Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements and Youth Justice

153 Pages·2009·1.5 MB·English

by  Kerry Baker

RESEARCHING CRIMINAL JUSTICE SERIES
Multi-Agency
Public Protection
Arrangements
(MAPPA) &
Youth Justice
Edited by Kerry Baker and Alex Sutherland
Multi-Agency Public Protection
Arrangements and Youth
Justice
Edited by Kerry Baker and Alex Sutherland
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by The Policy Press
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ISBN 978 1 84742 215 6
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Contents
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................................iv
Notes on contributors.................................................................................................................................v
Introduction ..............................................................................................1
Alex Sutherland and Kerry Baker
Part One: Young people and MAPPA: current policy and practice
1 Setting the scene: risk, welfare and rights...........................................17
Sarah Jones and Kerry Baker
2 MAPPA: learning the lessons for young offenders .............................25
Hazel Kemshall and Jason Wood
3 Youth Offending Teams and MAPPA: past problems, current ........43
challenges and future prospects
Alex Sutherland
4 Promoting public protection in youth justice: challenges for .........59
policy and practice
David Monk
Part Two: Risk management through MAPPA: the right approach for
young people?
5 Young people, serious offending and managing risk: a Scottish .....75
perspective
Fergus McNeill
6 MAPPA as ‘risk in action’: discretion and decision making ..............99
Kerry Baker
7 MAPPA for kids: discourses of security, risk and children’s rights ...111
Noel Whitty
Conclusion ..............................................................................................125
Kerry Baker and Alex Sutherland
Appendix: Qualifying offences for MAPPA categories 1 and 2 .......135
iii
Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements and Youth Justice
Acknowledgements
This book has developed from a study and symposium both funded by the Youth
Justice Board (YJB) for England and Wales and we would like to thank the YJB for its
generous support in these endeavours.
We are grateful to the research participants who gave up their time for the original
study and whose ideas and thoughts drove a lot of the debate and subsequent work.
We are indebted to the presenters and participants at the symposium for their views
and engagement with the issue of Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements
(MAPPA) and youth justice. Our thanks also go to Gill Kelly, Bernadette Wilkinson
and David Goode for their helpful comments. Finally, we would like to thank our co-
contributors for the time and effort they have given to this work.
Kerry Baker and Alex Sutherland
iv
Notes on contributors
Kerry Baker is a researcher at the Centre for Criminology at the University of
Oxford and also a consultant to the Youth Justice Board (YJB) on issues of assessment,
risk and public protection. She has been closely involved in the development and
validation of the Asset assessment tool currently used by all Youth Offending Teams
(YOTs) in England and Wales. She has experience of working with both practitioners
and policy makers in this field and has developed guidance for youth justice staff on a
range of public protection issues.
Sarah Jones worked at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford
between 2000 and 2007, completing various research and evaluation projects. One
of these projects was an investigation of the use of MAPPA for young people. Sarah is
currently the Research Manager at Revolving Doors Agency in London – a research
and development charity dedicated to the needs of people who are caught in a cycle
of crisis, crime and mental illness.
Hazel Kemshall is currently Professor of Community and Criminal Justice at De
Montfort University. Her research interests include the assessment and management
of high-risk offenders, Multi-Agency Public Protection Panels and community
responses to sexual offenders. She has written extensively on risk, public protection
and dangerousness, and has completed research for the Home Office, Scottish
Executive and the Economic and Social Research Council.
Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the Glasgow School
of Social Work and at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University
of Glasgow. Prior to becoming an academic in 1998, Fergus worked for a number
of years in residential drug rehabilitation and as a criminal justice social worker.
His research interests have addressed a range of criminal justice issues including
sentencing, community penalties and youth justice. Latterly his work has focused
on the policy and practice implications of research evidence about the process of
desistance from offending.
