Compliance with Community Orders: Front-line Perspectives and Evidence-Based Practices

Abstract

Studies and official statistics consistently show that many people serving community orders in England and Wales fail to complete their orders for negative reasons. According to the most recent official statistics, of the number of community orders terminated in the quarter ending December 2011, approximately 34 per cent of those serving community orders did not complete their orders successfully. Similarly, a significant proportion of those released on licence and placed under probation supervision were recalled to prison for breaching the conditions of their licence (Ministry of Justice 2012). Other studies have found that many people fail to complete offender behaviour programmes (Hollin et al. 2008; Kemshall et al. 2002; Palmer et al. 2007). Despite these findings, little is known about the strategies front-line practitioners employ to encourage compliance and how they deploy these strategies within ever-changing policy contexts. Equally, although there are now useful developments in the field of compliance theory (Bottoms 2001; Robinson and McNeill 2008) and evidence-based compliance strategies (Andrews and Bonta 2010), insufficient attention has been paid to the views of front-line practitioners regarding the strategies they employ. Consequently, very little is known about front-line practices and how these parallel or diverge from emerging theoretical perspectives on compliance and evidence-based practices. There is a need to examine these issues in order to find out how best to ensure that theoretical understandings and the relevant evidence base can inform policy and practice.