Working with Offenders
Guidance on Statutory Crime & Disorder Reduction Partnerships
The Crime & Disorder Act 1998 places obligations on local authorities, the police, police authorities, health authorities and probation committees (amongst others) to co-operate in the development and implementation of a strategy for tackling crime and disorder in their area.
These organisations have to consider changed working practices, internal priorities and their relationships both with other agencies and with the wider community.
Chapter 1 of “Guidance on Statutory Crime and Disorder Partnerships” (Home Office 1998) includes the following advice on probation service partnership involvement:
Probation Service
Probation services have a statutory duty ‘. . . to participate in . . . arrangements concerned with the prevention of crime or with the relationship between offenders and their victims or the community at large . . .’ (1984 Probation Rules).
The Home Office Plan for the Probation Service 1998–1999 includes a section on ‘Reducing Crime and Supervising Offenders Effectively’. This requires probation services to ‘. . . continue to develop links with the police and local authorities in promoting early intervention with young offenders and promoting local crime prevention strategies.’ Probation services will make a key contribution through the supervision of convicted offenders, especially repeat and dangerous offenders. Such activity is an integral part of the local crime and disorder strategies which the Act will require. These responsibilities are increasingly carried out in close working relationships with key partner agencies such as the police, social services departments, health authorities and the local community. Probation services bring to community safety planning a range of contractual partnerships with voluntary sector providers which address important social dimensions of crime prevention such as drug and alcohol misuse, employability and housing. Furthermore, probation services hold much information about offenders and their offending, offending behaviour and related factors; this information enriches more conventional crime pattern analysis and crime prevention planning;
Community Service Order schemes, supervising the work of offenders in the community, frequently contribute to community safety and related social and environmental improvement works;
Probation services’ work with victims of crime provides valuable information and perspectives which contribute to risk assessment and management, reparation, and fear of crime strategies; and
Probation services will have a key role in the new youth offending teams in helping to tackle youth crime, and their work in family courts reveals parenting issues which are increasingly recognised as a central feature of long-term criminality prevention within community safety strategies.
Getting a copy
A summary of the September 2007 guidance is available here.
Last update: Thursday, August 14, 2008