Back To The Future
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/026455050004700402 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
235
Back
To
The
Future:
Housing
And
Support
For
Offenders
The
Probation
Service
has
an
established
tradition
of
identifying
and
meeting
the
housing
and
related
support
needs
of
offenders.
However,
under
the
Government’s
Supporting
People
initiative
and
the
changes
proposed
in
the
Housing
Green
Paper,
current
arrangements
will
change
dramatically.
Ensuring
these
changes
do
not
disadvantage
offenders
will
be
a
complex
task
not
made
easier
by
the
News
of
the
World’s
campaign
to
name
child
sex
offenders.
Here,
Diane
Barkley
and
Steve
Collett
argue
that
offenders
can
gain
considerably
from
the
future
shape
of
housing
services
providing
that
both
practitioners
and
managers
engage
fully
in
the
new
arrangements.
he
hackneyed
and
oft
repeated
phrase
of
the
then
Leader
of
the
Opposition
that
a
new
Labour
government
would
be
&dquo;tough
on
crime
and
on
the
causes
of
crime&dquo;
now
seems
to
ring
true,
particularly
in
relation
to
the
former
if
not
the
latter
target.
As
the
increasingly
centrally
driven
and
limiting
What
Works
initiative
bears
down
on
manager
and
practitioner
alike,
it
is
clear
that
for
the
Probation
Service,
getting
tough
on
crime
means
more
demanding
and
structured
programmes
of
supervision
for
offenders.
This
focus
on
the
offender
and
their
individual
cognitive
and
skills
deficits
is
not
unwelcome,
but
both
implicitly
and
explicitly
it
locates
the
causes
of
crime
with
and
within
the
individual.
This
process,
which
Shaw
and
Hannah-Moffat
(2000)
refer
to
as
the
’responsibilisation’
of
offenders,
will
be
counter-productive
if
probation
and
other
service-providers
cannot
respond
to
the
more
general
needs
of
offenders.
These
needs
often
form
the
wider
context
within
which
offending
takes
place.
Back to the Future
Access
to
decent
quality
housing
and
related
individual
support
is
one
of
those
significant
contexts
which
probation
services
have
a
solid
track
record
of
working
with
and
developing
at
a
local
level.
As
Jeremy
Sandford’s
seminal
1966
play,
Cathy
Come
Home
was
highlighting
to
the
wider
public
the
inadequacies
of
the
post-war
Welfare
State
in
terms
of
housing
provision
for
families,
the
work
of
probation
staff
with
single
homeless
offenders
was
specifically
identifying
the
revolving
door
of
custodial
and
institutional
containment.
Research
undertaken
in
the
early
1970s
by
the
Howard
League
confirmed
the
views
of
many
practitioners
by
clearly
identifying
the
link
between
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