THE BACKGROUND TO ‘NOMS’: EFFECTIVE PRACTICE, EVALUATION AND THE POLITICS OF PENAL REFORM

To explain the background to the decision to set up a ‘National Offender Management Service ’ in England and Wales, it is necessary to give some account of the history of ‘offender management ’ in those countries, and in particular the history of the main provider of offender management, which is the Probation Service. Probation in England and Wales has been re-invented several times: understood in the 1960s as a social work service for offenders, it was affected by the international fashion for ‘nothing works’ research in the mid-1970s (Martinson 1974; Lipton et al. 1975; Brody 1976) which convinced Governments throughout the Western world that no form of sentencing was particularly effective in rehabilitating offenders and reducing re-offending. In Britain this led the Government to re-define probation services as providers of ‘alternatives to custody’, supervising offenders in the community to avoid costly prison sentences. The main aim was no longer to influence offenders ’ choices about offending, but to influence judges ’ and magistrates ’ choices about how to sentence them. If nothing works, cheaper is better. So by the end of the1980s the Probation Service found itself in a confusing situation, expected by the Home Office to facilitate diversion from custody but retaining