Rethinking What Works with Offenders : Probation, Social Context and Desistance from Crime

This new book reports on a major investigation of the outcomes of probation supervision, is concerned with the key question of what works in probation, and comes at an important moment of change and development for the probation service in the UK. Unlike previous studies which have relied mostly on official data, this book makes use of over 200 interviews with men and women on probation, and their supervising probation officers. "Rethinking What Works With Offenders" has the following objectives: to understand probation work from the perspectives of those who deliver it and those to whom it is delivered; to study probation intervention as a whole (in particular the probation order) rather than specific aspects; to locate probation work in the wider social contexts of those on probation; to analyze how probation works, and to reconceptualize probation outcomes in terms of degrees of success rather than as "successful" or "unsuccessful"; and to assess the policy implications of these conclusions. This book presents an important and challenging range of findings on "what works" in probation and with offenders, and should be valuable reading for anybody professionally concerned with the present and future of probation.