Welcome to this book about face-to-face work with offenders. It connects research and theory with practice, and explores how the key concepts of risk, responsivity and diversity can be applied in practice. By presenting ideas in an accessible form, it seeks to create a new ‘practice wisdom’ for engaging effectively with offenders.

Developing effective practice

The development of the concept of effective practice has revolutionised how offenders are worked with. With this development has come the recognition of the need for consistency and accountability in the way that services are delivered and offenders are managed. At the same time there has been a significantly heightened concern about risk and security and an increased desire to rely on procedures which offer technical certainty and greater defensibility. The downside to this development has been the increasing tendency for practitioners to adopt blanket approaches which seek to fit offenders to programmes rather than match interventions to offenders. It is our view that working effectively with offenders requires practitioners to keep offenders in focus by paying careful attention to the detail and complexity of offenders’ lives and not to make assumptions about how, or why, offending has occurred. This is in tune with one of the core principles of effective practice, that of targeting “energies, time and scarce resources on the right people and on those things that work” (Chapman and Hough, 1998: viii). We need to be building a body of knowledge which makes the connections between research, theory and practice and encourages practitioners to reflect on the detail of why some interventions have worked and others have not, and, as a result, refine their practice. This book does not claim to offer definitive knowledge or to be the only book you ever need to read about work with offenders. Inevitably, within the size and scope of this text, some important and specialist practice areas, for example, sexual offending and restorative justice, have not been included. Overall, this book strives to promote reflective and research- aware practice that is appropriate to a range of offenders.

Who is this book for?

This work is aimed to be informative for the student, trainee, practitioner and practice developer/manager, and all those involved, or interested in, making face-to-face work with offenders as effective as possible.