Rough justice - offender perceptions of police action on the front-line

‘Integrated Offender Management’ (IOM) involves the police, in England and Wales, working closely with other criminal justice agencies all in a bid to reduce offending by prolific offenders. The work involves traditional policing methods, but also requires some police officers to adopt the role of ‘offender manager’. As police offender managers, these officers should gather intelligence on the activities of prolific offenders as well as attempt to draw them away from crime through support and rehabilitation. Instead, most police offender managers were found to place considerable emphasis on orthodox police cultural practices, including social discipline and communicative surveillance. Conversations with IOM offenders indicated that they viewed such treatment, authoritarian, invasive and broadly unfair. Given the strong empirical links between fair treatment and police legitimacy, highlighted in existing literature, one might expect offenders to question the legitimacy of IOM police action; yet they did not. In this article, I argue that this response can be explained by reference to a notion of ‘rough justice’. It is a model that influences offender perceptions of police legitimacy; one that survives a failure on the part of police officers to adhere to norms of legality and the rule of law