ABSTRACT
As most readers of this chapter will already know, the government’s recent Crime Reduction Programme consisted of a number of evaluated initiatives intended to lay the foundations for an evidence-based approach to crime reduction, as advocated in an influential collection of research reviews published not long after the 1997 General Election (Goldblatt and Lewis 1998). Among these were a number of projects designed to evaluate promising new approaches to the work of the Probation Service. These were the ‘Pathfinder’ projects, and included evaluations of cognitive-behavioural programmes, basic employment-related skills training, new approaches to Community Service (which we are now supposed to call Community Punishment) and new resettlement services for short-term prisoners. The first three have already been mentioned in other contributions to this collection, and this chapter draws on the experiences of the team which carried out the fourth study. Although the views expressed in it are the author’s own, it obviously depends on and owes a great deal to the efforts of the whole team (the other members were Julie Vennard, Mike Maguire, Sam Lewis, Maurice Vanstone, Andrew Rix and Steve Raybould). The full report of the study is published by the Home Office (Lewis et al. 2003a) and a summary is available in Research Findings 200 (Lewis et al. 2003b).
