Chris Trotter

No left turn

Many social workers, probation officers and others in the human services are employed in positions where they deal with involuntary clients. These positions are demanding, and require a specific set of skills. The new edition of this successful book provides an accessible and practical guide for managing difficult and sensitive relationships and communicating with reluctant clients. The author directly links theory to real-life by adopting a jargon-free and accessible guide to working in partnership with involuntary clients. Written in a lively and engaging style, the book is relevant to students and practitioners and richly illustrated with case examples drawn from a variety of service-user groups, including adult and youth justice and child protection, as well as people with addictions, young people who refuse to go to school and mental health patients who refuse treatment. The author's integrated and systematic approach promotes prosocial values; emphasizes clarifying roles; and deals with issues of authority and goal-setting. Fully revised and updated throughout to reflect contemporary research and practice, the book includes new material on collaborative family work as well as an increased emphasis on trauma informed practice. The result is an invaluable practical guide for social work and social care students and professionals to working with both clients and their families.

A Guide to Practice

Working with Involuntary Clients

Gill McIvor

Rosemary Sheehan

Though many more women offenders are supervised in the community than in custody, much less is known about their needs and effective approaches to their supervision, support and treatment. Whilst there has been recent attention paid to responding to the needs of women in prison, negligible attention has been paid to women exiting prison, or on community based orders, and what is needed to work with them to reduce re-offending or entry into prison. Contributions to this book challenge policy-makers and corrections systems to concentrate more on community provision for women offenders and resist popular calls for more punitive responses to all offenders, women included. Contributors come from a wide range of countries including Australia, Canada, UK and USA. They argue that the criminogenic lens applied to women’s offending must be gender-responsive if systems are to be successful at addressing the disadvantage and risk associated with offending behaviour. Working With Women Offenders in the Community builds on ideas presented in the editors’ previous book, What Works With Women Offenders (2007), extending the focus particularly on women offenders in the community rather than in prison. This book concentrates on women who have committed criminal offences and who may have been placed on probation or other community based court orders or who have been released from prison on parole. It discusses the work done by professional workers including probation officers, community corrections officers and specialist case managers in areas such as drug treatment, housing, mental health or employment programmes. This book will be of interest to professional probation officers, case managers, drug treatment workers and others who work with women offenders. It will also be essential reading for students of criminology, social work, psychology, sociology and other disciplines who have an interest in women offenders.

Working with Women Offenders in the Community

The number of women prisoners has been growing rapidly during recent years and in many places has more than doubled in the past decade, significantly outstripping increases in the number of male prisoners – and with particular consequences for minority ethnic, black and aboriginal women, who constitute disproportionate levels of prison populations in many countries including Canada, the United States, the UK and Australia.

What Works With Women Offenders

Fergus McNeill

Peter Raynor

This major new book brings together leading researchers in the field in order to describe and analyse internationally significant theoretical and empirical work on offender supervision, and to address the policy and practice implications of this work within and across jurisdictions. Arising out of the work of the international Collaboration of Researchers for the Effective Development of Offender Supervision (CREDOS), this book examines questions and issues that have arisen both within effectiveness research, and from research on desistance from offending. The book draws out the lessons that can be learned not just about ‘what works?’, but about how and why particular practices support desistance in specific jurisdictional, cultural and local contexts. Key themes addressed in this book include: New directions in theory and paradigms for practice Staff skills and effective offender supervision Different issues and challenges in improving offender supervision The role of families, ‘significant others’ and social networks Understanding and supporting compliance within supervision Exploring the social, political, organisational and historical contexts of offender supervision Offender Supervision will be essential reading for academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students, policy makers, managers and practitioners interested in offender supervision.

Chris Trotter

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