Nathan Monk

During our ‘Conversation with Paul Senior’ in Kendal in January 2016, we reflected on the role of the Probation Institute (PI) in the future of Probation, especially its role in training and research. One colleague remarked: ‘It’s had a difficult birth; it’s the right organisation but the wrong timing’. This short article takes up this challenge and concludes that, despite its difficult birth, the Probation Institute is the right organisation, with the right long-term timing.

Elsewhere, I have suggested that the creation of the PI was a ‘courageous’ act (Worrall, 2015). Although it was something that had been mooted for a number of years, it was clear that setting up a PI in the political climate of Transforming Rehabilitation was going to be controversial. Despite being supported by key stakeholders such as the National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO), Probation Chiefs Association (PCA), Probation Association (PA) and Unison, the PI had an uncertain relationship with other stakeholders, notably academics, who felt that they were being simultaneously wooed and kept at arm’s length in the early days. Consequently, there was a lot of perfectly understandable suspicion, among both workers and academics, that this was little more than a governmental concession to placate the old guard of probation and to undermine legitimate protest against the breaking up of the Probation Service. Setting up a voluntary register of practitioners was viewed as especially inflammatory.

Nevertheless, there have been some promising early developments. In particular, the swift production of a code of ethics (Sinclair-Jones 2014), the launching of a magazine (Probation Quarterly) that includes research-based articles as well as ‘news’ and the creation of a Professional Development Framework alongside the professional register, have all suggested that the PI has a vision and that it is independent in spirit (even if not yet quite independent financially). It contributes now to debates through blogs, social media activity, Position papers, professional networks, consultation activities and seminars and conferences.

The Professional Development Framework’s founding principles are that it is inclusive, integrative, adaptive and aspirational. It is intended as a dynamic tool, constantly evolving to reflect the needs of the sector, through discussions with frontline practitioners and managers. It grapples directly with the complexity of the probation workforce whilst also encouraging renewed interest in advanced practice, which some may feel has been rather neglected in recent years. In the context of great uncertainty about the future of qualifying training (Community Justice Learning) the PDF may prove to be an invaluable anchor for those who want to retain and develop their professional identity.

The role of the PI as a centre of excellence for research is also a tricky one. In the early days, the PI became entangled in a rather unhelpful set of discussions about ‘what counts as research?’ While this undoubtedly reflects wider debates both in the profession and in academia, it seems more important for the PI to focus on the encouragement of a range of innovative research that will take it forward, rather than raking over old (and, some might say, unnecessary) battles about the relative merits of quantitative and qualitative research, ‘pure’ research and evaluation, practitioner and academic research and so on. Sue Hall (2015) has helpfully suggested a three-pronged approach for the PI: dissemination of landmark research and commissioning evidence overviews; cross-sectoral and multi-disciplinary analyses; and, practitioner involvement in evaluation. Short-term funding for practitioner research through the Sir Graham Smith Awards (inherited from the PCA) has been a tangible example of the latter of these aims (see, for example, MacDonald, 2014; McDermott, 2015). Although other events and priorities have overtaken progress in the area of disseminating and promoting research, the PI is now back on track, having had the first meeting of its Research Committee and having started to set up its Academic Advisory Panel.

The introduction of a membership category of ‘Fellow’ is another example of ‘courage’ or ‘grace under pressure’ (Worrall, 2015), both in terms of the offer and the take up. The distinction between ‘invitation’ and ‘application’ is an interesting one, made all the more so by the traditional self-effacement of probation worker culture (Mawby & Worrall, 2013). Do you apply to be a Fellow or wait to be invited? To be a Fellow, one has to have made an ‘outstanding contribution to probation or community justice’ and be a recognised expert in one’s field – and also pay £100 per year subscription. One also has one’s photo on the PI website! So is it an example of ‘cash for honours’? Hardly. None of this process sits comfortably with the image of probation work. Those of us who have taken up this particular challenge have done so, presumably, in order to demonstrate our support for the PI and our commitment to contributing to its development. This was certainly the impression given by those who attended the recent inaugural meeting of the Fellows Forum.

Lessons from the College of Social Work
In our discussions in Kendal we were conscious of the difficult political climate surrounding the setting up of the PI and its relationship with the Coalition Government. We were aware of the consternation that greeted the announcement of the closure of the relatively new College of Social Work and we wondered what lessons the PI might learn from it.

The College of Social Work was set up following the death of Peter Connelly in 2008. Its raison d’être was very similar to that of the Probation Institute, though for a very much larger body of professionals. It lasted barely four years and closed in the summer of 2015 amid accusations and recriminations. The government claimed to have invested £8m in TCSW and accused it of being ‘badly led’ and ‘rejected by the profession’. Ministers were apparently ‘unimpressed’ by the ‘standard and pace’ of its work, criticised its corporate membership scheme and claimed that it had failed to find a ‘viable financial model’. They pointed out that TCSW had reached barely half of its membership target of 31,000 and that barely 1000 of its members were ‘active’. In reply, TCSW accused the government of a lack of commitment and unfair criticism of the loss-making corporate membership scheme which, it claimed, had been the government’s suggestion in the first place (Community Care, June to August 2015).

Perhaps fortunately, the Probation Institute is much smaller and less ambitious than TCSW. But it faces similar hazards: over-dependence on government funding, especially if membership does not continue to expand, and the consequent risk of failing to ‘impress’ either the government or the profession. The PI received pump-priming from PCA and the Ministry of Justice. No more money has been forthcoming nor sought from government. Grants for pieces of work have been received, for example, from Forces in Mind Trust to undertake research and workshops into probation provision for armed forces veterans. Although membership has currently reached a plateau, the PI has built its offer on independent individual action and has not pursued corporate membership. It has, however, successfully sought to get into partnership with a range of organisations. These include Unlock, UserVoice, Magistrates Association, No Offence, other voluntary organisations and some CRCs, to name but a few. This is now the strategy for engagement.

