Offender Management Community Scoping of London Gang ...

5. Offender Management Models
5.1 Holistic management of serious group offenders
Many of the problems and solutions identified in this report can be summarised
by integrating suggestions made by some of the interviewees that are
congruent with the research literature and with our scoping of gang dynamics.
These sources lead us to suggest a “holistic model” of offender management,
which can be differentiated from both the “internal model” and the “multi-agency
model”.
These models represent ideal types and inevitably miss out some of the
complexities of everyday practice. We present them here as ways to think about
the process of working with serious group offenders under probation
supervision. They recognise the wide variety of needs that serious group
offenders are likely to have. These include needs for housing, education,
employment, welfare advice, legal advice, and also less easily assessed needs
for emotional and spiritual support.
The internal model is represented by the diagram in figure 5.1 below. This
shows a way of working that restricts contacts to those within the probation
service. The offender manager may refer the offender to specific interventions
(such as offending behaviour programmes) or to support around issues of
employment, training and education. But there is no systematic attempt to link
the offender to services and agencies outside probation provision. This restricts
opportunities to gain more information from outside probation that will help the
offender manager to work safely and effectively with the offender. It limits the
services provided to the offender to those that are currently provided by the
probation service. And it means that no relationships are developed that can
help offenders to exit and desist from serious group and other offending when
they are no longer under probation supervision.
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