Anthea Hucklesby

The working life of electronic monitoring officers

Monitoring officers are responsible for putting electronic monitoring (EM) policy into practice and ensuring that offenders are monitored and that alleged non-compliance is investigated. Arguably, they are a new criminal justice profession and exploring their working values and practices is important if we are to understand how EM operates and to address questions about its effectiveness. This article explores monitoring officers’ attitudes to their work and their working practices. It highlights how safety concerns impact upon their work and identifies a range of strategies which are used to deal with their anxieties. It also examines whether monitoring officers have an identifiable occupational culture concluding that while they share a working orientation, a strong cohesive occupational culture is absent. However, differences in working values were identified among monitoring officers, which mirror the range of working credos identified in other criminal justice professionals. The extent to which the work of monitoring officers is affected by EM being operated by the private sector is also explored as well as the policy implications of the findings.

Assistance, Support and Monitoring? The Paradoxes of Mentoring Adults in the Criminal Justice System

Mentoring has recently taken centre stage as one of the primary criminal justice ‘interventions’ to reduce reoffending, having grown in popularity over the past fifteen years. Its rapid growth has been driven by claims of success within and outwith the criminal justice system, leading some to argue that it has been perceived as a silver bullet (Newburn and Shiner, 2005). This article challenges such claims on three fronts: first, mentoring is an ill-defined concept with weak theoretical foundations; second, the evidence base upon which claims of success are made is limited; and third, transferring mentoring into the coercive and punitive environment of the criminal justice system results in a departure from the very principles and values which are the basis of its usefulness elsewhere. The article utilises the findings from three empirical criminal justice research projects to question claims of widespread and effective mentoring activity with defendants and offenders, suggesting instead that ‘interventions’ described as mentoring serve as a vehicle to extend the reach of the criminal justice system. At the end of the article we suggest that desistance theory, specifically the Good Lives Model, provides a conceptual framework for taking mentoring in criminal justice forward.

The Private Sector and Criminal Justice: An Introduction

This introductory chapter contextualises the wide range of developments and debates discussed in this collection of essays. This is done in three ways. The first is by emphasising the contentious nature of debates exploring the relationship between the private sector and criminal justice. The second is by suggesting that developments in contemporary law and policy in criminal justice and the role of the private sector have been significantly influenced by the critical shift of the post-modern era from ‘government to governance’. This move has resulted in the act of governing no longer being tied to monopolistic ‘command and control’ modes of government but instead drawing on the capacities of a more pluralised or ‘nodal’ set of institutional formations, including public, private and voluntary sector agencies. The third is by identifying the parameters of key debates and competing perspectives. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates that the entanglements of state and market in how criminal justice responses are formulated and operationalised generate debates that attend to the very heart of the political, legal and social order.

A Complicated Business: The Operational Realities of Privatised Electronic Monitoring of Offenders

This chapter provides a detailed examination of the complexities which are created by the private sector’s operation of electronic monitoring (EM). The chapter contends that the privatised EM service, as currently operating in England and Wales, is over-complicated and therein detracts from what has the potential to be an effective and humane criminal justice tool. In developing this analysis, the chapter suggests that debates about the role of the private sector in criminal justice have thus far largely failed to appreciate these operational complexities or consider their implications for service delivery. If private sector involvement is to be challenged effectively and EM and other criminal justice measures are to be delivered in humane and responsive ways, then a more nuanced and evidence-based approach is required.