Lessons from international evidence on probation
Until relatively recently, the Probation Service in England and Wales tended to be insular in its concerns, paying little attention to what was going on elsewhere, even on its doorstep in Scotland and Northern Ireland. While it may have avoided the worst excesses of the Prison Service in the latter’s deference to the United States, it has been very reluctant to look at developments in Europe. There is now a great deal of research and policy collaboration across Europe in relation to the community supervision of offenders and this is one area into which the PI can venture, promoting genuinely new and innovative insights from collaborative practitioner and academic research across Europe. For example, over the past four years, a group of practitioners and academics from 23 European countries has been meeting regularly, under the auspices of European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) (Robinson & McNeill, 2015) to discuss innovative methods of researching community supervision. Among the results have been two photographic projects involving practitioners and offenders (see Wendy Fitzgibbon’s article in this issue and Carr et al. 2015) taking photographs (on throwaway cameras and smartphone cameras) of their working and supervision environments. The projects have given a ‘voice’ to people who might not otherwise have responded to interview or observation methods.

Another example of new ideas and methods that the PI might wish to support and disseminate is the ‘Eurobarometer’, which is also part of the work of the COST project. This is a structured interview (using a set of questions developed by the researchers in the group) that attempts to capture the experience of supervision from the perspective of those subject to such sanctions. As such it aims to provide a comparative analysis of the experiences of individuals subject to supervision in the community. The structured interview has been piloted in Serbia, Italy, Sweden, Romania, Croatia and England and revised in light of feedback from those researchers involved in its application.

Conclusion
Much of our discussion in Kendal revolved around hopes and fears for the future of probation work. Our fears for the PI were that it would:

• Go out of business
• Become elitist, exclusive and irrelevant
• Fail to curb the division of probation work into NPS and CRC silos
• Fail to secure a full range of training and thus allow under-qualified staff to work with potentially high risk offenders.

By contrast, our hopes were that it would:

• Become a centre of excellence, promoting good practice and new ways of thinking in the new world of NPS/CRC
• Become a community of practice that maintains probation identity and values, yet is cutting edge
• Build on existing research and evidence base, fund or commission good research
• Engage practitioners and make the most of unique partnerships of practitioners, managers, academics and trainers
• Hang on to the ‘Probation’ brand – it will survive!

At the moment, the Probation Institute is sustaining and expanding its activities within tight budget constraints on the assumption that at some point, membership will surge again and it can expand activity to fit the aspirations of those members. There is a lot that can be done without much money and it will continue to do as much as it can (with just two paid staff – a CEO and an administrator) because this is a necessary and worthwhile project. The PI can’t prevent the worst consequences of Transforming Rehabilitation and it isn’t realistic to expect it to do so. It is also unfair to accuse it of making matters worse by cosying up to government and allowing an easier passage for government’s damaging policies. The PI is no more than an opportunity to maintain, and reconstruct positively, a valuable brand, working identity and ethos. It will go in the direction that its members want it to, if they choose to get involved, but, equally, it will only work if they want it to and see it as something of value. Standing back and ‘seeing how it goes’ will result in it failing. The danger is that too many people will only realise that it might have been worth getting involved when it is too late to do so.

References

Carr, N., Bauwens, A., Bosker, J., Donker, A., Robinson, G., Sucic, I. and Worrall, A. (2015) Picturing probation: exploring the utility of visual methods in comparative research, European Journal of Probation, 7(3):179-200.
Hall, S. (2015) Why Probation Matters, Howard Journal, 54(3):321-35.
Mawby, R. C. and Worrall, A. (2013) Doing Probation Work: Identity in a Criminal Justice Occupation. Abingdon: Routledge.
MacDonald, A. (2014) Major situation, Probation Quarterly, Issue 1: 7-12.
McDermott, S. (2015) Managing risk, Probation Quarterly, Issue 3: 31-4.
Robinson, G. and McNeill, F. (Eds.) (2016) Community Punishment: European Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge.
Robinson, G. and Svensson, K. (Eds.) (2015) Special Issue: Innovative methods for comparative research on offender supervision practice, European Journal of Probation, 7(3).
Sinclair-Jones, C. (2014) The moral compass, Probation Quarterly, Issue 2: 7-14.
Worrall, A. (2015) Grace under pressure: the role of courage in the future of probation work, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 54(5): 508-20

Alongside its strategy for privatising the probation service, the Ministry of Justice in the Conservative-led Coalition government (2010-2015) hatched a plan to upgrade from radio frequency electronic monitoring (EM) to a much larger scale, and solo use of GPS tracking. The plan failed, but was revealing nonetheless about the government’s policy intentions, to transform the community supervision of offenders more according to commercial-technological criteria than evidence-based penal ones. It is unclear if the new Conservative government, and new Minister of Justice, will retain the same misplaced confidence in an all GPS approach to EM and make a second, better finessed attempt at “disruptive innovation”. It is vital however that at this point in debate on the future of EM in England and Wales that probation interests and penal reform bodies abandon their traditional aloofness towards EM. They must recognise that it is merely an affordance, a customised coercive form, of the ubiquitous digital connectedness that characterises our age, and engage more actively in shaping the wise use of monitoring technology. Failure to do so will guarantee the continuing – but unwarranted – domination of rightwing, neoliberal narratives about the purpose, direction and scale of EM use. Other models, better aligned with community justice, already have prototypes in police-based Integrated Offender Management schemes, but are badly in need of professional and political champions.

Introduction
England and Wales’ radio frequency (RF) Electronic Monitoring (EM)-curfew scheme has long been the largest in Europe, and one of the largest in the world, having for several years sustained a 15,000 people per day peak, although in the last couple of years it has declined to nearer 13,000 (Hucklesby & Holdsworth, 2016). It has, in addition, always been distinct from its European counterparts by dint of being delivered by commercial organisations under (notionally) five yearly, renewable contracts with the Ministry of Justice, rather than being integrated in the practice of the state-based probation service (Paterson, 2007; Mair & Nellis, 2013). It is fair to say that early probation service attitudes towards EM veered between sceptical and hostile, as much because of antagonism towards the private sector delivery of it as towards the “surveillance technology” itself. Even the ascendant younger generations of probation officers and managers have generally regarded EM as “another agency’s business”, and shown no interest in using its inherent versatility to develop creative and penally defensible – or even progressive – forms of it, partly because some still find it impossible to imagine that it ever could be transmuted in this way.

