Nathan Monk

Restorative justice is about to become the subject of a study which aims to summarise all the relevant research on the effects of face-to-face restorative justice for personal victim crimes. While in many ways a welcome initiative, this also poses some rather unexpected threats. The article outlines the nature of some concerns about the methods to be employed and the political dangers which might arise, depending upon how the findings are presented.

The probation service in England and Wales has undergone massive change during the late 20th and early 21st centuries to become a National Service. This paper examines the wider social and political contexts in which such change has occurred. The reconfiguration of probation is argued to reflect the transition from a society governed through a political rationality of welfarism to one reflecting the tenets of neo-liberalism. A key shift has been in the massive purchase made in the service by managerial strategies and tactics which have been legitimated by their incorporation of the “What Works” research findings into the role of management. Such findings are argued to be provisional rather than universally applicable principles, and the meta-analyses from which they are derived are discussed in terms of their shortcomings and tendency to collapse rather than extract, detail. The “What Works” principles have been used as a mechanism to effect change in a service that hitherto had resisted various incursions by elements of the New Public Management. The key principles of effectiveness are depicted as being resonant with the notion of the rational-choice actor which provides the core model of individual behaviour within neo-liberal politics and which marks a disjunction with probation’s older association with issues of social justice and disadvantage

Abstract

This article focuses on the relevance of the idea of community justice for understanding the policing of drugs in England and Wales. It considers from a historical perspective the regulation of drugs in Lambeth, focusing in particular on the Lambeth policing experiment conducted in 2001. It is shown that elements of this twenty-first century experiment had been carried out on an informal basis for twenty years previously. Moreover, it is suggested that communitarian values have influenced police work in relation to drugs and that there is considerable emphasis on community consultation and community engagement. It is argued that schemes such as the Lambeth experiment go some way towards countering criminalisation processes and satisfying the requirements of the ethos of new public management (NPM). However, the organised criminal gangs responsible for distributing hard drugs will remain relatively unaffected as the safety and security of law abiding citizens continues to be threatened by the escalating violence between rival suppliers.

The argument is put forward that by comparing policing in the UK to policing across the Atlantic in New York, one can gain significant insight into the underlying processes which drive the managerial regimes of Best Value in the UK and Compstat in the USA. The paper begins by setting the introduction of the ‘new’ public managerialism into its socio-economic and political contexts in both countries. A brief articulation of both Compstat and Best Value are offered before the discussion draws upon some of the most striking parallels between the two. The respective underlying conditions which promoted a sense of ‘crime crisis’ in both countries are explored, together with the philosophy that contemporary police management must be about attempting to secure ‘continuous improvements’ in service delivery. Despite appearing to be ‘new’, the principles which underpin both Compstat and Best Value have a long history and they are both often presented as being politically progressive compared to previous modes of policing and public sector governance. Both regimes appear to empower middle police managers in terms of autonomy and decision making to a greater degree than ever before whilst at the same time increasing responsibility at this middle managerial level. The paper culminates by considering the potential for censure to be exerted under both Compstat and Best Value, together with some of the negative unintended consequences, including the undermining of attempts to make genuine improvements in community justice, which may result because of the threat of naming, shaming and blaming of police managers.