Offender Management: Reducing hazards and building resilience
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14613557231176367 |
| Author | Noreen Tehrani |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Original Research Articles |
Offender Management: Reducing hazards
and building resilience
Noreen Tehrani
Noreen Tehrani Associates Ltd, UK
Abstract
This article examines the psychological impact of working in a multi-agency team managing registered sexual and violent
offenders. A review of the nature of the role and data collected from psychological surveillance identifies personal and
work-related hazard and resilience factors. The study found that much of the variance in anxiety, depression, post-trau-
matic stress disorder and secondary trauma could be predicted by the psychological surveillance survey’s resilience and
hazard measures; each mental health condition had a different set of predictors with some common features. The findings
are a first step towards increasing the resilience of multi-agency offender management teams with suggestions for redu-
cing hazards and improving individual and team resilience. These findings can help reduce the mental health problems
experienced by offender managers working with registered sexual and violent offenders in prisons, probation and
policing.
Keywords
offender management, mental health, psychological surveillance, well-being
Submitted 14 Jan 2023, Revise received 17 Mar 2023, accepted 24 Apr 2023
Introduction
One of the most complex and demanding roles in policing is
that of a management of sexual and violent offenders
(MOSOVO) officer. The belief behind placing violent and
sex offenders on a register is that this will help to protect
the community from the possibility of registered offenders
harming children and other vulnerable people. The goal of
police and probation officers is to deter offenders from
becoming involved in harmful and illegal behaviour
(Mydlowski, 2022); it is not being named on the register
that provides the protection, but the efforts of offender
manager (OM) teams working with registered offenders.
As the number of offenders placed on the Violent and
Sex Offender Register (ViSOR) increases annually, redu-
cing the incidence of re-offending becomes more challen-
ging for OMs. A review of re-offending has highlighted
the lack of supervision in managing offenders as the
primary causal factor in re-offending (Her Majesty’s
Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP), 2020). The HMIP
finding that the supervision of offenders is an essential
element in offender management raises the question of
the nature of offender supervision, the number of skills
required to protect the community and rehabilitate offen-
ders, and the emotional and psychological burden carried
by the OM teams of police and probation service officers.
The MOSOVO role requires OMs to have a wide range
of skills (College of Policing, 2020), including assessing the
level of risk the offender poses to the community, develop-
ing a strategy for eliminating or mitigating this risk and a
plan ensuring the offender’s adherence. OMs also have to
protect the well-being and safety of the offender, who
may be at risk of physical harm from members of the
public who do not want offenders living in their neighbour-
hood (Cubellis et al., 2018).
In addition to the risks created by offenders and their
propensity to recidivism (Hanson et al., 2003), OMs are
also at personal risk of mental health problems related to
Corresponding author:
Noreen Tehrani, Noreen Tehrani Associates Ltd, Baronsfield Road,
Twickenham TW1 2QU, UK.
Email: noreen.tehrani@noreentehrani.com
Original Research Article
International Journal of
Police Science & Management
2023, Vol. 25(4) 379–388
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/14613557231176367
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