Linking With Criminal Justice / Offender Management

In addition to clear and direct links with the Local Strategic Partnership, we recommend that the community safety partnership establish a clear relationship with the Local Criminal Justice Board, most usefully through the county level strategy group in two-tier areas. Community safety partnerships and Local Criminal Justice Boards play crucial roles in preventing and reducing crime and are part of the wider management of offenders. They both have an important task to provide reassurance to communities and increase communities’ confidence in the criminal justice system. Successfully rehabilitating and resettling offenders in the community will also have a significant impact on partnerships’ crime reduction work and the Local Criminal Justice Board’s work to improve public confidence in the criminal justice system. In particular, good working relationships would help to address overlaps in:

Membership on the groups – the same members may sit on multiple groups and represent similar interests.
Responsibility for delivering on Prolific and other Priority Offender (PPO) and Persistent Young Offender (PYO) schemes
Similar requirements to engage with the community to identify local needs – which would benefit from a joined up and coordinated approach.
Shared involvement in PSA2: Reassurance and Public Confidence until April 2008 and future shared involvement in Safer Communities PSA.
Links with the work of Youth Offending Teams on youth justice issues.

For more on working with Local Criminal Justice Boards, partnerships can refer to the guidance ‘CDRPs(CSPs) and LCJBs: How to work together’ – details of which are given in the further resources section.

Partnerships already work closely with many local agencies and voluntary groups to achieve a community- based multi-agency approach to crime reduction. They may consider developing these existing partnerships or building new partnerships to incorporate reducing re-offending as an important aspect of crime reduction.

Working more closely with Probation Trusts to reduce re-offending will support the delivery of crime reduction priorities, and therefore community safety outcomes. Currently, Probation Trusts have specific responsibility for managing offenders but much of the resource and services needed to address re- offending are not within their control, for example accommodation provision. Partnerships are in a good position to bring together and co-ordinate the actions of a range of partner agencies that all have a critical role to play in providing mainstream services focused on offenders’ needs.

With changes to the local delivery landscape arising from the Offender Management Act 2007 (see Appendix E), partnerships may wish to consider joint commissioning of services with Probation Trusts to reduce re-offending, for example through the co-location of resources or the identification and bringing together of existing resources.

Partners in the Local Strategic Partnership/Local Service Board also include the agencies that hold the key to reducing offending and re-offending. Strong links between all these partnerships will support improvements in joined up working across community safety and criminal justice agencies and inﬂuence the allocation of resources accordingly.

Regional Reducing Re-offending Boards act as fora to bring together regional and local agencies from the public, private and voluntary and community sectors that can help make a difference to reducing re- offending and protecting the public. Their purpose is to develop and deliver the regional reducing re- offending strategies and action plans to tackle re-offending in each region. They can also inﬂuence the prioritisation of resources to reduce re-offending and can support the work of community safety partnerships.