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Abstract
Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA) are an innovative, volunteer-based means of supervising sex offenders, usually upon release from prison, which were 'transplanted' from Canada to England and Wales at the turn of the 21st century. The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), and the Lucy Faithful Foundation, were concerned with both the extreme demonisation of sex offenders in the press, and with the need to find better ways of safeguarding children from sexual abuse. The Home Office was simultaneously developing new mechanisms of public protection and funded three COSA pilot schemes between 2002 and 2005. The processes of development and implementation were essentially informal and improvised, crucially dependent on the choices, decisions, energy, status and reputations of particular individuals in particular places and networks. Circles flourished at the intersection of a nascent official concern with public protection, and the determination of faith-based professional activists (and others) to reaffirm the redeemability of sex offenders, but there was never a "structural logic" which made the emergence of COSA inevitable. Drawing on information from the key players, this paper details the processes by which they came into being.
Introduction
Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA) are an innovative, volunteer-based means of supervising sex offenders, usually upon release from prison, which were 'transplanted' from Canada to England and Wales at the turn of the 21st century. They were initially taken up and piloted by the Home Office, albeit on a small scale, and their early development can be illuminated by Jones and Newburn's (2007) insights into "policy transfer". In England, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) was the body through which transfer was effected, and had it not been for their initiative - which reflected both a long tradition of Quaker involvement in penal reform and their considerable experience of turning spiritual and social concerns into enduring (and eventually independent) secular projects2 - it is quite possible that Circles may never have come to the attention of the Home Office. The fusion of Quaker discernment and Home Office judgement proved timely. It meant that there was just sufficient official appreciation of what Circles might be able to offer in Britain before the media-driven moral panic about released sex offenders that had steadily gained momentum in the...