Drawing on recent comparative research in Europe (in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, England and Wales and Scotland), Hucklesby et al. (2016:1) rightly observe that “EM has universal appeal because it fits or can be made to fit many purposes …” and saw “clear expectations in all jurisdictions except Germany, that [it] would be used more in the future” (p.12). It does, of course, depend on whom one asks but among policy-makers and penal managers there is indeed widespread acceptance of EM, an appetite for expansion and a mood of expectation. But this does not simply reflect a change of penal mood compared to the more cautious attitudes that prevailed, in mainland Europe back at the millennium, or even a sense that EM specifically has proved its penal worth and can now safely be built upon. More deeply, enthusiasm for it reflects the global ubiquity of computer-mediated action-at-a-distance, real-time communication, digital transparency and connectedness, the vast datification of contemporary experience and the routinisation of citizen’s exposure to corporate and governmental monitoring. In a remarkably short period of time, modern western people have – relatively unreflectively – embraced the utility, convenience and pleasure of digital technology in so many spheres of contemporary life. In such a context, EM as a penal measure hardly stands out as something different, or to be resisted (Harcourt, 2015).

This paper will focus on recent developments in EM in England and Wales, in particular the dangers and opportunities arising from the Ministry of Justice’s stalled attempt at “disruptive innovation” – developing the large scale, bulk use of GPS tracking as part of the Transforming Rehabilitation agenda (Ministry of Justice, 2013). The stall, which may only be temporary, potentially opens up a space for belated engagement with EM by probation interests and penal reform bodies, whose narrow conception of its possibilities and relative silence on the issue has in effect allowed public debate in England to be dominated by influential neoliberal think tanks like Policy Exchange and Reform. A more informed and contextualised theoretical understanding of EM as a form of “coercive connectedness” will be offered, and the suggestion made that while the measure cannot be refused in its entirety in a digital age, it must be actively shaped and constrained in ethically and penally-defensible ways if it is not to be used damagingly, and to excess (Jones, 2013).

How exactly this “shaping-debate” plays out will reflect political and penal configurations in different countries, and may not involve the same actor networks in all cases. The balance of forces for and against EM in established “penal fields” (Page, 2013) will vary, and, as the example of Germany shows the resistance of cultural, legal and political traditions to state surveillance will affect the forms and scope of EM’s development – there has been, and still is nothing inevitable about EM’s large-scale expansion; it may simply, and more appropriately, find a particular penal niche, or several. But in England and Wales the Conservative government has declared its intention to contemplate mass expansion of EM, aided and abetted by neoliberal think tanks. Resistance from probation interests and liberal-left penal reform bodies has been negligible, but their more informed involvement is now vital if the neoliberal right is not to retain its freehold on the future of EM.

The collapse of the “Third EM Contract”
It never helped the probation service in England and Wales that, from the onset of initial debates on EM in the late nineteen eighties, successive British governments used EM (and its private sector location) as a means of intimidating the service into accepting “punishment in the community”, making veiled threats that probation would itself be replaced by another agency if it did not give ground. Governments persistently portrayed EM as self-evidently modern (and therefore desirable), and implicitly superior to the professional social work and public service ethos to which probation clung, the remnants of which were to be expunged in the Transforming Rehabilitation programme. Given this, it is perhaps paradoxical that EM has actually figured so little in the agendas of the new Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs), and the National Probation Service, now that probation itself has largely been privatised, and – while it might be prudent to be careful what one wishes for – these new agencies’ absence (or exclusion) from the debate about the future of EM in England and Wales is unhelpful, because it is with their other services to offenders that EM ought to be integrated.

This absence of such key actors reflects not only path dependence on the old “parallel tracks” model of probation and EM policymaking but also the misguided approach of the Conservative-led Coalition’s Ministry of Justice to developing the third EM contract (whose foundations were in fact laid under New Labour) (Mair & Nellis, 2013). It has retained the top down, centralised approach of the first two contracts and ignored considered advice from Policy Exchange itself (Geohegan, 2012), that a more localised market approach to contracting EM would be more efficient and less expensive, based on the promising results of police-probation Integrated Offender Management (IOM) schemes which had been using GPS tracking since 2010.

Some irony is in play here. The Coalition government’s White Paper Punishment and Reform (Ministry of Justice, 2012) did attempt to overcome the “parallel tracks” model: privatising probation services and expanding EM were juxtaposed as implicitly entwined strands in the same strategy to transform community supervision, but with insufficient detail for it to signal what government ambitions actually were, or to enable proper public discussion. Ministry intentions crystalised under Justice Secretary Chris Grayling, probably in more convulsive ways than would have occurred if his more temperate predecessor, Ken Clarke, had remained in post. It is arguable that Grayling would not have pursued the high risk strategy of privatising – deprofessionalising and intrinsically downgrading – probation quite so relentlessly if he had not also had a grand plan to expand and upgrade EM to an all-GPS system (hubristically-named “New World”) alongside it, premised on the belief that this would actually be the innovative silver bullet which reduced reoffending even if privatised probation itself fell short.

The Ministry’s business model for the third EM contract – requiring collaboration between four companies, three of who might more usually have seen themselves as competitors – was never all that appealing to the EM business community themselves. Even in early 2013, when the Ministry began canvassing commercial interest in its complex tender document it was already mooting the prospect of having 75,000 offenders monitored per day, achievable perhaps by 2020, to entice companies on board. This figure had not in fact been plucked from thin air – it derived from a model of future EM use (replacing “outdated” RF technology with a new bespoke tag, yet to be designed, that combined both RF and GPS capabilities) put forward by Policy Exchange, which also favoured localised procurement and service delivery rather than yet another centralised contract (Geohegan, 2012:22). Policy Exchange was wrongheaded about both the supposed penal supremacy of GPS over RF and the viability of bulk monitoring as a means of reducing recidivism – it even imagined the possibility 140,000 offenders per day being subject to it. While it was made public that the Ministry of Justice rejected Policy Exchange’s view on local procurement, it was never openly disclosed that they did actually adopt the think tank’s transformational vision of EM, although it was possible, in insider networks, to know that this was the case.1

Capita (service integration and delivery), Airbus (mapping software), Buddi, later replaced by Steatite (hardware, ie tags) and O2 Telefonica (telephony services) were eventually picked as “preferred bidders” to create the new EM service. In fact, Grayling’s grand plan crashed and burned, without any external pressure – without, in fact ever fully becoming a contract – having proved as internally unworkable as the wary commercial organisations had originally anticipated. The roll-out to an all GPS system was expected to begin in late 2014, and be completed by mid-2015, with the numbers building up after that. The Ministry had failed to anticipate intellectual property disputes among the commercial collaborators, demanded unfeasible technical specifications for the required bespoke tag, fell out with its first choice hardware provider and had to find a replacement, all of which caused delays. After a widely publicised “overcharging scandal”, the old two-contract system in which G4S and Serco delivered EM in the north and south of the country was replaced by a single national contract delivered by the new service provider, Capita (trading as Electronic Monitoring Services (EMS), who had actually signed up to use its expertise in business processes to steer the transition from RF to GPS, not to maintain the existing RF system (Nellis, 2016).

