Mark's Blog

Hi everyone

I’m heading up the blog this week with a bit of insight into our approach to Justice clients…

I attended a Through the Gates Workshop at the Ministry of Justice recently for which the strapline was ‘Learning from Research and Best Practice’.

To be honest it was a bit boring on the whole but Flora Fitzalan Howard from the Evidence Based Practice Team delivered a presentation about Procedural Justice, which was a new concept to me.

The premise was about flipping the discussion about offending behaviour and instead of saying “why do people offend” look at “why do most people not offend”, because as a rule, people are compliant and do what is expected of them, even though they could probably get away with more.

It turns out it’s related to factors concerning the individual’s perception of fairness.

If they feel they are treated respectfully, are able to have a voice and that those who have authority over them are trustworthy and have sincere motives that’s good enough for them to stay on the straight and narrow.

This made a lot of sense to me and resonates with our thought about why people engage well with our services: because by and large we are seen as fair, we seem well motivated and our clients feel listened to.

At this point I felt I had learned something new and valuable. Then others in the room who had been around the Justice system longer than me pointed out that this had been initially been a recommendation from the Woolfe Report of 1996, which was published as a consequence of the prison riots earlier that decade and there was a massive push to implement it across probation at that time. It had just been superseded by the next big thing.

I suppose the point is that trends come and go and although it is great to have the latest theory in this and that at your disposal, if you try to be nice to folk, listen to what they say and make them feel like you are bothered, you won’t go far wrong.

Onto the rest of this week’s blog…

Sean Wimhurst

Head of Justice Services