Following the changes in Government Machinery that took place on the 09/05/2007, this area of work has moved from the Home Office; and is now managed by the Ministry of Justice. These pages have been left here as a navigational aid – and will be removed in time.
The
programme of work carried out by the probation research section
is responsive to the needs of the Probation Unit for information
on the effectiveness of the probation service in achieving its stated
goals of reducing crime and supervising offenders effectively.
A number of recently completed studies have evaluated new national
initiatives, such as the use of electronic monitoring of curfew
orders (Mair and Mortimer, 1996) and the introduction of automatic
conditional release (Maguire et al, 1996). Other issues addressed
in recently completed research or in progress include:
The
assessment of risk of reoffending, allocation to suitable programmes
and management of risk in the course of supervision order.
The
way community orders and post-release licences are enforced, having
regard to National Standards.
The
evidence for claims that cognitive-behavioural approaches are
effective in reducing reoffending.
The
effectiveness of employment and training work with offenders.
Work
with the Prison Service to evaluate the effectiveness of through
care arrangements with
drug misusing offenders.
The use and effectiveness of drug treatment and testing orders.
November 1996 saw the launch of the first version of the Offender
Group Reconviction Scale (OGRS), a statistical risk score for use
by the probation service in England and Wales.
The aim of the score was to estimate, from a limited amount of information,
the probability that a convicted offender will be reconvicted at
least once within two years of their release from custody or from
the start of their community sentence for any type of offence.
The score was intended for probation officers to provide them with
guidance in their writing of Pre-Sentence Reports (PSR\'s).
It was emphasised though that the score was only an aid to judgement.
Probation officers, were advised to use OGRS but to use their judgement
to take account of all the special circumstances connected with
a case. The score did not play any formal part in the judicial process.
OGRS though has also been widely used as a research tool to evaluate
the effectiveness of offender treatment programmes.
OGRS was based on a logistic regression analysis of data on a large
sample of offenders who had been convicted in the recent past, and
whose subsequent two year history of reconvictions had been traced
through official records (i.e. using the Home Offices Offenders
Index)
There was a demand for a national risk assessment tool. A number
of probation forces had developed their own scales in an attempt
to quantify the risk of reconviction, but these tended to be based
on small local samples, to have somewhat informal statistical methods,
and they differed widely in their choice of covariates. The development
of OGRS was an attempt to establish a uniform national score. It
was based on a more careful statistical analysis, and used data
on a much larger and a more representative sample of offenders.
By providing an estimate of what reconviction rates might be expected
at a national level for any given mix of covariate values, the score
provided a basis on which to assess temporal changes and differences
between administrative areas in observed patterns of sentencing
and reconvictions.
For further information please contact Ricky Taylor Tel: 020 7 273
3452