When Michael Gove became Justice Secretary in the new Conservative government in May 2015 several Grayling-bequeathed problems (e.g. on legal aid and the victim surcharge) required immediate resolution. EM, being less advanced, was less urgent, although a report by a second neoliberal think tank, Reform (Lockhart-Mirams et al., 2015) (which savaged the failure of the third contract to deliver) had re-injected momentum into the debate, and indeed offered Gove a way forward. Grayling’s grand plan was duly further inspected, the civil servant team leading on it refreshed, and further announcements deferred to mid-2016. Gove made an early bid to claim “penal reform” as natural Conservative Party territory, promising to make prisons more rehabilitative and visiting Texas (of all places) to see how they had done this. This had earned him a premature encomium from the Howard League, quickly tarnished when mere weeks later he simply echoed Grayling in repudiating the case for sentencing reform and reducing prisoner numbers as a necessary and desirable penal aim in England and Wales (Butt, 2016; Gentleman, 2016).

Prime Minister David Cameron picked up these themes in a high profile speech at Policy Exchange headquarters on 8th February 2016, reaffirming commitment to a fully operational, “ground-breaking” satellite tracking scheme by “the end of the parliament”, i.e. 2020 (Policy Exchange 2016). In the interim, GPS pilots were promised in several criminal justice settings; vague reference was made to sentences which would combine weekday tracking and weekend imprisonment. No mention was made of anticipated numbers, but the fact that Cameron’s speech took place under the auspices of Policy Exchange – a “modernising” organisation of which Michael Gove became the founding chair in 2002 – suggests that only modest alterations will be made to the transformational intentions of the first grand plan: after all, the likely future failings of the privatised probation service must still be distracted from and compensated for. Sure enough, later in the month, a junior justice minister backtracked on the search for a bespoke tag and promised a less complicated business model, whilst apparently remaining committed to an all-GPS strategy:

‘Developing bespoke tags has been challenging and it is now clear that it will be more appropriate to pursue our goals using off-the-shelf technology which is already available. That is why the Ministry of Justice will be terminating our contract to develop a bespoke tagging product with Steatite Limited and will shortly begin a new procurement process for proven tags already on the market … We will simplify our approach in order to meet the challenges of technical and business integration and continue to drive and monitor delivery from the other suppliers.’ (Raab, 2016)

Somewhat ironically, given the Ministry’s insistent emphasis on using EM to save taxpayers’ money, the £23 million that had been awarded to Steatite, a small British provider of rugged military equipment, in 2014 had been wasted. The original hardware supplier, Buddi (with whom the Ministry of Justice fell out over the technical specifications of the chimerical, bespoke tracking device), already had a perfectly serviceable GPS tag, and are likely to tender for any new contract. The fact that “Steatite’s share price fell 32% after the [ministerial] announcement” (The Guardian 25th February 2016) was a sharp reminder of the commercial investment that Grayling’s grand plan had encouraged, and indeed been premised upon.

The narrow parameters of English debate on EM
While a certain schadenfreude in probation circles at the collapse of Grayling’s grand GPS plan was inevitable, indeed delightful, the whole sorry affair has been a scandalous waste of time, resources and intelligence, which wider public debate and broader consultation with relevant agencies, including the interested think tanks, Probation Trusts and their successor CRCs, sentencers and (at least in principle) penal reform organisations, would probably have avoided. The stalling of the New World EM strategy at least creates a space for this kind of consultation to now take place, although that depends on whether – and how much – the Ministry of Justice is prepared to open up. Whether it does or not, there ought to be much wider and more thoughtful discussion of EM by all concerned with penal policy-making, not least because of the alarming scale on which Grayling (and Policy Exchange) were prepared to see it used, and the prospect of this same longer-term vision prevailing in the mind of the new Justice Secretary. Such consensus as came to exist in government that RF was obsolete and an all-GPS system was the way forward probably originated with no more than a dozen people, in and around Policy Exchange, and would never have become an official orthodoxy if more voices had regularly been contributing to EM debate.

Their intellectual quality notwithstanding, it is politically unfortunate that the two most high profile reports ever written on EM in England and Wales have both been produced by neoliberal think tanks, which between them colonised both policy and practice debates that ought to have been owned and articulated long before by established penal reform bodies, and by probation services themselves. Both Policy Exchange and Reform actually favoured the integration of EM with support services rather than the dominant standalone models designed into current legislation. Policy Exchange had (interestingly) not presumed that the probation service would be privatised and was open to local (or regional) statutory agencies – police and probation working together, as in IOM and MAPPA – delivering EM in partnership with tech providers of their own choice rather than those specified in a central government contract. Reform conceded that a centralised software programme would be necessary to ensure interoperability of EM across regions, into which a list of approved tech providers could tap, but broadly shared Policy Exchange’s localism, which had been a longstanding theme of Conservative (and previously Coalition) government policy.

Reform did nonetheless maintain Policy Exchange’s view that an upgrade to an all-GPS system made sense, a decision-based purely on commercial-technological logic, and on the allure of the “cool brand” that GPS represents, rather than any sound understanding of good penal practice (in which RF EM-curfews still have a legitimate place). It is this overriding, expansionist logic – the allure of excess – rather than the deployment of monitoring technologies as such, that most needs challenge from probation interests and penal reform bodies. Neither, however, has a good track record of informed engagement with EM issues, or any sense that it could or should – and must – be bent to penally progressive ends.

