The Probation Service annual report 2016.

There were 2,067 Community Service Orders made in 2016 compared with 1,937 in 2015. This represents an almost 7% increase. The use of prison as a sanction of last resort is a core principal of penal reform and greater use of Community Service can be made. The increase in the application of this sanction is very welcome. The Community Return Scheme continues to have a 90% compliance rate and 270 prisoners completed community return in 2016. The fourth recidivism study was published in 2016. This looked at the 2010 cohort of offenders who received either Probation Supervision or Community Service. The results show that almost 63% of offenders given one of these alternative sanctions by the Courts had not reoffended in the following 3 year period. This compares well with the previous study (2009 cohort) even though the overall recidivism rate increased marginally from 37.3% to 37.5%. The Probation Service piloted integrated community service in 2016 with 70 participants. Following from the recommendation of the Strategic Review of Penal Policy, the integrated community model allows for up to one third of Community Service hours to be used to facilitate participants’ attendance at programmes that address the issues connected with their offending behaviour. The pilot will be evaluated in 2017 P.15. Responding effectively to substance misuse: The correlation between substance misuse and offending is well established in the research literature. This was also reflected in the Probation Service Drugs and Alcohol survey conducted in 2011 which demonstrated that 89% of the adult offender population on probation supervision had misused substances. Alcohol was identified as the substance most commonly misused and in 71% of cases, where alcohol misuse was an issue, the misuse was directly related to the offence for which person was subject to supervision. As part of the Service response to these findings we began to implement the SAOR model, which is an innovative, evidence based model for the delivery of Screening and Brief Intervention (SBI) to clients with alcohol related problems……