ABSTRACT
Bodies like Crisis, the Samaritans and the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders also stress the need for concern and encouragement, for a combination of policy reform and practical support. The National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders agrees: its mission is to ‘deliver social justice by positively changing lives, strengthening communities and preventing crime’. ‘According to the figures’, concludes the Daily Telegraph, ‘only a third of offenders given sentences of between two and four years went back to crime within a year. Jesse Varley’s second foray into white-collar crime was striking for three things: its brevity, its lack of success and the light that it throws upon the rehabilitation – or non-rehabilitation – of white-collar criminals. Varley hired a Birmingham solicitor, Philip Crawshaw, who travelled the 90 miles or so to Sheffield to represent him. The existence of what it labelled a ‘recidivist class’ explained, at a stroke, the persistence of recidivism and reconviction.
