'The Quest for Success: Evaluation of an Integrated Offender Management Scheme'

Over recent years there has been considerable focus on interventions with, and management of repeat offenders. Under the Labour Government Prolific and other Priority Offender (PPO) schemes were developed, which focused on offenders who were identified locally as committing a disproportionate amount of crime and harm within in their communities. In 2009, under the guise of ‘maximising the impact’ (Home Office 2009), this approach was ‘refreshed’ and brought within the over-arching integrated offender management (IOM) strategy. This continues to be a politicised area of the criminal justice system under the current Coalition Government, with pressures arising from on-going policy initiatives and resource constraints. This paper reports on research that was commissioned from Plymouth University by a local IOM multi-agency project, initially to explore its effectiveness over a one-year period and subsequently to carry out a review of the costs of the scheme (SERIO 2011). Our paper explores the process of undertaking the research and interrogates some of the findings in order to explore and analyse relevant theoretical, policy and practice issues. In particular, it examines some of the practical challenges of developing and maintaining a monitoring framework and investigates aspects relating to the multi-agency arrangements. It concludes by comparing and contrasting this research with other research studies in this area, where tensions have been noted between the high hopes of research findings ‘proving’ effectiveness in this area and the complexities and longer-term challenges of rehabilitative work with such offenders.