The role of non profit organisations in prisoner reentry: establishing a US-European research network

Third sector organisations (hereafter TSOs) currently provide a range of services to offenders and criminal justice organisations, including advice and advocacy, mentoring schemes, education and training, as well as performing watchdog and advocacy functions. They are involved in the provision of core rehabilitative and resettlement services (such as drug and alcohol treatment, employment and training, housing aid and advice) and in some areas (such as debt and finance and assistance to offenders' families) services are almost entirely provided by TSOs. The proposed activities have particular importance in each of the countries represented in this collaboration, where the growing role of TSOs in the context of the development of mixed economies of Criminal Justice has developed as a contentious issue in recent years. Indeed, in England and Wales this topic has become especially relevant in the context of recent developments around the Ministry of Justice's Payment by Results and Social Impact Bond agenda, which has gained international attention as an innovative and unique pilot scheme.
The investigators bring complementary research capacities to this emerging field of study, and are extremely familiar with, and have themselves made significant contributions to, the growing literature on third sector involvement in Criminal Justice. All have excellent contacts with relevant practitioner organisations and have already made substantial contributions to the ongoing debates on the changing role of the third sector in Criminal Justice in each of their countries:
Rosie Meek (PI) has written a number of scholarly articles on the role of third sector organisations in Criminal Justice, offender perceptions of TSOs in reducing reoffending, and the views of professional stakeholders. She is experienced in carrying out qualitative and quantitative research in a range of Criminal Justice settings and she has recently completed an ESRC-funded two year project exploring the role of the third sector in prisoner rehabilitation. She was previously awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to carry out comparative research into juvenile justice systems in California.
Professor Martine Herzog-Evans (Co-I) has written extensively on legal processes, international law, family law and criminal justice. She has published 18 books and more than 250 articles or encyclopaedia entries.
Dr Beverly Frazier (Co-I) has carried out research on community institutional capacity (CIC) for prisoner reentry, using survey data from over 800 non-profit organisations, as well as administrative data obtained from federal, state and county corrections departments. She has authored a number of journal articles, chapters and a forthcoming book on the role of faith-based organisations in prisoner reentry in the United States.

The changing role of third sector involvement in prisoner reentry in Europe and North America provides an especially significant and timely area of academic research in criminal justice. As well as being international in scope, the proposed activities are inter-disciplinary and will bring together academic leaders and future leaders in order to exchange ideas and promote future opportunities in partnership with practitioners, policy makers and other research users.
The proposed activities are feasible because they will be based on summarising, discussing and expending an existing but highly dispersed and fragmented body of academic and policy research on the changing role of the third sector in Criminal Justice, led by a team of national experts in their fields. The activities are innovative because, to our knowledge, the seminar series represents the first international collaboration in this field of study. The proposal is timely and interesting from an academic, practitioner and policy maker perspective because it seeks to identify and develop key academic debates in this rapidly changing field. The proposed activities are committed to the active development of a community of academic and practitioner users. This is more than simply the dissemination of findings, but represents the development and maintenance of a European research group through a dedicated Website and a number of research and practice seminars.
The activities will have a significant impact on both academic and non-academic beneficiaries concerned with third sector involvement in reentry. The first group of beneficiaries is academic. There are a growing number of scholars who are interested in the role of TSOs in Criminal Justice more broadly, and prisoner reentry more specifically, and the seminars will be ground-breaking in the way they enable and promote an exploration of these issues in a cross-European and North American context. The project will also open up the possibility of new avenues of quantitative, qualitative and/or theoretical research directions and will result in a number of publications.
The second group of beneficiaries are practitioners and policy makers - actors who promote and/or organise third sector involvement in Criminal Justice. The ongoing involvement of TSOs will ensure widespread dissemination of the research findings through seminars, the project website, expansive email lists and publications. We will also draw on the experience of practitioner engagement in the Third Sector Research Centre (Universities of Southampton and Birmingham) and the wide network of practitioners that each of the researchers has developed in their research to date.
The final beneficiary group represents the offenders who are affected by developments in the role of TSOs in criminal justice. The research team are experienced in promoting user-involvement in research planning and dissemination and continued service-user involvement will be embedded in the design and dissemination of the seminars. The research team are experienced in promoting user-involvement in research planning and dissemination and continued service-user involvement will be embedded in the design and dissemination of the seminars.