Abstract
This significant publication, stretching to over 300 pages, delivers what it sets out to do in the title and the author should be applauded for sticking to the task of both outlining and analysing the increasingly complex and contentious contexts to contemporary probation practice. The book is clearly and logically structured with key considerations within offender management, providing the context for Part Two on key law and policy and (the final) Part Three focusing on key areas of practice. What is particularly helpful is the clarity from the beginning that the author’s critical thinking is from a human rights perspective and that work with offenders is ultimately a moral activity notwithstanding the increasing technicalization of offender management.
Part One deals largely successfully with outlining the political and organizational thinking (or debacle, as some would argue) behind the consolidation of a risk and public protection approach within a National Offender Management Service (NOMS). The Offender Management Model (OMM) is neatly summarized and the outline of partnership and inter-agency working which both predated and carried forward the OMM is clear, detailed and even for someone who lived through these developments provides a very useful résumé. Likewise, although heavily reliant on the work of Fergus McNeill, Robinson draws Part One to a conclusion by effectively contrasting the problems of risk based approaches to offender management with the potential for a rights based approach which is advocated by the author.
The guts of the publication is an eight chapter Part Two – Offender Management: Key Law and Practice - which tends to be less discursive and more descriptive and instructional but provides straightforward material about a range of topics from human rights and equalities legislation to procedures at court, community and custodial sentencing, enforcement and engagement. Although relatively short, the chapter on community sentencing is particularly helpful in charting the changes in sentencing powers from the seminal 1991 Criminal Justice Act.
Part Three, consisting of some six chapters, considers offender management in the context of key areas of practice. The opening chapter in this section covers work with victims and does an excellent job of placing the responsibilities of probation within the overall development of what Robinson refers to as victims coming in from the margins. Chapters follow on youth justice, substance misuse, mentally disordered offenders, sex offenders and indeterminate sentence prisoners. All these key areas of practice are dealt with in a clear and informed manner and I think readers will appreciate the balance within the narrative between recent policy development, legislative frameworks, comment and analysis.
Inevitably, a book which attempts to cover so much will also frustrate the reader. For example, the way in which restorative justice is dealt with at the end of the chapter on victims is both brief and somewhat tokenistic. Having said that, the author provides a ‘Further Reading’ section at the end of each chapter. This should be very useful for readers who wish to pursue their interests in a particular aspect of offender management.
This is a book aimed at practitioners and those training to work within the probation service and wider criminal justice system. Its content admirably reflects Robinson’s two basic premises outlined in the introduction to her book. Firstly that practitioners who are confident in their knowledge and understanding of the legal and practice frameworks that govern their professional world ‘will be better able to negotiate its more tricky aspects, to deal with complex ethical questions and to work more constructively with both criminal and non-criminal justice agencies’ (p. vi) and secondly that practitioners who are adept at working within these frameworks should also be prepared to ‘ask questions about where these frameworks have come from and the values and beliefs that inform them’ (p. vi).
Finally, notwithstanding the worth of this book for its intended readership of practitioners and students, I found it an invaluable aide-mémoire for charting the folly, wasted energy as well as the progress that NOMS has contributed to the world of practice, management and leadership during the recent past.