ABSTRACT
After agreeing to contribute a chapter on older offenders and community penalties for this collection I began to consider what the chapter might include and what the main focus of the piece of work should be. My last piece of detailed research in this area with my colleague Helen Codd (Codd and Bramhall 2002) was now three years old and at that time there seemed to be a growing awareness and concern about the interactions between elders and crime. I naively assumed that there would be a larger and growing body of research and was optimistic that others would have taken up this neglected area and have pushed forward our knowledge and understanding of the interactions of older offenders with community penalties. My first task then was to undertake a thorough literature search, familiarise myself with the material, and then reflect on the purpose, shape and content of the chapter. This proved to be a rather thankless task as although there are some committed and enterprising researchers determined to give the voices and experiences of older offenders, particularly those in prison, a space to be heard, within the field of older offenders and community penalties in the UK there was little new work.