David Monk is Head of Practice Framework and Innovation at the YJB for England
and Wales and was previously London Regional Manager for the YJB. Before that, he
worked for the London Probation Area and as Assistant Chief Probation Officer in
the late 1990s held policy and strategic responsibility for the probation service’s work
with sex offenders. His current responsibilities at the YJB include (among others)
oversight of developments in relation to assessment, public protection, safeguarding
and serious incidents involving children and young people in community and secure
settings.
v
Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements and Youth Justice
Alex Sutherland is currently studying for a doctorate in sociology at the University
of Oxford. His thesis explores the application of explanatory theories of crime to
adolescent substance use. He was a researcher at the Centre for Criminology at
the University of Oxford between 2001 and 2007. During this time he worked on a
number of projects, notably the evaluation of Intensive Supervision and Surveillance
Programmes and a recent collaboration with Sarah Jones on MAPPA in youth
justice.
Noel Whitty is Professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Nottingham. His
current research is centred on prisoner and ex-offender governance within the UK,
focusing in particular on the relationship between risk assessment, risk management
practices and human rights law.
Jason Wood is a senior lecturer in youth and community development at De
Montfort University with a particular interest in the community management of high-
risk offenders. In 2006, he led a study into the operation and experience of MAPPA
as part of the Child Sex Offender Review commissioned by the Home Secretary.
Together with Hazel Kemshall, he has published numerous chapters and articles on
risk, public protection and the development of MAPPA.
vi
Introduction
Alex Sutherland and Kerry Baker
Public protection, particularly of children and the most vulnerable, is this Government’s
priority. (David Blunkett, cited in Home Office, 2002, p 5)
The way we deal with those who break the law is fundamental to the health of our
society. (Charles Clarke, cited in Home Office, 2006, p 5)
Framing the debate
P
ublic protection is always high on the political agenda in one form or another.
The phrase ‘public protection’ began life within the criminal justice sphere
as part of the government White Paper Crime, Justice and Protecting the
Public (Home Office, 1990, cited in Merrington and Stanley, 2007, p 437). Since its
introduction into the political lexicon, ‘public protection’ has been transformed
into an umbrella term to cover a range of activities by local authorities and other
government agencies,1 but within the context of this book the phrase relates solely
to serious offending (that is, violent and sexual offences). Although the phrase
may have been formally introduced fairly recently, ‘[t]he probation service has
been accountable for the protection of the public from serious offending ever
since it took responsibility for the supervision of released prisoners in the 1960s’
(Merrington and Stanley, 2007, p 437). A long-running topic within the criminal
justice literature has been what the state’s response should be to those individuals
who threaten serious harm to others (see Bottoms, 1977). Current debates in
criminology focus on security and the governance of criminal justice (Zedner,
2003; Loader and Walker, 2007). Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements
(MAPPA), as their name suggests, are a part of this debate. Until now, much of the
discussion about MAPPA has focused on their application to adults. More recently,
however, there has been a growing academic and political interest in the use of
MAPPA for young people. The ways in which organisations, charged with the task
of managing the risks posed by young people, view and treat those they are working
with is a critical nexus where conflicting assumptions about ‘being young’ are laid
bare, and where the difficulties encountered by criminal justice agencies in working
with the young are most apparent. The contributions included in this book offer
insights into these issues from a range of perspectives and highlight a number of
areas, both practical and theoretical, that require further attention.
1
Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements and Youth Justice
A (brief) history of risk
There is an extensive literature devoted to the ‘rise of risk’ across a range of subjects,
and it will not be repeated here.2 There are, however, some relevant key points
arising from this literature that serve as useful terms of reference before delving
further into this book.
The first important point from this literature is that the concept of risk has moved
from being something that is ‘unknowable’ to that which appears ‘predictable’. Lupton
(1999) points out that the hazards of plague, war and famine were more prevalent for
past generations than they are now. However, at the time, these events were seen
as natural and essentially outside of human control – for example as an act of God
(Ewald, 1993). The progression from risk as an unknowable externality to something
calculable has been attributed to a wide range of factors (see Kemshall et al, 1997;
Lupton, 1999; Rigakos and Hadden, 2001). The important point is that increasingly
the mathematical and scientific approaches to risk supplanted previous ideas for
explaining human behaviour. In the midst of this, Castell (1991, p 281) argues that the
‘scientific’ approach led away from the idea of ‘a subject or concrete individual’ to one
where the person is atomised into ‘a combination of factors, the factors of risk. Thus,
if we understand risk to be ‘the effect of a combination of abstract factors’ (1991, p
287) affecting the likelihood of an undesirable behaviour occurring, this, it is argued,
makes human behaviour more susceptible to analysis and prediction.
