Desistance and Reducing Reoffending
Desistance from crime - the process through which people cease and refrain from offending - is a research topic that is of significant import for criminal justice policy and practice. Staff of the SCCJR have already made a number of contributions to debates about how policy and practice could and should respond to the findings of desistance research. For example, we contributed to a recent ESRC/Scottish Executive Public Policy Seminar on Reducing Reoffending (for details see: here)
A review of the implications of desistance research for criminal justice policy, which provides 8 key principles to promote desistance through the justice system, has recently been published by the Scottish Consortium on Crime and Criminal Justice. This review has been cited both in House of Lords debates on the Offender Managment Act and by the Cabinet Secretary for Justice in Scotland. The report can be accessed in project documents below.
We also contributed an important literature review on 'Reducing Reoffending: Key Skills' to the 21st Century Review of Social Work (see: ReducingReoffending.pdf)
More generally, debates about desistance and criminal justice social work are also covered in some detail in McNeill, F. and Whyte, B. (2007), Reducing Reoffending: Social Work and Community Justice in Scotland (Cullompton: Willan).
Project Documents
Project Contacts
All Projects
- A Comparative Analysis of Community Service in Belgium, Holland, Scotland and Spain
- Policing organised crime: effectively measuring performance
- 'Holistic' interventions with women involved in the criminal justice system.
- A profile of female offenders within the Lothian and Borders
- A Rapid Evidence Assessment of the Drivers of Perception of Anti-Social Behaviour
- Alcohol Misuse and Domestic Abuse
- All Change
- An investigation into the environmental impact of off-license premises on residential neighbourhoods
- Analysing the Scottish Crime Survey Over Time
- Analysis of Supervision Skills by Juvenile Justice Workers
- AQMeN
- Assessing Dynamic Risk in Intimate Partner Offenders
- Assessing Risk in Intimate Partner Offenders
- Audit of a sample of alcohol outlets in Glasgow
- Building Safer Communities: ESRC Engaging with Scottish Local Authorities initiaitve
- Circles of Support and Accountability
- Collaboration of Researchers for the Effective Development of Offender Supervision (CREDOS)
- Community Policing in Scotland
- Comparing Crime Surveys Across the UK
- Compliance with Community Penalties
- Consensus / Consenso
- Crime and Justice Research Training and Development
- Cultural Change in Community Justice
- Desistance and Reducing Reoffending
- Different Systems, Similar Outcomes? Tracking Attrition in Reported Rape Cases
- Diversion from Prosecution to Social Work
- Drinking and Drug Use in the Community: A Survey of Young Offenders, 2007
- Economics of Crime
- Ethnography of Penal Policy
- Ethnography Reading Group
- European Postgraduate and Early Stage Researchers Working Group
- European Society of Criminology Working Group on Community Sanctions
- Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Home Detention Curfew (HDC) and the Prison's Open Estate
- Evaluation of the Grampian Return Home Welfare Interview (RHWI) pilot
- Evaluation of the National Parenting Development Project Project (NPDP, Aberlour Child Care Trust).
- Evaluation of the Women in Focus Programme
- Evaluation of Up-to-us Young Women’s Project
- Families of Nations and Criminal Justice Outcomes
- Football Banning Orders in Scotland: Evaluating their operation
- Gender Equality Duty and Scottish Criminal Justice - EOC Guidance
- Implicit Thinking in Intimate Partner violence
- Incarceration, social control and human rights.
- Juvenile Justice in New South Wales
- Learning about alcohol: Influences of family context
- Metaphors in Policy
- Organised Crime Mapping Project
- Pathways into organise crime
- Pathways to Recovery Seminar Series
- Policy Responses to Gender Based Crime in Scotland
- Prison Privatisation
- Probation Histories
- Public procurement processes and resillience against infiltration of organized crime
- Punishing Spaces, Working Spaces: Artist in Residence at SCCJR
- Quality of Engagement in Probation Practice
- Racism and social marginalisation research study
- Reconviction among Drug Court participants
- Reconviction among young people sentenced in the pilot Youth Courts
- SCJS User Guide
- Scoping Study into Quantitative Methods Capacity Building in Scotland
- Scottish Prisons Commission Report
- Services for Young Runaways: A Scoping Study
- Social Enquiry and Sentencing in the Sheriff Courts
- The Governance of Security and the Analysis of Risk for Sporting Mega-events: Security Planning for the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games
- The International Market in Illicit Antiquities
- Understanding the drivers of the female prison population in Scotland
- User Views of Punishment
- Using the Scottish Offenders Index for Research
- Women, Punishment and Community Sanctions - Human Rights and Social Justice
- Working Lunches at Ivy Lodge
- Young Women and Violence
- Youth Gangs and Knife Carrying
- Youth Violence in Scotland
