Criminal Justice Identities in Transition: The Case of Devolved Probation Services in England and Wales

Abstract

In 2014, the coalition government's Transforming Rehabilitation reforms led to the wholesale restructuring of probation services in England and Wales. As part of this reconfiguration of probation services, more than half of the employees of public sector Probation Trusts were transferred to 21 new Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) set up to manage medium-and low-risk offenders and destined for sale in the criminal justice marketplace. This article presents the findings of an ethnographic study of the formation of one CRC, with a specific focus on the construction and negotiation of identities. We identify a number of key themes, prominent among which is 'liminality': i.e. the experience of being betwixt and between the old and the new, the public and the outsourced. Other themes discussed in the article include separation and loss, status anxiety, loyalty and trust, liberation and innovation.

Lost in Translation? Examining the Role of Court Interpreters in Cases Involving Foreign National Defendants in England and Wales

“…Indeed, in the last few years, the provision of interpreting services in England and Wales has undergone important changes-most significantly, the outsourcing and centralization of the service in one provider. These changes have been primarily geared to cut costs and increase the efficiency of the service, and are in line with austerity measures introduced across the criminal justice system (Ward, 2015), particularly the reduction of legal aid budget (Cape, 2016), the partial privatization of the probation service (Robinson, Burke, & Millings, 2016), and the introduction of criminal court charges for convicted defendants. 6 We analyze recent reforms to the language service provision against the backdrop of increased public concerns about the impact of migration on public services and the welfare system, and on social cohesion.…”

Good cop, bad cop, both? Examining the implications of risk based allocation on the desistance narratives of intensive probationers

“…Yet, interestingly, it was apparent in the current research that the disruption caused by the initial implementation of TR presented the potential for considerable barriers to compliance for some of the probationers in the sample. The remainder of the article will focus on two key issues, hitherto unidentified in the recent early implementation reports published by HMPI (2014HMPI ( , 2015aHMPI ( , 2015bHMPI ( , 2016 2 , which arose out of these reforms; firstly, as there was no NPS presence in the ICO office, any high risk offenders who were reallocated to the NPS were not only required to see a different Offender Manager (OM), but they were also required to go do a different building for their supervisions which at times included a considerable 1 For a more detailed discussion of the implementation of Transforming Rehabilitation see Robinson et al (2016).…”

Fragmenting probation

“…Agencies that are confident to share information and data with public sector providers may be wary about sharing it with private providers, particularly if they anticipate competing with that provider for future work. The CRC supervisors interviewed by Robinson et al (2015) expressed anxiety about maintaining inter-agency links with workers from other agencies who viewed the CRC as 'second class' probation and no longer part of the public sector criminal justice system. TR creates a critical new inter-agency relationship, between CRCs and the NPS.…”