Intensive supervision and monitoring projects

Intensive supervision and monitoring projects

Anne Worrall Rob C. Mawby Geoff Heath Tim Hope

Home Office Online Report 42/03 The views expressed in this report are those of the authors, not necessarily those of the Home Office (nor do they reflect Government policy).

Contents Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. What are Intensive Supervision and Monitoring (ISM) Projects? 3. The Stoke-on-Trent Prolific Offender Project 4. Case study 5. Cost effectiveness analysis 6. Implementation considerations

7. Transferable lessons and questions 8. References, further reading and other sources of information

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Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank all the past and present members of the Stoke-on-Trent Prolific Offender Project (POP) team for their co-operation throughout the evaluation. We would also like to acknowledge the contribution of the staff from the agencies which worked in partnership with the project team. We are also grateful to the team’s managers for their supportive approach to the evaluation and to their respective organisations, Staffordshire Police and Staffordshire Area Probation Service, for allowing access to the project. In addition we acknowledge with thanks the co-operation of the project participants. The authors are members of the Keele Community Safety Group at Keele University. Geoff Heath moved from Staffordshire University to Keele University during the course of the evaluation and acknowledges the support of Staffordshire University’s Business School from May 2001 to August 2002. Professor Anne Worrall acknowledges the support of the Crime Research Centre, University of Western Australia from August 2002 to July 2003.

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1. Introduction This report is based on the evaluation of the Stoke-on-Trent Prolific Offender Project which operated between June 2000 and September 2002 under funding provided through round two of the Targeted Policing Initiative, one component of the Crime Reduction Programme. The evaluation was concerned with the implementation and effectiveness of the project during this period of 27 months. The project was established as a partnership between Staffordshire Police and the National Probation Service Staffordshire Area to work intensively with up to 16 prolific offenders at any one time with the primary objective of reducing their offending. In designing its evaluation framework, the team adopted the principles of ‘realistic evaluation’, recognizing the embryonic and developing nature of the project. The evaluation comprised process, outcome and cost effectiveness elements. The process and outcome evaluations involved: direct observation of the project’s internal and external processes and activities; documentary analysis of project records; interviews with the project team members, managers, participants and partners; the design of a quantitative data collection framework; and data gathering and analysis. The costeffectiveness analysis involved the application of a Home Office prescribed model to data and information we collected on costs and inputs. The Home Office’s preferred name for these projects is now Intensive Supervision and Monitoring (ISM) Projects and this is the term that will be used throughout this report when referring to the projects in general, although the term ‘Prolific Offender Project’ will be retained when referring specifically to the Stoke-on-Trent Project. The authors wish to acknowledge the pioneering work of the Newcastle under Lyme Prolific Offender Project which exists in the neighbouring town and which was evaluated by some members of the same evaluation team and others between 1998 and 2001 (Worrall et al., 2002). Many insights gained from that project have informed the development of ISMs.

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2. What are Intensive Supervision and Monitoring Projects? Intensive Supervision and Monitoring Projects are premised on the assumption that a small number of offenders are responsible for a large proportion of acquisitive crime and that resources should be targeted on intensively supervising and monitoring this group. As such, these projects have emerged from the convergence of intelligence-led policing and evidencebased probation practice and their impetus has been provided by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act’s emphasis on multi-agency working and information exchange.

Key characteristics of ISMs To date, ISM Projects have been concerned with the reduction of volume property crime, predominantly theft and burglary, although the inclusion of certain types of crimes against the person is now being considered. Their central feature has been the combination of intensive attention from both the police and probation services. The key innovation of the projects has been joint working between two criminal justice agencies that, traditionally, have been wary of each other’s aims and methods. The other characteristics of the projects derive from this central feature: •

The project is staffed by designated police and probation personnel, and located on either police or probation premises.

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Participants in the project are required to meet local criteria that categorise them as ‘prolific’ - that is, among the most persistent property offenders in the locality.

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They are subject to formal court orders of supervision or post-custodial licence.

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Participants are subject to high levels of police monitoring and programmes of intensive probation supervision which seek to address their offending behaviour and other needs such as housing, substance misuse, leisure, education and employment.

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In order to achieve this, there has to be an agreed mechanism of information exchange between participating agencies.

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There is an agreed procedure for swift enforcement in the event of non-compliance or further offending.

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3. The Stoke-on-Trent Prolific Offender Project The team The Stoke-on-Trent project team was based in one office at Hanley police station and comprised three probation service staff and two police service staff, namely: •

a probation officer;

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a probation service officer;

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a police constable (a police sergeant between June 2000 and June 2001);

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a crime analyst; and

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a team assistant (probation service staff).

