Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

Probation Service Pathfinders: Community Reintegration

Community reintegration is the most critical process for achieving long term change in offenders. Work to help them achieve a settled lifestyle, and become involved in pro social relationships and activities, may well reduce the risk of re-offending.

Such work needs to build on learning from structured programmes dealing with offending behaviour and will provide an opportunity for offenders to practice newly developed skills by applying them to daily problems they may face – in employment, accommodation, finance or other aspects of their lives.

The Probation Service has established pathfinder projects, which will explore how this work can be done most effectively. These focus currently on three areas.

• Community Punishment - 8 projects involving 11 areas looking at how the community service order can be delivered so as to have the most effect on reducing re-offending.

• Resettlement of short term prisoners - 6 projects testing different approaches to helping prisoners being released from short prison sentences. Three of the projects involve joint work between prison and probation service, the remaining three jointly taken forward by the Prison Service and voluntary organisations.

• Basic skills - 7 projects exploring how best to help offenders under supervision in the community improve their skills in literacy and numeracy.

These projects became fully operational in March/April 2000, and are being fully evaluated. An additional pathfinder will be commissioned shortly, testing out a model for helping offenders secure employment.

Evaluation

The evaluation assesses the impact of each project on offender attitudes and social circumstances, and ultimately on their future pattern of offending. Information about the intermediate outcomes should be available in the first half of 2001. The reconviction analysis will not be completed until 2003.

Projects which achieve a positive outcome will be used to develop a model of effective practice in that area of work. If appropriate, this will be submitted to the Accreditation Panel for formal accreditation, and will then be implemented in services in England and Wales – subject to any necessary resources being made available.

More details

Main contact	Chris Johnson	020 7217 0695 chris.johnson@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
Community Punishment	Steve Woodgate	020 7217 0684  steve.woodgate@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
Basic Skills	Laura Fairweather	020 7217 0680  laura.fairweather@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
Resettlement of short term prisoners	Steve Pitts	020 7217 0682 steve.pitts@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

Last update: 12/09/03