The rise of branded programmes and interventions is an important, but largely under-explored, development in criminal justice. This article draws on findings from a study of a British Integrated Offender Management (IOM) scheme to ground a broader theoretical discussion of the meaning and implications of the increasing centrality of such 'brands'. This article focuses primarily upon the ways in which criminal justice practitioners might draw upon brands in order to (re-)construct their professional identities. Ongoing fundamental reforms of criminal justice organizations, which have tended to blur the traditionally clear distinctions between professional roles, have made this need to reinforce (and indeed reconstruct) practitioner identities ever more pressing. The article closes by considering the prospects and limitations of criminal justice brands. It is argued that while brands may play an important role in 'ethically orienting' relevant practitioners, there is a danger that the absence of appropriate structural underpinnings may prove to be highly counterproductive.

This paper examines the politics of crime and insecurity as experienced ‘from below’. We draw on in-depth interviews with families of indeterminate-sentenced prisoners, and policy participants, in order to understand families’ experiences of their relative’s imprisonment under the discredited English Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence and their public campaigning against it. We situate these experiences within broader structural trends, which we conceptualise as penal-familial assemblages. We argue that the experiences cause ‘pains of hope’ for families through a double liminality: first, due to the uncertainties caused by the indeterminate sentence, which brings neither closure nor release. Second, meaningful state action on campaigners’ demands remained elusive, with moments when change appeared close but ultimately remained just out of reach. In conclusion, we draw out the lessons from our study for analysing penal politics. We argue, in particular, for a humanistic recognition of the centrality, and the pains, of lay citizens’ efforts to seek to achieve progressive penal policy change.

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This paper utilizes the notion of 'policy disasters' to examine the policy developments that led to the part-privatization and marketization of probation services in England and Wales-Transforming Rehabilitation. Specifically, it examines the 'internal' component of policy disasters, drawing on semistructured interviews with senior policymakers and other relevant sources. The findings presented demonstrate that the policy dynamics relating to Transforming Rehabilitation specifically, and the departmental budget as an important underlying component, were both distinctly 'unbalanced'. This is argued to be an important explanatory factor in its extremely swift implementation and operationalization. In closing, the paper reflects on the policy studies notion of 'policy equilibrium' to consider whether the policy landscape relating to probation in England and Wales has reached a 'steady state', or whether the ongoing apparent failings of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms may result in a further round of considerable policy change.

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