Management A multi-agency steering group provided strategic management and direction. This met on a quarterly basis and included representatives from the two partner agencies and from Stokeon-Trent Youth Offending Team, North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare Trust and Stokeon-Trent City Council Housing. From its outset, the project formally ran with two lines of management, with the probation and police staff reporting to senior staff in their respective agencies. The team had no designated manager role, the original project proposal stating that the police officer and probation officer would jointly ‘co-ordinate’ the project. However, in practice initially the police sergeant co-ordinated the project and following his departure, the probation officer became the project co-ordinator.

Selection The project identified and targeted prolific offenders who were committing acquisitive crime in the city of Stoke-on-Trent. The selection process involved the crime analyst undertaking research and assessing intelligence to identify potential participants. These were then assessed for project suitability using a scoring matrix and those reaching the threshold score were approached, interviewed and, if suitable, invited to participate. Offenders consented to participate as a condition of a Community Rehabilitation Order (CRO) or they participated on supervised licence following release from prison. During the period from July 2000 to 30 September 2002, 135 offenders were scored and assessed for their suitability for participating in the project. The criteria for selection were established as: •

the offender was known to commit crime in the Stoke-on-Trent area and

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was aged 18 years or over and

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the offender profile and/or intelligence suggested he or she may be responsible for a high volume of acquisitive crime and was active currently, or if in prison, intelligence suggested they were likely to be criminally active upon release and

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the offender scored at least 30 (out of a possible 45) on the matrix (unless there were special circumstances).

The scoring matrix allowed the project team to go beyond targeting offenders who had been convicted of x number of offences over a period of x months, and to take into account factors including ‘criminal type’, the category of crime and its locality, criminal intelligence, current crime trends, victims targeted, the impact of the offender on the locality, on fear of crime, and on the volume of crime. The maximum score which could be achieved was 45. Offenders scoring over 35 were normally offered the project, unless, for example, they were particularly dangerous individuals or were active drug dealers. Offenders scoring between 30 and 35 were assessed for suitability and those scoring under 30 were not normally selected unless there were specific reasons why they should be assessed further. The purpose of the scoring system was to use offending and other information to assess eligibility and suitability for the project. Its purpose was not to predict offending, though other ISMs might wish to incorporate a scoring system as a predictive tool. In addition to completing the scoring matrix for potential participants, the crime analyst encoded the modus operandi of offenders and searched this against undetected offences and incidents in the locality where the offenders operated in order to build up a more complete picture of the scale of offending. These selection methods drew on analysis of current police intelligence, the monitoring of profiles against undetected offences and previous probation and police knowledge and experience. This not only produced a comprehensive and rounded assessment of the offender, but also enabled potential participants who were in prison, or who had been charged and were awaiting sentencing, or who were believed to be actively offending to come to light. Offenders in this last category might be targeted, leading to their arrest, charging and possible project participation. Offenders considered suitable for the project who were already within the criminal justice system were approached through their legal representatives. If they expressed interest in the project, an interview was arranged and conducted jointly by police and probation team members to emphasise that this was a partnership project. If the offender agreed to join the project, this might be made a condition of a community sentence. If the offender received a custodial sentence, then the project team maintained contact during the term of imprisonment and there was the possibility that the offender may join the project on release as part of his/her licence conditions. In the evaluation period, 22 offenders were recruited to the project. Two others were visited in jail and worked with there, but never subsequently joined the project in the community. Most commonly offenders were accepted onto the project as a condition of their CRO, but eight participated as part of their licence conditions following their release from prison. While the project intended to work with up to 16 offenders at any one time, the number that the project worked with in the community was subject to fluctuation and never reached 16. The participants in the community, who were subject to intensive supervision, typically ranged from six to ten, and at the same time the team would be working with past and potential participants in prison, and would also be targeting new people for participation. At one point the team was actively working with 19 offenders, but not all were in the community. The ages of the offenders on joining the project ranged from 19 to 43 and only two were female. All the offenders had previous convictions for acquisitive crime, primarily burglary and vehicle crime, though one offender had a recent history of shoplifting. It is also noteworthy that whilst the project was not established primarily as a project targeting drugs-related crime, the participants had histories of drug and substance misuse. The numbers of previous

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convictions ranged from eight to 129 and the periods in which the participants had been offending prior to joining the project ranged from five months to 18 years. The project worked with these 22 participants during the evaluation period and five completed their designated period with the project without being breached and recalled to prison or resentenced. These five were ‘successful’ in terms of remaining with the project for the length of their order or licence. They were also successful in terms of reduced offending and progress with drugs misuse treatment. In addition they moved towards greater stability in their lives in such areas as their accommodation, relationships with their families and planning for the future. Six of the offenders returned to the project for a second time and one individual was assigned to the project as a CRO condition on three occasions.

