Showing papers by "Mike Maguire published in 2013"

Intermediate outcomes of arts projects: a rapid evidence assessment

Abstract: A summary of the findings from a rapid evidence assessment which sought to identify 'intermediate' outcomes from arts projects with adult offenders.

Putting the OM into NOMS: problems and possibilities for offender management

Abstract: Four years ago, in July 2005, we were invited to take part in a symposium organised by members of the School of Law at King’s College, London, on the subject of what was then the proposed National Offender Management Service (NOMS). Our contribution focused particularly on the emerging National Offender Management Model (NOMM), and was subsequently published (Raynor and Maguire 2006), together with other contributions to the symposium. At that time the final shape of NOMS was unclear (though perhaps nobody expected it would remain unclear for so long); the relevant legislation was struggling through parliament and was withdrawn to make room for a General Election, then reintroduced afterwards with some changes. The Carter Report, published at the end of 2003 and immediately welcomed by government after only the most perfunctory consultation, proposed a system of ‘end-to-end offender management’ to overcome what was seen as a dysfunctional separation between prisons and probation, and a new body, NOMS, to oversee the correctional system as a whole (Carter 2003). Offenders would be subject to a single sentence management process whether in custody or under supervision in the community, and this developed in due course into the NOMM. However, alongside these integrative proposals in the Carter Report ran another set of proposals which tended more towards the fragmentation and splitting of services in order to achieve ‘contestability’ and to allow the market testing and possible privatisation of elements of community sentences in imitation of the private sector prisons. Mostimportantly, these proposals resulted in a fundamental split between ‘offender management’ and ‘interventions’, the latter being commissioned (internally or externally) as discrete services or activities that offenders can be directed to attend by their offender managers. In our paper we reviewed a variety of evidence that supported the idea of greater continuity in offender management, but questioned whether contestability and continuity could easily be pursued together. We also pointed to an important distinction, not always clearly made in the plans, between continuity of contact with people (‘relational continuity’), which research tends to support, and continuity understood simply as an administrative responsibility – continuity in the case record rather than in the offender’s lived experience.