That said, fine pioneering work by Dick Whitfield (1997; 2001), the lead on EM in the now defunct Association of Chief Probation Officers (ACOP) probably left a legacy of pragmatic open-mindedness in some sections of the old (now defunct) Probation Service. Whitfield took the view that because the Home Office (the then lead Ministry) was determined to press on with EM despite widespread liberal opposition to it, probation could not effectively oppose it outright, but also saw genuine merit in integrated probation-EM schemes like those of Sweden. Service pragmatism toward EM, however, never went deep enough to mobilise any strategic engagement with EM, or to demand of the Home Office that it was rightfully probation service business which should be taken from the private sector and given to them. The service was, admittedly, under such relentless pressure from successive governments to re-structure in so many ways that this might never have been a realistic management priority, although equally, a visible and symbolic willingness to bring EM in-house would have made it less easy for governments to accuse probation, whether fairly or not, of a hidebound reluctance to modernise.

In any case, the National Association of Probation Officers would probably never have countenanced such a strategic move. NAPO was never wrong to periodically highlight the practice failings of private sector operatives, the sometimes negative consequences of standalone EM-curfews for offenders, and the cost of the contracts. It persistently failed, however, to disentangle the idea of EM as a potentially useful supervision tool from its delivery by a despised profit-seeking provider, despite some evidence that offenders and families themselves might be favourably disposed to being monitored. NAPO unreflectively accepted the self-serving, one-dimensional punitive narrative in which the Home Office framed standalone EM-curfews, always responding oppositionally, never making the effort to imagine creative uses of a 21st century technology that could be aligned with a modern probation ethos and genuinely used to challenge the enduring overuse of imprisonment. NAPO all too often spoke as if it believed that EM could and should be stripped from the penal landscape, fearing only dystopian outcomes (which EM technologies undoubtedly have) and never realising that resistance to something so embedded in the wider digital technoculture could only take the form of reclaiming and reshaping, rather than rejecting outright.

The major British penal reform groups, the Prison Reform Trust, and the Howard League for Penal Reform, have seemingly accepted EM as a penal fixture, but similarly seen no creative potential in it. They have acknowledged some value in early release schemes (Home Detention Curfew), but more often contended that EM makes matters worse for offenders, especially juveniles (which, quite possibly, present usage does), and made no effort to learn from both mainland European practice and Council of Europe (2014) “soft law” on EM. They have not attempted to challenge or change official discourse on EM – or to create competing discourses on it. Like NAPO, their unwillingness to engage in constructive resistance has, however unintentionally, actually helped neoliberal arguments to become hegemonic in this field of penal policy.

There are both distant and immediate reasons behind their position. Humanistic social welfare traditions in Britain, in which both probation and penal reform bodies have deep roots, have always been wary of “technical fixes” being (mis)used to engineer behavioural change or social justice, especially if they are seen as likely to jeopardise or take resources from person-centred approaches. With EM technologies, this risk was undoubtedly there from the start, not intrinsic to the devices as such but associated with the dark desires – subordinating social work to surveillance and punishment, or dispensing with it altogether – to which some political and commercial interests would (still) see them put. It simply does not follow, however, that monitoring technology is never useful, in some forms, in some degree, and that it can never be used to serve humanistic ends. Technology is, to be sure, never simply a neutral tool to be deployed in good or bad ways. Any decision to replace or augment human activity with technology always has a moral dimension in itself – and may sometimes, of course, actually be ethically defensible (see Heikkero, 2012).

Academic penological discourses, on which probation and penal reformers draw and to which they contribute in return, have not helped much to clarify or remedy these issues, because applied penology’s own engagement with the broader issue of socio-technical – and particularly “digital” – change and its varied penal affordances has been too few and far between to filter down into in practitioner debates. The international “what works” movement marginalised EM because prevailing punitive models of it seemed not to accord with the cognitive behavioural understanding of how offenders change for the better – only Bonta, Rooney J and Wallace-Capretta (2000) found a small, valuable role for it. The international (and especially British) “desistance” movement envisaged no role for EM in creating human or social capital for reintegrating offenders – until Hucklesby’s (2008) pioneering research showed exactly how it could do that.

The largely North American, and intensely humanistic, “community justice” movement has understandably found it hard to accommodate the severely punitive uses to which the US has put GPS with sex offenders (and others), or to see purely cost-driven post-release uses of it as a legitimate means of decreasing the spiraling costs of imprisonment. One of community justice’s most persuasive advocates, Todd Clear (1994) has invariably cast EM in the USA as a form of “penal harm”, the wrong sort of justice to invest in. Ex-offender James Kilgore’s (2015) articulation of the “voice of the monitored” gives no reason to contradict this. But Kilgore at least recognises that the tilt of many, if not all, American models of EM-use are a contingent product of a callous penal culture, and that some European approaches to EM may well have more legitimacy.

Victims, especially domestic violence victims have mixed, but not wholly negative, views on the viability of GPS tracking for the accused at the pre-trial stage, whilst incidental research in this particular field of practice has also shown that variations in local “agency culture” in the US can affect the sensitivity (or otherwise) with which EM is deployed and the way it impacts on defendants (Erez et al., 2012; Ibarra, Gur & Erez, 2014). This is very important research, more so than straightforward studies of effectiveness and recidivism, because it clearly highlights the way in which operational processes rather than the technology itself affects the impacts and outcomes of monitoring. While EM is indubitably a form of control, punitiveness (extreme or otherwise) is not inherent in the devices or the system architecture: there is no pre-determined “one way” in which an EM-based regime must be implemented or enforced. Legal, policy and practice frameworks can be designed to use EM supportively or punitively, monitoring regimes can be calibrated in nuanced, even personalised ways, and their intensity tapered off as completion dates approach, while breach ought always to allow an element of human judgement. But a key question is, who gets to design the regimes? And whose tech is it anyway?

