This edited collection brings together international research on evidence-based skills for working with people who are subject to penal supervision or other interventions in the justice system. The text focuses on skills-based practices that are empirically linked to rehabilitation and desistance from crime. The term ‘skills’ is multidimensional. But broadly conceptualised, the term refers to the proficiencies, capabilities and other attributes that contribute to positive outcomes such as active service-user engagement with supervision objectives, rehabilitation and desistance. We recognise that the term ‘desistance’ is also multidimensional and as Maruna and LeBel (2010, p 72) rightly note: ‘There is no single “desistance theory” any more than there can be said to be a single theory of crime or of poverty.’ While some desistance scholars highlight the role of agency in achieving desistance, some emphasise structural factors, and others emphasise the relevance of agential factors constrained by wider structural forces (see generally Giordano et al, 2003; Ugwudike, 2016).

That said, Maruna (2004) offers a useful conceptualisation of desistance as being characterised by primary desistance and secondary desistance. The former refers to a hiatus in a criminal career. According to Maruna (2004), individuals involved in offending inevitably undergo this hiatus at some point, or indeed, at various periods of their offending career. By contrast, secondary desistance is permanent desistance and it involves a transition from primary desistance (a temporary break from offending) to a permanent break from offending that is accompanied by adaptation to a prosocial selfidentity – the ‘role of identity of a “changed person”’ (Maruna, 2004, p 274). This definition very much suggests that desistance is at best viewed as a process. The issue of whether or not criminal justice practitioners who supervise people undertaking court orders can contribute to the process of secondary desistance is perhaps open to question given the widely accepted view that most people involved in offending behaviour eventually desist from offending as they approach maturation and attain turning points in their lives (Thorpe et al, 1980; Sampson and Laub, 1993; Rutherford, 1986).

However, insights from the desistance literature indicate that practitioners can contribute to the process, or as some suggest, facilitate ‘assisted desistance’ (King, 2014).