Supervision and monitoring Project participants were monitored through police intelligence and analysis systems on a daily basis. They also received intensive supervision across a range of different activities. The supervision package included at least four appointments per week with project and partner agency staff. Participants had to keep the four designated appointments that were arranged for them on an individual basis. During the evaluation period these included: •

A weekly office visit. These were structured and focused on offending behaviour, although they did not follow an accredited programme.

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A weekly home visit. Two members of the project team visited the participant at home. The purpose of the meeting was to meet the participants and their families in their home environment and to monitor their lifestyle, their relations with those they lived with, and the health and well-being of any children. These visits also proved valuable for the gathering and testing of police intelligence.

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Consultations with a substance misuse nurse and, where appropriate, a doctor. During the formative days of the project, these appointments were held on a weekly basis with the substance misuse nurse who provided assessments and counselling, and oversaw random witnessed urine tests. Referrals were made to a doctor to consider detoxification treatments and contacts. As the project developed the doctor increased his involvement, becoming an integral member of the project team.

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A monthly Multi-Agency Planning and Assessment Meeting (MAPAM). This comprised a formal monthly review of all participants. The crime and community safety chief inspector chaired the meetings, which were attended by agencies with an active involvement in the supervision of the participants. All attendees signed a confidentiality agreement. Before each participant was called in, police intelligence on potential offending was discussed and the agencies present reviewed the participant’s progress. The participant then came into the meeting and progress was reviewed against the formal minuted targets that had been set at the previous meeting. The chief inspector always formally reminded participants that they were on a crime reduction programme and that they were being carefully monitored. If police intelligence had suggested suspicious sightings or associations, then the participant was challenged and required to provide an explanation.

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Employment/work assessment interviews. The Work Experience Centre (WEC), a registered charity funded by the probation service, provided this input. The WEC worker provided a travelling job clinic to offenders in nine locations in North Staffordshire. The project formed a strong working relationship with the WEC worker, who initially worked with project participants on a weekly basis, but in the later stages, the contacts were less regular and were organised on a demand-led basis.

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Healthy lifestyles sessions. These included a range of activities that were held at the local YMCA, utilising the sporting and computer based facilities. Different activities were introduced which included basic cooking and art-based work.

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Attendance at the ARCH day-centre. This involved life skills work and the provision of advice on accommodation, health, benefits and the Prince’s Trust.

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Occasional activities. The most ambitious activity in which the project team and participants became involved was the making of a short video film. Participants worked with the New Vic Theatre Borderlines team to produce Day by Day, chronicling the dangers of drug addiction and drug dealing. This was shown at the theatre at a one-off screening.

This programme of intensive supervision was a defining aspect of the project. While participants were bound to four appointments weekly, commonly there were a greater number of contacts. New participants, for example, required greater supervision initially. In addition, because the participants were, or had been, drugs users, their lifestyles were often chaotic. Consequently there were periods when a participant reached a crisis point and relied on the project team for intensive daily support. This support extended to participants’ families, whom team members worked with as one means of attempting to stabilise the participants. In some cases the families contacted project team members secretly, seeking support and advice, and providing information on their partners or children. The regime of intensive supervision involved the co-ordination and co-operation of many organisations, but the contributions of the health representatives were integral to the project. Initially, the substance misuse nurse provided a valuable service, and the doctor’s role became increasingly influential, since the misuse of drugs ran through the operation of the project. Taking drugs did not mean that participants automatically breached their conditions for project participation, but it did influence their capacity to participate in activities, their ability to find work, their reliability to attend appointments, their state of mind, and their relations with family and the project team. Drugs use also influenced their associations and how they funded the purchasing of drugs. Therefore an early step in project participation was fasttracking an appointment with the doctor, who firmly believed that stabilisation of the participants’ drugs use underpinned everything that followed. Taking this approach, the project doctor became a genuine team member, working with the other members rather than providing a detached service to them. He conducted consultations with the participants which he described as being as intensive as those he had conducted in inpatient psychiatric units. He also met offenders in times of crisis. He contributed forcibly to MAPAMs, challenging offenders’ behaviour and counselling their families and partners. The doctor-project relationship thus became more complex and less regimented than that found on other projects, such as the Drug Treatment and Testing Orders (DTTOs), which have the services of a doctor one day per week on a session basis and where there is a lower level of multi-disciplinary input. It is clear from the supervision regime described that this project aspired to a framework of support that was different to other programmes, providing a flexible, responsive service that drew on a range of specialists who would work on a one-to-one basis. Participants considered the project to be unlike their previous experiences of probation and community service. The differences they perceived related to the intensity of contact, and the level of support from the project team. Most said the project had changed their views of the probation service, their previous experiences of the agency being less positive. Unsurprisingly the participants joined the project with an entrenched distrust and dislike of the police, but mentioned particular acts of support that individual team members had provided, indicating respect for the team, if not the agencies they represented. The participants were also in agreement that they valued the combination of the project’s different elements and activities. They perceived the project to have additional objectives to preventing reoffending, namely assisting reintegration into society and providing support across a range of areas, particularly helping with drugs problems.

