Evaluation in the Eye of the Storm: Reflections on the Diamond Evaluation

It is difficult for readers to fully comprehend the internal and external stakes that were on the table with this evaluation, for the practitioners, the politicians, the programme and the researchers. Practitioners and politicians courted media coverage, and after our first-year report many expected to read about a successful solution to a worrying problem of high reconviction rates for a significant group of offenders. But the government changed (yes, politics does matter). Following this change of government, Diamond took on the additional political weight of proving IOM as a concept and that of the ‘rehabilitation revolution’. There was an additional national IOM (excluding London) external academic evaluation at the time but was only able to explore ‘process’ and not ‘impact’ (Senior et al. 2011). Because we had skillfully negotiated access to data from the inside (and knew the ins and outs, pitfalls and frustrations of managing such data sets), we had information about reconviction of the very sample population that was in the political debate about offending.