Introduction

This final chapter sums up the key ideas about risk, responsivity and diversity, spelling out the messages for practice along the way. It sets the reader a number of challenges to take forward in their own development and also in one-to-one work with offenders.

In Part One, the book introduces the concepts of risk, responsivity and diversity, having briefly charted the changing nature of face-to-face work with offenders. It notes the move away from faith-driven approaches and highly individualised practice towards a more organisationally accountable approach to service delivery and the development of the concept of evidence-based practice. Standardised approaches to case management pose the potential to blunt the practitioner's sensitivities to the detail of offender's lives and issues of risk and responsivity. Such a blunting of sensitivity can lead to ineffective and overly generalised interventions. It can also limit the ability of practice to provide interventions to which a diverse population of offenders can respond.

It is curious that in social work and most other areas of public service there has been significant development in terms of service user involvement, both in terms of valuing their perspective, but also using that input to shape and evaluate the delivery of services. Pycroft (2006) suggests that this has not happened so readily in criminal justice because service users in this sphere are more readily seen as being the courts, or victims, but not the offenders themselves. It is almost as if there is reluctance to accept the importance of listening to offenders, in case this tips the balance away from victims and the wider community. The voice of the offender is, however, an important source of information in developing understanding of offending behaviour and how to reduce it. This will be apparent to the reader in the detail of much of the research that has been drawn on in Parts Two to Five of this book.

In Part Two, the issue of working with offender groups who fall outside the majority, adult, White, male offenders, is explored. These chapters, which focus on offenders from certain groups (women, young people and minority ethnic offenders), suggest that their diversity should be appreciated and that this will have implications in terms of how they are worked with.