In 2016 I had co-founded and was running a popular arts venue on the south coast. There was some trouble with the council over licensing, and various allegations and controversies throughout the year, some well-founded, others based on simple gossip, culminating in the place losing its licence two weeks before Christmas, and a sexual allegation concerning me a week later. This was bundled together with a less serious allegation from six months previously, which had resulted at the time in a No Further Action (NFA) decision by the police. There followed a social media campaign, sufficient in toxicity to compel me to leave town.

I never expected to go to prison, I don’t think anyone does the first time around. It’s a place that most members of society aren’t really aware of. I definitely wasn’t, despite going to a state school in Northwest London, where a few peers ended up in prison, I was blissfully unaware of the realities of being a prisoner. I was 18 years old when I got into Plymouth University to read medicine, it was a dream come true and a career that my identity was heavily attached to. During my school life, I enjoyed biology and chemistry while continually desiring a job where I could serve the people around me. Luckily, my friends from school all managed to get into Plymouth too, so we all set off that September to begin our adult lives in a new city, studying to be the young professionals we thought we were destined to be.

I ended up with a custodial sentence because of my poor choice in men - would I have committed something so serious if I was single - I believe that it is a NO. I had a partner at the time, we both became addicts whilst we were together. He was terrible with money and got into a lot of debt - that’s why we ended up doing what we did. I wasn’t terrible with money, far from it. My problem was having terrible choices in men. I didn’t have any boundaries - I was very easily influenced and manipulated when it came to men. I don’t think that if I was single, I would have ended up in such a mess. It may seem like I am blaming him - I am not. It was my own choice to get involved with him. Years later he got in touch with me via social media and he must have been doing step 4 of the 12-step programme. He said that he was really sorry and did I forgive him. I realised then that I had never blamed him, though on paper one would understand why I would have done.

The introduction of COVID-19 restrictions meant that probation practitioners worked from home, engaging and supervising people on probation remotely. However, limited research has explored the personal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on probation practitioners who supervise women. Women on probation are often a marginalised group, who have multi-faceted and complex needs, and were at even greater risk and disadvantage during the pandemic. The current paper explores the experiences of probation practitioners, who were responsible for supervising, supporting and safeguarding women on probation during COVID-19. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty-one probation practitioners working remotely for five Community Rehabilitation Companies. Probation practitioners reflected on their challenging role, often thwarted by a myriad of practical obstacles, and heightened emotional turmoil due to the triple-edged sword of unification, the pandemic and working with complex women. These hidden key workers demonstrated core resilience as the probation service navigated through uncharted waters to provide a professional service to some of the most marginalised women in society. The findings offer a unique perspective on the experiences of frontline workers supervising women on probation during the exceptional delivery model in response to COVID-19. The study offers important implications for current practice and for the future of hybrid work in the criminal justice system.

Throughout my life, even from childhood, I experienced a series of events that fall under the umbrella term of ‘early life trauma’. This included sexual abuse, ongoing socio-economic disadvantage, chronic health conditions (including mental health), and relationship breakdown, which saw me become a single mother to an 18-month-old and a newborn baby. Although I did not realise it at the time, these and other stressors in my life resulted in me engaging in illicit activities, which saw me sentenced to a period of incarceration of 12 months with a non-parole period of 4 months.

There is a rising interest in penal abolitionism internationally. In the US, longstanding calls for radical alternatives to the criminal legal system gained significant momentum with the killing of George Floyd, connecting with Black Lives Matter activism and calls to defund the police. In the UK, alongside a long tradition of penal reform, an abolitionist pulse has remained evident among critical criminologists. This theoretical position has attracted increasing attention within the mainstream of the discipline and there has been a growth in scholarly and academic engagement with the ideas of abolitionist theory and practice, recently for example, in the work of Coyle and Scott (eds) (2021) Scott (2018 and 2020) and activist collectives such as Cradle Community (2021).

The paper considers the thinking articulated in the White Paper, ‘A smarter approach to sentencing,’ and evaluates its potential impact on probation practice in England and Wales. Both authors are experienced probation practitioners, now concerned with the training of future Probation Officers. A specific focus of the article considers the retention of practitioners, at a time when the attrition of staff is significant. (HMPPS, 2022a.)