Book Reviews
Author | Marian Duggan |
Pages | 223-229 |
223
BOOK REVIEWS
Edited by Marian Duggan
REOFFENDING: A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE TO WORKING WITH
OFFENDERS AND OFFENDING BE HAVIOUR IN THE CRIMINAL
JUSTICE SYSTEM
Jonathan Hussey (2012) Bennion Kearney, 204pp. (pbk) £14.99, ISBN 978-095705114 - 0
Jonathan Hussey has taken on a challenging task. He want s to introduce people at the
start of their careers in working with offender s, to the complexities of offender
management. Laudable though this enterprise is, the resul t is unsatisfactory.
He does write in an accessible, conversational style. A lso, some of the right ideas are put
before us - there is muc h that is sensible and necessa ry for practitioners in the first two
chapters. The chapter on ‘The Working Relationship’ contains a great deal of useful
material, extending from the cycle of change and motivational approaches to issues suc h
as body language and pro-social modelling. There are though a number of substantive
problems with his approach.
First of all, the offender is presented to us as though (s)he is waitin g for the offender
manager to come up with an assessm ent and a change p lan. The professional makes an
assessment, comes up with a plan and this is then ‘put d own on paper and presented to
the offender.’ (pg 18) The offender you would think is the problem and the professional
the answer. Mr Huss ey then has to look at how to ‘sell’ the plan to the offender, which to
me suggests he is already in the wrong place to support a change process owned by the
person facing change.
The material on assessment is not clear about the complex nature of ‘risk’, with the terms
‘risk assessment’ and ‘needs ass essment’ often seeming interch angeable. People coming
new to this work need to be able to analyse risks with more precision than this, especially
if risks that are easily overlooked are to be incorporated into assessments. It is
unfortunate that risk to children gets no mention in the sect ion on assessment, and has no
clear profile in his discussion of domestic violence.
British Journal of Community Justice
©2013 Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield
ISSN 1475-0279
Vol. 11(2-3): 223-229
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