ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some discussion of the central theme of the book as well as an introduction to Part One. The central argument presented is that more recent understandings of ‘what works’ have been dominated by policy and practice that have originated from ‘top-down’ initiatives and policy proposals. The origins of these processes can be located in the increasing tendency for government to centralise control over the probation service and youth justice services; practice over recent decades has become increasingly directed by politicians and central senior management rather than practitioners and local managements. Moreover, the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) at national level is populated overwhelmingly by staff with little or no professional experience of probation practice (McKnight 2008). This desire for centralised control and direction is located in the ‘logic’ of the new public management and managerialism. While this is influenced in turn by a desire to implement methods of practice that are based in evidence and effective in terms of the reduction of re-offending, the authors argue that these factors have led to an over-reliance on cognitive behaviourism as a theory of intervention and group work as a system of delivery, as well as the risk factor basis of current interventions with young offenders. In turn this has led to the exclusion of other theories and forms of intervention and the downplaying of the relationship between the supervisor and the supervised, something that is being increasingly seen as fundamental to effectiveness (see for example Downden and Andrews 2004). Further factors include the emphasis from government that the task of the probation service is mainly to protect the public and manage and punish (and label) ‘offenders’, although retaining rehabilitation as one of its aims. Most recently, the development of NOMS and the Offender Management Model suggests that the central consistent relationship between supervisor and supervised is under threat and that practice intervention may become increasingly fragmented.