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In addition to supervising the participants’ lifestyles through the regime of appointments, the team also warned the participants that the police would monitor them closely. While the analyst constantly scanned for reported crimes that met the modus operandi of participants, incoming intelligence on their movements and associations was constantly reviewed, and the offenders continued to be watched carefully by local policing unit (LPU) officers. The level of monitoring was increased if participants behaved in a manner which suggested they were returning to offending. Although the offenders had joined the project in the knowledge that it involved intensive monitoring, some found it uncomfortable that the police knew so much about their movements and associations, and resented being the subject of so much intelligence gathering. Others took it in their stride, regarding it as an acceptable part of the project’s regime. While the project was clearly supportive, its purpose was also to provide a structure to the participants’ lives that they were bound to adhere to. The team issued weekly diaries to the participants detailing the activities they were expected to undertake. Four of the weekly activities were designated breachable appointments and participants risked breach proceedings if they missed these appointments. As the project team was supervised to the probation service’s national standards, its cases were audited and achieved commendable standards of documentation for levels of contact, and for processing breach proceedings. During the evaluation period the team instigated breach proceedings on 17 occasions against 13 participants.

Outcomes Reducing offending The offending behaviour of the participants during the two years of project implementation was analysed, specifically looking at the period from the start date of each individual up to 30 September 2002 and, where appropriate, differentiating between ‘on-the-project’ and ‘postproject’ periods for those participants completing their involvement with the project. However, it is not enough to assess the issue of reduced offending solely with reference to the participants’ own behaviour since any observed changes over this period may be due to factors other than being part of the project. For example, it is known that reoffending rates reduce with age and therefore observed levels of reduced offending may be due to ‘maturation’ out of crime. It is feasible also that other factors, influences and experiences in the participants’ lives unconnected to the project might influence their desistance or continued offending. It is necessary to find some additional means of ‘controlling’ for these factors in order to isolate what part of their subsequent offending/non-offending careers might be due to the project. The normal approach to addressing this issue is to make a comparison with another group of offenders, who have not experienced the intervention being studied, namely a ‘control group’. Perfect matching between participants and controls is rarely possible and is certainly not in this case where prospective subjects have not been allocated at random either to an ‘experimental’ or ‘control’ group. However, it is possible to form a comparison group which may serve the purpose of highlighting project outcomes with some measurable reliability, though with the important caveat that any observed differences could be due to another unmeasured set of influences, rather than the project. To compile a ‘comparison’ group of offenders it is important to compare like-with-like so that we can get as close as possible to ‘matching’ participants with comparators in order to rule out differences between the groups other than presence on the project. Therefore the ‘population’ from which comparators should be drawn should approximate to the local population of prolific offenders active in the Stoke-on-Trent division and at the same times as those selected for project participation. The Basic Command Unit (BCU) intelligence cell had an ongoing list of prolific offenders identified across Stoke-on-Trent. The crime analyst was able to draw on this pool for potential comparators and also assessed on an ongoing basis

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other offenders coming to notice through her routine scanning activities. In selecting comparators, the criteria applied by the crime analyst were: •

same gender as project participant;

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similar age to project participant;

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in the community and available for offending during the same time periods as the project participant;

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similar crime types committed as project participant;

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similar crime levels to project participant; and

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offending in similar geographical area to project participant.

In practice the first three criteria were prioritised where difficulties arose in matching across the six highlighted characteristics. The crime analyst completed the matrix for potential comparison group members. Those offenders who reached the threshold score and matched the required criteria were assessed as a potential match for a project participant. Applying this 1 process, a comparison group was assembled. Since each of the 22 participants during the study period was matched to his or her own ‘comparator’, the estimation of the effect of the programme is relatively straightforward, requiring an appropriate statistical test of the differences between the two groups in their prior, on-project and post-project convictions: •

There was no significant difference in pre-project convictions between the participant and comparison groups. This confirms the general robustness of the matching procedures, producing similar average numbers of convictions for both groups prior to the participants being selected for the project.

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Participants had a significantly lower number of convictions, on average, while participating on the project compared with the comparison group, who remained at large in the community (p.