A second point of interest is the (re)conceptualisation of risk as a negative. The
modernist understanding of risk presents it as a morally neutral term, relating only to
the probability of an event occurring. However, the 20th century has seen a transferral
of this meaning away from neutral probability to negative danger. As Douglas makes
clear makes clear ‘[t]he word risk now means danger; high risk means lots of danger’
(1992, p 24; emphasis in original).
Finally, we should be conscious of the fact that perceptions of those who present a
risk to society change over time. In the early 19th century, for example, the greatest
threats to social order and stability came from ‘dangerous classes’ rather than
dangerous individuals (Pratt, 2000). From the mid-19th century onwards, this shifted
towards individuals who were seen as presenting a risk to society; for example repeat
property offenders (Pratt, 1997) and, latterly, violent and sexual offenders (Nash,
1992). Bottoms (1977) highlighted the selective way that risk categories are applied,
an issue that has also been highlighted again more recently by Tombs and Whyte
(2008). Since 11 September 2001, we have seen a recategorisation of those who
present the ‘real risk’ to the principles of (Western) society to include terrorists
and religious extremists. There is also an increasing concern about those engaged
in ‘single issue’ protests (such as animal rights, anti-war, anti-globalisation and anti-
genetically modified crops).3
2
Introduction
Government and the governance of risk
Concerns about risk – and subsequent strategies employed to control it – have a long
history (see Lupton, 1999). Despite the fact that there are competing ideas about the
conceptualisation of risk (Brown, 2000; Kemshall, 2002), the shift towards apparent
predictability and the location of risk within individuals rather than groups or ‘classes’
means that the ‘probabilistic discourse is still prevalent in much government policy’
(Kemshall, 2002, p 15). While, as O’Malley (1992) argues, there may be an increasing
expectation that individuals and communities should protect themselves from crime,
the idea that the state has a duty to protect its citizens is still widely accepted. This
is based primarily on the fact that it is difficult to insure against events (such as crime
or flooding), which are relatively rare, hard to predict and that can lead to large, even
irredeemable losses. As a result, citizens still demand that the apparatus of the state
provides protection against these kinds of risks.
The forms of control employed to minimise risks posed by offenders have been
many and varied throughout the course of history; from the magic and superstition
of premodern societies, the prevalence of corporal punishments through much of
history, right through to the technologically dependent surveillance methods of the
late-modern age. Within this, there have been numerous debates and legislative
drives focused on what to do with those who present a threat of serious harm to
others. Through various manifestations, the control of this small group of individuals
has tended to focus on a lengthy prison sentence in one form or another (primarily
on an incapacitative basis; see Ashworth, 2007; Levi et al, 2007). The proliferation
of criminal justice legislation as a means by which government can control the risks
posed by offenders was paralleled by an emphasis on risk assessment and the
implementation of risk management procedures for offenders being released from
prison, or otherwise supervised in the community. A paradigmatic example of this
drive for controlling risk forms the primary subject matter for this book.
MAPPA
MAPPA are discussed at length in this volume and, consequently, the introduction
to them here will be brief. In essence, MAPPA are a mechanism by which agencies
can work together in managing the risks presented by those who present a high risk
of harm to others and/or whose actions have drawn high levels of attention from
the public and the media. MAPPA are a relatively new phenomenon, beginning in
2001 and initially aimed at adult sex offenders. Over time, this remit has expanded
to include violent offenders and other ‘high-profile’ cases. MAPPA are about risk
management, not risk elimination: at their most simple they are a set of arrangements
and a forum for multi-agency cooperation. Their dual purpose is to ensure that
relevant information about an individual is shared between those agencies who
have responsibility for managing the potential for violent and/or sexual offending by
specific individuals; and where required, to access services and resources that enable
3