Nathan Monk

The rhetoric about support for victims of crime is excellent, and the themes of many victim conferences over recent years have sounded both impressive and powerful. Much practice is excellent too, making victims matter and putting the victim centre stage. However the reality of victim support generally still leaves much room for development, and hence the question mark in the title. This paper describes the development of the Victim Contact Team of Leicestershire and Rutland Probation Trust, where the authors have worked with victims since the scheme began. It goes on to consider some of the issues that arise in this work.

The government’s recent provision of £9.5 million to establish demonstration projects to provide integrated community services for female offenders was a welcome development. It is unlikely that continued special funding will be available for such projects so it is essential that lessons learned from these projects are disseminated widely to facilitate the mainstreaming of good practice. This paper considers the context for this development and presents the results of a recent review of provision for women offenders (Gelsthorpe, Sharpe and Roberts 2007) and recommendations for future developments.

In this paper I am concerned to document the ways in which ordinary and mundane experiences of criminal victimisation, alongside the more widely publicised threats posed by terrorist activities, transgress our everyday sense of well-being and in the light of this to consider the range policy responses that have been put in place. Consequently the paper falls into three parts. In the first I shall endeavour to offer a critical evaluation of recent policy efforts that have been made to place the victim at the centre of criminal justice policy. In the second part I shall trace the return to the Gothic, the increasingly public pre-occupation with suffering, discernable within these policy processes. In the third and concluding section, I shall consider some aspects of the implications of these developments for questions of justice.

Abstract

Most communities seek to reduce crime in their locality. To direct their resources most effectively, they need to gain an understanding of local offenders, types of offending and the services available to address them. Rarely, however, is this understanding reached through the concrete evidence which can be gained by investing in detailed research. Broadland Council in the UK is one of 7 district bodies responsible for local governance in the rural Eastern county of Norfolk. In 2005, it resolved to introduce a programme named ‘Stairway’, to help its offenders, particularly the young, to move out of crime. Unusually, before doing so, it took the decision to acquire a research-based and community-informed focus for the Stairway project and commissioned the School of
Allied Health Professions at the University of East Anglia to establish, during 2006–7, a local profile of offending and offenders. This profile was named Spr:ocket – Stairway Profiles Research: Out of Crime Key Enablement Tools.

This paper explains how the profile was drawn up and, drawing on in-depth case studies, discusses the findings which have particular relevance to young offenders and Broadland’s plans for implementing them: integrating early prevention measures; effective inter-agency working; and community support.

The article reviews the risk prevention paradigm and contemporary responses to youth posing a risk and, to a lesser extent, youth at risk. The underpinning notions of prudentialism and the rational actor are critiqued and limits to this policy approach are explored. The article will review the limitations of this position and draw on recent empirical evidence on the decision making of youth to illustrate that prudentialism is often not that clear cut. A greater understanding of decision making is advocated and the implications of starting with how young people think about risk decisions are reviewed.

This paper explores the potential for deploying the discourse of human rights to invigorate debate about the ethics of penal practices and in particular the values of probation. Human rights are argued to be the most promising basis for an ethically principled opposition to both excesses of punishment and an unduly instrumental understanding of penal practice. Recent themes in penal policy are identified and an account of human rights is set out. It is argued that human rights are distinctively important in discussions of punishment and that an attempt should be made to disentangle those rights that are appropriately forfeit as legitimate punishment and which rights should be retained. Two misgivings about human rights are identified and addressed. The place of the Council of Europe in working out the real-world implications of the European Convention on Human Rights is considered. The Council of Europe can also help to develop a legal framework to support its ethical initiatives. It is concluded that penal practice grounded in human rights affirms the responsibilities of offenders and therefore constitutes an appropriate penal communication. Ethically informed penal practice promotes legitimacy and perhaps enhances effectiveness in reducing reoffending.

Over the last twenty years the prison population in the UK has been rising at an unprecedented rate. In 1971 the number of people held in prisons and young offender institutions (hereafter in prison) numbered 45,046, in 1991 it was 50,736 and in 2001 it was 66,300. At the time of writing, April 2008, the UK prison population stands at 82,945. De Silva et al (2006) have sought to make projections as to what the UK prison population might be in 2013. Based on the assumption that recent sentencing trends continue into the future, they projected that the prison population would be 98,190. This 18% increase would require room for an additional 15,000 inmates. The largest existing single prison in the UK – HMP Wandsworth, holds on average 1,461 prisoners. If all the new prisoners in 2013 had to be housed in new prisons of this size, ten new prisons would have to be built in the next five years to accommodate them. Possibly anticipating that ten more new builds would be an expensive prsoposition, the Justice Secretary Jack Straw announced in 2007 that in addition to more traditional medium sized prisons, three ‘Titan’ prisons would be commissioned and built over the next five years to hold 2,500 inmates each. The policy of imprisoning ever larger numbers of people has been subject to considerable research and commentary over the last ten years. The focus of criticism has been on the efficacy and philosophy of imprisoning more and more people. This article does not seek to reproduce that debate; rather it focuses on what is known about the impact of a new prison build on the prisoner and local community experience. As the prison building programme evolves over the next few years, local debates about the perceived desirability and impact of new prison builds are likely to flourish. This article aims to provide a focus and make a contribution to those debates to better inform decision making in this area.