Abstract:The probation service has been a key part of the criminal justice process for more than 100 years. It deals with more offenders than the prison service; it is more successful than prison in terms of reconviction rates, and it is considerably cheaper than prison. Its advantages as a court sentence seem to be only too clear. Yet, prison remains the gold standard for punishment in England and Wales while the probation service is facing a bleak future. How has it come about that the existence of probation is now u… Show more
“…The growth of probation service officers in relation to probation officers in recent years is frequently taken as evidence of de-skilling (e.g. Gale, 2012; Mair, 2016). For Fitzgibbon and Lea (2014), this demographic shift laid the foundations for splitting the service according to risk of harm.…”
Section: ‘Us and Them’: (Inter)organisational Workingmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In cases where a short-term prison sentence was imposed, judges and magistrates had access to a PSR in fewer than one in four cases, while reports are often re-used when an offender is sentenced for a new offence (HMI Probation, 2019a). This devaluation and degradation of PSRs can be located within longer term trends towards ‘speedier’ justice (Mair, 2016; Robinson, 2017). Indeed, there has been a marked increase, from 3% to 36%, in the number of offenders who have been recalled to prison as ‘a direct result of the .…”
Section: ‘Us and Them’: (Inter)organisational Workingmentioning
This article reviews developments in probation in England and Wales since 2010, a decade in which services were exposed to the logic of competition and profit. In 2014, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government’s Transforming Rehabilitation ( TR) reforms promised an end to a top-down, target-centric culture of state intervention by outsourcing services for low-to-medium risk offenders to 21 privately-owned Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). And yet, just four years after the reforms were implemented, the Conservative government announced that CRCs’ contracts would be terminated, with all offender management services returned to the public sector. With a focus on the private sector, the article argues that radical change to the probation service’s structure has entrenched a focus on centrally-administered performance targets and audit. In other words, contrary to the decentralising rhetoric at the core of TR, the decade has in many ways produced more of the same managerialism that the reforms were presented as a means to displace. The result has been a general decline in the quality of probation services.
“…The growth of probation service officers in relation to probation officers in recent years is frequently taken as evidence of de-skilling (e.g. Gale, 2012; Mair, 2016). For Fitzgibbon and Lea (2014), this demographic shift laid the foundations for splitting the service according to risk of harm.…”
Section: ‘Us and Them’: (Inter)organisational Workingmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In cases where a short-term prison sentence was imposed, judges and magistrates had access to a PSR in fewer than one in four cases, while reports are often re-used when an offender is sentenced for a new offence (HMI Probation, 2019a). This devaluation and degradation of PSRs can be located within longer term trends towards ‘speedier’ justice (Mair, 2016; Robinson, 2017). Indeed, there has been a marked increase, from 3% to 36%, in the number of offenders who have been recalled to prison as ‘a direct result of the .…”
Section: ‘Us and Them’: (Inter)organisational Workingmentioning
This article reviews developments in probation in England and Wales since 2010, a decade in which services were exposed to the logic of competition and profit. In 2014, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government’s Transforming Rehabilitation ( TR) reforms promised an end to a top-down, target-centric culture of state intervention by outsourcing services for low-to-medium risk offenders to 21 privately-owned Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). And yet, just four years after the reforms were implemented, the Conservative government announced that CRCs’ contracts would be terminated, with all offender management services returned to the public sector. With a focus on the private sector, the article argues that radical change to the probation service’s structure has entrenched a focus on centrally-administered performance targets and audit. In other words, contrary to the decentralising rhetoric at the core of TR, the decade has in many ways produced more of the same managerialism that the reforms were presented as a means to displace. The result has been a general decline in the quality of probation services.
“…This demographic shift is in spite of the efforts to 'toughen' probation supervision (Knight, 2007). There has also been a sustained growth of (unqualified) probation service officers relative to (qualified) probation officers, with the former comprising approximately 50% of staff by 2012 (Mair, 2016). Introduced as 'ancillaries' in the 1970s to assist probation officers in their role, managing generic cases and performing specialist functions like unpaid work, there was a marked increase in probation service officers to cover the shortfalls when training for probation officers was revoked in 1996 (Bailey et al, 2007).…”
Section: The Changing Nature Of Probation Supervisionmentioning
This article explores the changing nature of supervision in a Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC) following the Transforming Rehabilitation ( TR) reforms to probation services in England and Wales. Based on an ethnographic study of an office within a privately owned CRC, it argues that TR has entrenched long-term trends towards ‘Taylorised’ probation practice. This is to say that qualitative and quantitative changes to the complexion of practitioners’ caseloads since TR reflect a decades-long devaluation of the probation service and its staff. The decision to allocate most qualified practitioners to the National Probation Service means that Case Managers (i.e. probation service officers) now supervise offenders who would historically have been supervised by Senior Case Managers (i.e. probation officers). This loss of expertise has been exacerbated by administrative staff redundancies at the office. The result is an increasingly standardised and fragmented mode of working within the CRC in which the majority of services are now delivered by the voluntary sector.
“…George Mair said in his inaugural lecture: fragmentation, loss of expertise, conflicts of interest, inconsistency of practice, the gains of the last decade will all be negated by these changes. (Mair )…”
“…George Mair said in his inaugural lecture: fragmentation, loss of expertise, conflicts of interest, inconsistency of practice, the gains of the last decade will all be negated by these changes. (Mair 2013) The 'institution of probation' has been here for a long time. The social structure has gained a high degree of resilience, composed of cultural, cognitive, normative, and regulative elements, that together with associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life; they change, they adapt, they move on, that is absolutely the case, but they are important as a stable force in delivering practice.…”
The probation service has showed a remarkable facility to reinvent itself over a century of turbulent, but sustained, history. This 16th Bill McWilliams Memorial Lecture will explore the ethos underpinning that survival as the service faces its potential fragmentation, and even dismantling, given the government commitment to privatise much of its current business. If the institution of probation collapses, is there still an important place for probation skills and in what institutional forms will this be reconstructed? Can a hopeful scenario for the future be garnered from the current policy imperatives? Does it matter? And if it matters, how can a vision be created which builds on that history in concert with partners from all sectors? This lecture will reflect on these themes in a policy framework which is fluid, uncertain, and deeply challenging.
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