EM: Gathering evidence and gaining experience
Internationally, it can no longer be said that we lack viable evidence of EM’s effectiveness, in terms of reducing recidivism, reducing prison use and saving costs, but precisely because of the very variable ways in which it is used at different points in the criminal justice process, in different jurisdictions, means that policy and practice lessons are not easy to transfer from one country to another. None of the available evidence is spectacular, and it still begs the question of whether all the wise and sensible permutations of EM-use have yet been tried, let alone evaluated. It is also the case that in the current political and economic climate financial and ideological factors are driving policymakers to augment or replace “people-centred” work with monitoring technology. Where “people-centred” means supporting and caring this invariably causes alarm, but what if face-to-face, “people-centred” practice was oppressive, and monitoring was (relatively) liberating? Would this be an ethically acceptable use of new supervision technology?

A long awaited Campbell Collaboration meta-analysis of EM’s effectiveness seems to have stalled, presumably because there are still too few random controlled trials of EM of the kind the Collaboration favours. The Scottish Government recently commissioned a review of the current EM evidence-base as part of its own rethinking of the future of EM – a vastly more deliberative and consultative exercise compared to the lofty, secretive approach of the Ministry of Justice in England – which stands as state-of-the-art thinking for any country considering taking EM forward (Nellis 2016a). It concluded that there is a case for cautious, contextualised experimentation with all forms of EM, including GPS and transdermal alcohol monitoring, but that rehabilitative outcomes are only feasible when EM is properly integrated with other supportive measures (Graham & McIvor, 2015).

Hucklesby et al.’s (2016) European Union-funded research on “creativity and effectiveness in the use of EM”, comparing policy and practice in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, England and Wales and Scotland deserves wide dissemination. Wisely, the Ministry of Justice had signed up to participate in this, but the researchers empirically grounded conclusions give scant comfort to the Policy Exchange thinking that went into Grayling’s grand plan, least of all for an all-GPS model. “Radio frequency and GPS technologies have complimentary and distinct advantages and uses”, they writes, adding, “private sector involvement in EM is associated with less integration into broader criminal justice structures”, and concluding with “the greater the involvement of probation in EM the more discretionary decision-making takes place” (Hucklesby et al., 2016:1). These are undoubtedly very relevant messages for the Ministry of Justice, but they, and many other sophisticated, comparatively informed understandings of EM need, even more, to become the common property of all the actors who should be debating its future in England and Wales.

Sanguinely, Hucklesby at al. note (across all the jurisdictions studied), “creative use of EM is limited with [only] isolated examples of innovative practices”. Ironically, in England and Wales, it is the maverick police-probation IOM schemes, for example, set up since 2010 (first in Hertfordshire) by practitioners outwith the Ministry of Justice EM contract, in conjunction with GPS manufacturer Buddi, that have been the most striking examples of such creativity. They have used GPS with persistent and prolific offenders who volunteer to prove their willingness to desist by opting for 24/7 real-time tracking, and some personalised support, instead of the intrusive, intimidating police contact that had hitherto controlled them, but which simultaneously undermined and devalued their efforts to desist. Being “people-centred” (in a harsh way) it was also both labour intensive and costly to the police. An evaluation of the Cardiff scheme has found that some offenders welcomed, valued and benefitted from the approach (Jones & Hudson, 2016).

The voluntaristic element, counter-intuitive to people who can only imagine GPS tracking as a high tariff intervention for high-risk offenders, gives it more of an affinity with social work approaches to offenders (or indeed “community justice”) than any other use of EM in Britain. Without precedents from elsewhere, without a power of legal compulsion (or threat of breach), the staff in the IOM schemes have had to work out on their own how GPS can be operationalised to serve desistance purposes, how to motivate offenders to keep wearing it, how to persuade desisting offenders to eventually give up the anklet rather than become dependent on it, how to work with the tech manufacturer to create useful mapping software and back-up services. Experiential learning of this kind, by frontline practitioners, was never possible with top down, fixed models of EM imposed by the Ministry of Justice, and delivered by a separate agency.

Nonetheless, as ever with EM, there are dangers. The various schemes are somewhat unregulated (police discretion has been used both well and badly, probation involvement is variable), and, as the desistance-minded police officers who began them readily admit, there is a real danger that other police managers will become more enamoured of the intelligence-gathering potential of GPS (applying data analytics to offender’s trails) than its capacity to sustain offenders’ motivation to desist. Reform actually supports this, and with some high-risk offenders it might well help, but there is no case for developing this digital capability across the board, routinely, with all offenders. This goes to the heart of how EM technologies might be shaped to suit practice ideals; the full capabilities of a technology do not have to be used just because they can be, if a more constrained use of it is easier to align with caring and supportive practice. Commercial, technocentrically-inclined people often find this hard to understand and have become adept at discursively framing every capability as penally indispensable. Probation and penal reform interests have negligible experience of engaging in these kinds of practice debates, and are easily outclassed in arguments about technological capabilities. Developing their expertise in this is long overdue.

There are paradoxes too. Chris Miller (2012; 2014), the Assistant Chief Constable in Hertfordshire who rightly championed the use of GPS in the IOM scheme, had a significant impact on the Policy Exchange report, but his belief that these small, successful local projects could and should be scaled up to a national model of bulk monitoring (and dispense with “obsolete” RF EM) was an extrapolation way too far. Sara Murray, the founder and CEO of Buddi, was similarly influential with Policy Exchange, based on an innovative project using compulsory GPS tracking of patients/offenders on home leave from an NHS secure hospital (Hearn, 2013), as well as many of the voluntary IOM schemes. But her company only sells GPS products (for telecare and telehealth as well as criminal justice markets) and so she has had no commercial interest in defending RF EM, or seeing it survive, whatever sound penal reasons there may be for continuing to use it as well.

In developing any sort of digital strategy, in any sphere, the tech experts always need to be at the table, but in respect of EM so too do penal reformers, open to new thinking, but knowledgeable and confident enough to rein in the more technophiliac aspirations of the sellers and manufacturers. They need to be able to specify what technology they want, and what they don’t, and why, and what an acceptable scale of use would be. Pragmatic penal politics in a digital, connected age simply requires this, and while EM is never likely to become the most important preoccupation of humanistic penal reformers it can no longer be left off their agenda, and may, in fact, if they can shape the way it is used, help advance it.

