Introduction

Managing risk and promoting rehabilitation are often uneasy bedfellows. Issues of risk frequently invoke punitive and restrictive measures, whereas rehabilitation often calls for positive and empowering interventions. Many criminal justice initiatives have tried to strike some balance between the two. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 certainly does a lot to further notions of assessing and managing risk and dangerousness, including the introduction of the legal notion of ‘the dangerous offender’, and demonstrates how issues of risk and dangerousness permeate criminal justice practice (see Clift, Chapter Two, this volume). At the same time, however, there are also glimmers of rehabilitation in the Act, although typically in a ‘strings attached’ sort of way. The Mental Health Treatment Requirement that can be imposed as part of a Community Order (or a Suspended Sentence Order) quite possibly fits that banner, as we will discuss.

The Criminal Justice Act 2003 is indeed quite a colossus. Looking at its contents eight years after it came into force, the breadth of arrangements it sets out and the wide scope of its intended impact remains impressive. It regulates, for instance, trials without jury for complex fraud cases. It also sets out provisions for video links, for instance between prison and magistrates’ courts, and also on charging, disclosure and elements of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. Notably, the double jeopardy rule was revised with provisions to allow for cases to be retried if there is new and compelling evidence against the acquitted person. The introduction of the concept of the ‘dangerous offender’ is exemplary of the current Zeitgeist in which risk and danger dominate discourses of crime and significantly impact upon notions of rehabilitation.

In relation to offender management, the Criminal Justice Act 2003 is, of course, mainly known for the introduction of the Community Order and the Suspended Sentence Order (see Winstone and Pakes, Chapter Eight, this volume). The Community Order represents a reconfiguration of community penalties into a single Community Order. Its aim was to give courts more flexibility in deciding on the appropriate disposal for offenders to serve their sentence in the community, and to have that sentence make an impact on the risk of reoffending.