Nathan Monk

The Thames Valley Partnership held a conference on 18th March, 2008, to celebrate the work of its retiring Chief Executive, Sue Raikes, and to review the Partnership’s experience over the 15 years of its existence and the twelve years during which Sue Raikes had been Chief Executive. About 35 people were present, from a wide range of backgrounds including representatives of national organisations and central government, most of whom were working with the Partnership in one capacity or another or had done so previously. The title ‘The Journey’ was intended to convey a sense of the movement and progress which had taken place over that period, and to look forward as well as to the past.

This paper records and reflects on the main points which were made at the conference and in subsequent discussion. Information about the Partnership, its work, its people and the projects and programmes mentioned in the paper, together with most of its publications, is available on its website www.thamesvalleypartnership.org.uk

Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA) are an innovative, volunteer-based means of supervising sex offenders, usually upon release from prison, which were ‘transplanted’ from Canada to England and Wales at the turn of the 21st century. The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), and the Lucy Faithful Foundation, were concerned with both the extreme demonisation of sex offenders in the press, and with the need to find better ways of safeguarding children from sexual abuse. The Home Office was simultaneously developing new mechanisms of public protection and funded three COSA pilot schemes between 2002 and 2005. The processes of development and implementation were essentially informal and improvised, crucially dependent on the choices, decisions, energy, status and reputations of particular individuals in particular places and networks. Circles flourished at the intersection of a nascent official concern with public protection, and the determination of faith-based professional activists (and others) to reaffirm the redeemability of sex offenders, but there was never a “structural logic” which made the emergence of COSA inevitable. Drawing on information from the key players, this  paper details the processes by which they came into being.

Community Justice attempts to achieve various outcomes. Extensive community engagement and involvement is one of these and the extent to which this is achieved can distinguish community justice as distinct from traditional justice models. This article presents the findings of a research project exploring community engagement within community justice through a series of models and testing these to improve validity; assessing uniqueness of community justice; and, supporting implementation and understanding of community justice elsewhere. Adopting a realist perspective (Pawson and Tilley, 2007) the research employed a literature review and innovative e-Delphi method. Findings from the research corroborate the veracity of proposed models and  demonstrate how they can be used to explore and understand community justice in different settings. Additionally several characteristics of community justice that can be classified as unique but highlight potential tensions are discussed

Set within the wider context of responsibilising youth justice policies, this article heeds academic calls for further research into parent/child dynamics within restorative justice processes (Prichard, 2002; Bradt et al., 2007), by critically analysing and evaluating the role of parents as supporters of young offenders. The aim is not to call into question the entitlement of parents to be present during restorative processes, but to critically examine their suitability to play the role of designated supporters. Drawing upon the literature as well as empirical work conducted by the first author (Hoyle et al., 2002), it will be argued that many of the moralising and responsibilising messages directed at the offender find currency with parents in a way which makes them feel ashamed, embarrassed and as if they themselves are on trial. Parents react to this discomfort by engaging in apologising, neutralising, dominating and punitive discourses. Their reactions not only cast doubt upon their ability to be composed and supportive of their children, but more importantly might adversely affect the dynamics of the process itself. Parental reactions might thereby deny the young person the opportunity to take responsibility for their actions and to contribute to the discussion on appropriate reparation, which could ultimately thwart the chance for reintegration.

This paper draws on research evidence from the author’s study of murder investigation in order to generate questions about social and welfare consequences of the contemporary murder inquiry. The paper discusses findings from interviews with Senior Investigating Officers, Detectives from Outside Inquiry Teams and Family Liaison Officers, Scientific Support, and Media Communications divisions. The legal-scientific logic of responding to murder, with an ever sharper focus on forensic strategy, drives the murder inquiry and characterises the wider policy and social response to murder. This excludes a broader community justice perspective on criminal homicide victimization. The need to respond effectively to complex cumulative effects of the murder inquiry itself on primary victims and the homicide-bereaved is neglected. Third Sector organizations are left with inadequate resources to ‘pick up the pieces’. The paper concludes by supporting recent critics of victim policies and victim based research, in calling for further collaborative research between third sector organizations and universities with the aim of achieving better outcomes for victims; and asserts the need for a community and social justice, rather than an exclusively juridical perspective.

There has been increasing attention to the role of social capital in fostering resilience to risk and challenging life transitions, particularly for young people (Evans, 2002). In the criminological arena recent studies have focused on the role of social capital in facilitating desistance from crime (Farrall, 2002, 2004). Such studies have also emphasised the crucial inter-play between agency and structure (Giddens, 1998), and the concept of the ‘agentic’ individual capable of exercising choices and shaping their futures (Ward and Maruna, 2007). In this article we explore the role of social capital in assisting young people to negotiate key life transitions, and in particular how social capital (or the absence of it) can facilitate or hinder desistance from crime.

Abstract

The probation service provides criminal courts with information on people who offend, before they are sentenced, by utilising three report formats. Firstly a comprehensively written pre-sentence report can take up to three weeks to prepare. Secondly a briefer document completed within five days, known as the fast delivery report, predominantly relies on a tick box format. The third category is oral feedback. Significantly the criminal justice system is being encouraged to call upon the services of the two briefer formats, primarily because of the time and costs involved in preparing a full report. The central
concern of this paper is to explore this shift of emphasis, particularly within magistrates’ courts, which militates against the probation service undertaking a detailed analysis of the social circumstances of offenders. This has potentially serious implications for criminal and social justice.