Understanding EM as “coercive connectedness”
Contrary to the way probation and penal reform bodies have seen it, EM has never been a penal-thing-in-itself that could simply be said yes or no to on ethical or empirical grounds (important as it is to make both types of argument). Thinking of it merely as a penal technique that might or might not “add value” has obscured both its embeddedness in information and communication technology (ICT) more generally and the broader commercial and technocultural sources of its continuing global momentum. This is why, in England and Wales, probation and penal reform bodies have all too often underestimated the appeal and staying power of EM, mistakenly believing that it can be wished away, loftily disparaged and left to fail because it won’t be particularly “effective” at anything it is used for. Lacking familiarity with the well-established academic and policy literature on “the social shaping of technology” (Mackenzie & Wajcman, 1999), probation and penal reform signally failed to grasp the importance of reconfiguring EM as a safe, legitimate application of digital technology in the struggle to create safe communities and reduce prison numbers.

To understand EM’s past, present and future trajectories it is vital to understand it simultaneously as both a socio-technical/digital intervention, and as a penal one. Viable, scalable forms of EM were only realisable by governments and commercial organisations as an affordance of the emerging digital communication infrastructure in the 1990s, and the convivial overlay of e-connectedness that it began infusing into all spheres of social (including everyday) life. EM as a penal technique could not have come into being as a distinct penal measure without the ecology of systems, businesses, networks and expertise associated with digital connectedness more broadly. Commonplace forms of hardware and software were easily customised into a means of monitoring presence or absence from a particular place, and thereby restricting an offender’s movements. The American pioneers of EM had always imagined it as a form of tracking – “mobility monitoring” rather than mere “presence monitoring” – a development that was easily realised by the commercialisation and refinement of the US government’s Global Position System (GPS) satellites, a once exclusively military project which became a civic utility (Nellis, 2013; Milner, 2016). In a very basic sense, EM was always – and remains – a form of “coercive connectedness” embedded in the much denser matrix of voluntary, reciprocal, collaborative and contractual connectedness that digitisation has enabled, through an ever greater array of devices and platforms, and reliant on the same, ever upgradeable, ever more accurate, real-time pinpointing and tracking technologies.

Neoliberal capitalism being what it is, for a range of security, technology and business processing companies, old and new, there was some inevitability about specific digital affordances coming to be seen as a market opportunity in the “penal fields” of many countries. Governments, sometimes keen to foster their tech sectors, sometimes to reduce the costliness of prison systems (and in England in particular to outsource public services) were receptive to arguments that “electronic monitoring” would be a cost-efficient and self-consciously modern form of punishment and control over offenders, an aspect of e-governance more generally (and in England of a nascent “digital by default” approach to public service provision (Nellis, 2016b). Within “penal fields”, and also in policing, EM has also played into latent panoptic impulses, but always alongside economic arguments which have gained in force as austerity policies and “doing more for less” (often using automation) has become institutionalised in public policy. Some degree of contestation and resistance has occurred in every country whose governments have considered EM but was never likely to prevail for long, given the sheer “technological momentum” (Hughes, 1994) of the burgeoning digital world, and its manifest ubiquity and normalisation in all aspects of existence.

Understanding EM as “disruptive innovation”
In the contemporary “landscapes” of neoliberal capitalism there are business, technical and political elites and entrepreneurs for whom constant socio-technical innovation is now a commercial and governmental norm, an existential condition (Goldman & Papson, 2011). In their eyes, a cool, convivial, efficient, profitable – and high tech – corporate future beckons irresistibly. With such an imaginary, developing digital technology in a specifically penal context – and when necessary transforming aspects of penality in the process – simply does not seem strange. Digital technology, suitably pushed, seductively marketed, has a demonstrable capacity for disruption and countless industries and occupations (think banks, libraries, taxis), as well as specific working practices, have already been modified, transformed or discarded because of it, with no obvious endpoint in sight (Susskind and Susskind 2015). To corporate futurists scanning the world’s “penal fields” it is not only humanistic forms of probation supervision that already seem unmodern; even the “first generation” of RF EM looks outdated, and in manifest need of an upgrade, simply because this is what happens, what profitability requires, as a matter of course – sometimes incrementally, sometimes more convulsively – in the wider digital world.

At root, corporate futurism (one version of a neoliberal utopia) animated Grayling’s vision for EM, the significance of which – the sheer extent to which familiar penal anchor points were to be left behind – has still not been fully appreciated. Between them, albeit with different understandings of the kind of market needed to deliver services, Policy Exchange and Grayling were bidding to make EM – in the form of an all-GPS system – into the “disruptive innovation” that some of its early champions had always believed and hoped it could be, albeit (for them) on the radical understanding that it would be imprisonment which would be lessened as a consequence of disruption.3 Silicon Valley has popularised the concept and practice of “disruptive innovation”, Christiansen, Raynor and Macdonald (2015) had theorised it and the very name “New World” speaks to the Ministry of Justice’s ambition in this respect. In fact, it has been probation in England and Wales, as both occupation and craft, rather than imprisonment, that has been most disrupted by official aspirations to bulk GPS monitoring, becoming less important, more subordinate, something to be downgraded, deprofessionalised and “sold off”. Available evidence did not in fact suggest that the old probation service was failing – official targets, at least, were being met, but it was dispensed with anyway because, in corporatist futurist terms, it was increasingly out of time.

Significantly, in respect of his all-GPS strategy, Grayling commissioned no evidence-base to underpin it because it is in the nature of disruptive innovators to believe that what they intend is without precedent, and that by definition no prior evidence exists which would indicate how to eclipse incumbent interests and displace established practices. Strategy is all: to such thinkers, a “business model” (although in this instance, Grayling selected a bad one) is more important than a “(penal) evidence-base”, because it was not primarily penal criteria (as traditionally understood) that were being used to shape the future. The National Audit Office and the Committee on Public Accounts eventually took the Ministry of Justice to task for neglecting empirical evidence (Hodge, 2015), but, distracted by the G4S/Serco overcharging scandal, they themselves neglected to critique the dubious new business model, and its own startlingly high costs, adopted by Grayling for the third contract.

