Editor's Introduction to the Special Issue

A previous special issue of our journal was given to the topic of Offender Rehabilitation (Ward & Eccleston, 2004). With remarkable prescience, the Editor's Introduction to that Special Issue suggested that ‘The level of debate set up by this collection of papers is absolutely critical to the further development of the field’. The two areas of debate, so evident in 2004, that still continue to engage the attention of those working in the field of offender rehabilitation are theory and evidence. This is not to diminish the importance of practice – skilled, trained, and supported practitioners are the most important element in the delivery of effective offender rehabilitation – rather to reflect that without theory and an evolving evidence base the research community does not serve practice well.

A defensible theory is the bedrock of good practice and informed theoretical debate can drive standards of practice to higher levels. There are several ways that theoretical debate can be informed: however, in the great British tradition, empiricism is strongly favoured, particularly in an era of evidence-based practice. The steady accumulation of empirical research evidence does demand an occasional overview, typically in the form of a review paper or book, although increasingly with the use of meta-analysis where there are sufficient published studies. The field of offender rehabilitation was given a significant impetus by several meta-analyses (e.g. Andrews et al., 1990; Lipsey, 1992) that, in turn, gave rise to several lines of research concerned with different aspects of rehabilitative work. Thus, for example, some research is concerned with particular types of offender (e.g. Marshall, Anderson, & Fernandez, 1999), some with particular approaches to practice (e.g. McMurran & McGuire, 2005), and yet others with the finer points of research design (e.g. Hollin, 2008). One of the main points to emerge from the meta-analyses was that effective rehabilitative programmes assist offenders to change how they think, feel, and act: in other words, rehabilitative work should embrace a process of change that encompasses cognition, emotion, and overt behaviour. Of course, in order to bring about change at each and all of these aspects of functioning, it is critical that we understand each individually and how they relate to each other.

In this special issue, Theresa Gannon and Tony Ward have gathered a collection of papers with a focus on offender cognition and emotion. Reflecting the need for theoretical debate, empirical evidence, and scholarly collation of the extant evidence, the papers presented here provide an excellent overview of the field. The papers include reviews, theoretical articles, and empirical papers that as a whole make a remarkable contribution. In the final paper, Kevin Howells provides a commentary on each paper and makes some cogent suggestions regarding future directions. One should not underestimate the editorial work that goes into producing a collection of papers as presented here and I am pleased to acknowledge the debt we owe to Theresa and Tony.

Clive Hollin

University of Leicester, UK