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This thesis considers how research evidence can support the probation service in its work with offenders, addressing the questions: 'What methods are effective in offender rehabilitation?'; 'How can we know these methods are working in practice?' and 'How can research evidence underpin policy and practice in work with offenders?'. The thesis explores whether crime-reduction via work with individual offenders is a feasible aim, ethically and practically, and reviews how this fits with theoretical approaches to understanding crime, and as an aim of the probation service. The characteristics of effective and ineffective methods of intervention as described in research literature are reviewed, revealing a low level of consistency between research-syntheses as to the characteristics of effective interventions. Methods of research synthesis and meta-analysis are critically reviewed. Issues in evaluating offender-interventions are reviewed, focusing on the use of reconviction as an outcome indicator. The thesis presents research case-studies of five offender-interventions, selected to be representative of probation programmes. The impact of each intervention on reconviction is evaluated using a quasi-experimental methodology. The offending careers of over 700 offenders, in intervention and comparison groups, are analyzed. Three interventions show clear evidence of effectiveness, with a lower proportion of offenders in the intervention groups than in relevant comparison groups being reconvicted: 48 percent, 34 percent (these finding were statistically significant), and 18 percent fewer offenders in the intervention group were reconvicted within one year. In this latter case-study of an evidence-based cognitive-skills training programme, offenders who showed positive change in attitudinal measures were more likely to be reconvicted. The implications of this finding for programme-evaluation methods are discussed. The thesis concludes by considering what these findings convey about effective ways of working with offenders, and how the findings contribute to an evidence-based approach in the probation service's work with offenders.

The lay magistrates' court system in England and Wales has, for centuries, permitted the detailed involvement of thousands of ordinary legally unqualified members of local communities in decisions which can have a profound effect on the lives and liberties of their fellow citizens. The role of magistrate is, therefore, important, and, for centuries, 'the great and good' monopolised local law enforcement and social control on behalf of the state. However, as this thesis suggests, the rather ad hoc, piecemeal development of the system allowed imbalances and inequalities to arise, and despite repeated efforts to reform the system in both regards, two principle criticisms remain: perceived sentencing inconsistency and social imbalance. The thesis suggests that there is a connection - denied in conventional rhetoric about criminal justice - between these two areas, a connection which is best understood via the concept of 'court traditions': habitual practices, attitudes and beliefs developed within the magistracy and, more particularly, within local benches, which allow 'non-legal' factors to influence decision-making and which perpetuate particular traditional views of the position and role of magistrates. These explanations can even utilise contradictory conceptions of the lay justice system, parading faults in one view as virtues in another. To investigate these 'traditional views', the researcher studied almost 300 lay justices and their professional colleagues at nine different English magistrates' courts. The study updates previous research about the social composition of the magistracy and - having developed a definition of 'court traditions' - examines how far this corresponds to respondents' own perceptions of the workings of the system. Attention was not only focused at the local grassroots level of lay involvement in the criminal justice system, for the researcher also studied the role of the lay justices' representative organisation, the Magistrates' Association. Possibly for the first time, the detailed working and position of this widely respected and influential group are critically discussed, and parallels are drawn between the roles of the Association and of lay justices in preserving the status quo inequalities of power and wealth of modern society