LETTER TO THE CLERK OF THE COMMITTEE

  I have delayed my response to your enquiry because it seemed best to concentrate on only one issue, namely the means by which community penalties could be made more effective and thereby win the support and confidence of the general public and sentencers. I have been awaiting publication of the HM Probation Inspectorate's Strategies for Effective Offender Supervision better known as the "What Works" Project and this week it has finally been published. I am pleased to enclose it together with a management summary for the attention of your Committee.

  I am in no doubt personally that this is the most important piece of work with which the Probation Inspectorate has ever been involved. Put at its simplest it says that certain community programmes involving the same population significantly out-perform custodial sentences in reducing offending. Further that a new statistical and research technique called meta-analysis derived from medical research has allowed researchers both in Europe and North America to comb hundreds of community programmes and to identify common characteristics of success; and these characteristics when pursued can reduce offending, by an overall level of 10 per cent in terms of improvement over current figures and even more in specific programme areas.

  The enclosed volume is a difficult read; it is the first part of a three-part attack on effectiveness carried out jointly by the Home Office, the Association of Chief Officers of Probation, Central Probation Committees and the Inspectorate. It is a detailed and rigorous examination of the principles of effective practice and looks at targeting, design, programme delivery and general management issues. It has been able to satisfy independent academic tests of reliability and validity in the programmes it had studied.

  This first volume will be followed by a second which will be an Effective Practice Guide. This is aimed at practitioners and management and aims to be something which will be easily assimilated and accessible to all staff. I hope it will be on every worker's desk. It will contain advice for managers to develop, provide and quality assure effective supervision; for practitioners to deliver and quality assure similarly and for managers and practitioners responsible for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of offender supervision. It will also include material to assist managers and staff to be competent to do the work. It is planned that a draft copy of this Guide will be available for the public launch of this work at the end of February.

  The third volume will be documentation on accreditation. The "What Works" report sets a tough standard for probation work with offenders. All of the available evidence suggests that most probation supervision will need to be up-graded in order to reach that standard. The Home Office wants to create a way in which probation areas which attain that standard or make notable strides towards it can demonstrate their progress to their local courts, their probation committee and the Home Office. The Home Office plans to introduce a system of accreditation for probation supervision programmes which builds on the experience of the Prison Service.

  We cannot say yet how accreditation will work. The proposals are at a very early stage of development but the aim will be to ensure that programmes of supervision are reviewed by independent experts and that the process of accreditation is one which encourages and supports delivery of the very best work. The accreditation process will examine both the content of a particular programme and whether it is being run properly.

  In conclusion therefore there is now a body of evidence which exists which tells us how probation services can be more effective in reducing offending. To use that evidence properly the Service needs to distinguish carefully the method selected for use, the offenders which they are used with and the offender supervision actually provided. The evidence also suggests that certain principles are associated with effective intervention and these include risk management assessment, targeting offending behaviour, addressing offenders' problems and criminogenic needs, relevance to offenders' learning style and promoting community re-integration whilst maintaining a quality and integrity of service.

  The evidence also shows that most programmes that have been reviewed so far by the Inspectorate do not meet these tests for effective supervision and that our findings are similar to those in North America and the rest of Europe. The implementation challenge therefore, is very great. In addition to what must be key counter-cultural and counter-intuitive features which we must understand and overcome, it also appears true that all of the players in the criminal justice system need to understand the imperatives of the "What Works" research if it is to succeed.

  The good news of the study is that we did find a number of probation programmes in England and Wales which were already able to mostly achieve these principles and reduce offending. "What Works" and its message is without doubt the most important challenge facing the Probation Service and its implementation will bring great rewards for the community in terms of its increased protection and reduced offending.

  "What Works" has other valuable spin-offs. In the long term it should enable resources to be saved because it will target them better. We also estimate that contact increases by a factor of five from conventionally managed programmes. Staff are used differentially and an impetus is given to the development of partnership with the voluntary and private sectors. There is also improved overall consistency making joint training more easy to achieve.

  Overall the atmosphere in which community penalties exist is rendered more optimistic in a "What Works" climate. This must be good news and goes against the pessimistic hopeless "nothing works" environment which has been such a negative but overriding perspecitve of criminal justice in the past few years.

  Finally there is one other matter that I would like to draw to the Committee's attention and that is the importance of reducing prison places for remand prisoners. This can be achieved by the increased use and extension of bail information schemes. Research has shown the schemes, together with bail support, are strongly supported by the courts, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police and reduce significantly unnecessary remands in prison.

  The Probation Service is finding it hard to invest the necessary resources in this activity. There are fewer bail information schemes than there were and hardly any bail support for adults. They strongly need the commendation of this Committee and encouragement to expand.

Graham W Smith

23 January 1998


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries

© Parliamentary copyright 1998
Prepared 25 August 1998