Developing and Evaluating a Programme to Reduce Offending

Abstract

When the right programmes are offered in the right way to the right people, some things can work. This is the accumulating message of the most recent research, including the examples discussed in the last chapter. Putting these lessons into practice is, however, no simple matter: in some ways the possibility of effectiveness now poses an even greater challenge to professional thinking and skills, because the attempt to get it right may question previous practices and assumptions. We have described in the previous chapter how the professional culture of the probation service successfully maintained a degree of optimism through the ‘nothing works’ era, partly sustained by unfamiliarity with the research or by an expectation that research is generally unhelpful. This often co-existed with and reinforced a very individual approach to practice in which it was assumed that only the individual practitioner was entitled to take decisions about his or her work. In what we hope will be a new era of aspiration to achievable effectiveness, some cultural and attitudinal changes are likely to be needed and are, we would suggest, already occurring.