ABSTRACT
In their major study of community supervision, ‘Exploring the black box of community supervision’, Bonta and colleagues found that although ‘cognitive behavioural methods appear to have been most effective in bringing about change in offenders’, there was limited evidence of them being used in supervision (Bonta et al. 2008). Bonta’s ‘black box’ reflects the intrinsic difficulties in probing into what actually goes on within the relatively private world of oneto-one supervision and the barriers that these raise to its evaluation. In order to make an assessment of whether something is or is not successful one has to be able to form a cogent picture of what that something is.