Hucklesby et al. (2016:1) observe in the five jurisdictions they studied that “the extent to which the size of the prison population is viewed as problematic is an important determinant of EM use”. In general this is true, and even in England and Wales periodic plans to expand RF EM use have indeed been rhetorically connected to reducing prison use (without ever accomplishing this on a significant scale). But Grayling always eschewed this, as Gove has also done; having one of the highest rates of imprisonment in Europe is not actually problematic to them, but they commit to and invest in EM nonetheless. In England and Wales, imprisonment was not be touched despite the large scale on which GPS use was being envisioned: it would be forms of offender management in the community that would be transformed. This represents the kind of “penal excess” in the use of EM that Richard Jones (2013) has warned against.

The Ministry of Justice’s failure to involve the new Community Rehabilitation Companies as participants in the New World EM service was nonetheless anomalous, a flaw in the disruption strategy. Several of the companies involved are American-owned, and doubtless know that the US evidence of significant crime suppression effects whilst on EM (if not after EM) might help with the payment by results approach they are required to take (Padgett, Bales & Blomberg, 2006). Since coming into being the CRCs have had immense administrative and logistical problems to deal with and EM could not have been one of their priorities, but down the line, as they decide what sort of staff they wish to employ, and whether skilled probation officers are among them, it may well become more important to them, not just to the Ministry of Justice. Some indication of the future status of probation officers in respect of new technological initiatives might be inferred from the official announcement of the London-wide expansion of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) Alcohol Monitoring Service pilots: the role of the London CRC probation staff in making the pilots a success was played down, as if they had been merely contingent, non-essential contributors (personal communication David Raho, 25th February 2016).

Conclusion
The “New World” all-GPS EM strategy devised by the Conservative-led Coalition Government, informed by Policy Exchange and led by Chris Grayling was a commercial, technological and penal fiasco and there is nothing to be regretted about its passing – if indeed it has passed. The fact of its failure, in this iteration at least, is less important than what was revealed by the plan itself. That said, its failure serves to confirm Nicola Lacey’s (2013) argument that abstract, reified visions of neoliberal practice can’t be implemented without viable institutional structures and networks which are capable of carrying them. The Ministry of Justice will doubtless work to improve these structures and networks; whether it will revive or revise the original vision of GPS, or something more modest and sensible, remains to be seen.

Michael Gove, the present Justice Minister, is no less neoliberal in outlook than his predecessor, but may have more talent for finessing the implementation process. Like Grayling, he is a committed marketiser, an ambitious disrupter of public sector provision, a confirmed Brexiteer unlikely to be receptive to cautious European models of EM, and opposed to strategic reductions in the size of the prison population (Gentleman, 2016). Marshalling an evidence-base of some sorts, consulting more with relevant interests and establishing GPS pilots are all sensible in themselves, as well as means by which the Ministry of Justice can regain lost legitimacy in this area of policy-making. Nonetheless, any sign of continuing commitment to an all-GPS system or the bulk monitoring of 75,000 offenders per day as envisaged by Policy Exchange will be evidence that commercial-technological factors rather than penal factors are still driving the vision and implementation strategy, and must be contested.

But more than issue-specific contestation is needed: the bigger picture must be appreciated. The temporary implementation hiatus in EM policy creates an opportunity for penal reform bodies to reconsider their position on EM in England and Wales, and become more than simply reactive to it. Such groups need to engage in constructive resistance, shaping not rejecting, on the understanding that EM is now such an integral element in a digitally connected world that it is neither going away nor growing less important, and that unless they attempt to shift the centre of gravity in public and professional debate, policy will continue to be dominated by untrammelled right wing interests. Historically, and from experience, penal reformers know, more than most, that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing, but for want of an informed understanding of the digital technoculture in which EM is rooted, they have come close to letting this happen.

Penal reformers need to enter the EM debate with (to use a somewhat passé term) a “hacker ethic”3 in mind, a sense that EM technologies are not solely owned by government, that they can be appropriated and deployed to better, more creative ends than those who control the dominant narratives about them have thus far been prepared to concede. It is precisely because the various modalities of EM can – among other things – add a flexible element of control to community supervision that it is capable of enabling viable alternatives to custody – something well understood by most European probation services – and the fact that Gove has already decided not to exploit this strategic aspect of it is an own goal on his part, and an open one for penal reformers.

The challenge for probation interests and penal reform bodies in England is pressing, because as Hucklesby et al. (2016) have intuited, in relation to Europe as a whole, a new surge of enthusiasm for EM seems imminent, indeed already underway, in which it is likely that the Ministry of Justice will wish to remain at the fore. Hucklesby (2016) herself has quite aptly likened this surge of interest to the opening of Pandora’s Box, out of which nothing good comes, but a more commercial, socio-technical account can be given of what lies behind it. Over the past two years the Bank of America, the Bank of England, the World Economic Forum and sundry economic commentators have been forecasting a vast expansion of automation and robotics in global businesses which will have far-reaching consequences for many middle class occupations, including legal and welfare professions, particularly those whose working practices and processes have become so standardised that they can readily be replicated (and improved) by smart machines (Susskind & Susskind, 2015; Treanor, 2016). One aspect of this upcoming tech transformation is the so- called “internet of things”, which will further normalise the idea of ubiquitous environmental sensors constantly feeding real-time data to monitoring centres for analysis and profiling, both aggregated and individualised, and it is inevitable, given past trends in the adoption of technology, that law enforcement will seek in some way or other to harness its potential.

GPS tracking devices are essentially internet-linked mobile sensors, and many aspects of EM systems are already automated: the larger the system the more algorithmic processing of events is required. While there is no simple, mechanistic relationship between “the rise of the robots” (Ford, 2015) and “the internet of things” (Greengard, 2015) and EM as such, they both give further symbolic and practical credence to the value of “non-human” approaches to increasing efficiency in and control over a range of business, administrative and governmental processes. Coupled with that, many EM manufacturers are nested in and overlap with the same digital ecosystems and research and investment networks, and the same corporate futurist imaginaries from which automation, robotics and remote sensing are arising, and will be emboldened by the same trends, which modernising, efficiency-seeking governments will facilitate and align with in greater or lesser degree.

It is tempting, even plausible, in retrospect, to see the English Ministry of Justice’s efforts at simultaneously upgrading EM and downgrading probation from 2012 onwards as an early, localised expression of these broader global developments, a step towards “non-human” (or less human) offender management. Knowledge of these developments, and the momentum which will flow from them into and through the “penal field”, necessarily raises the stakes in debate on EM, because the dismal spectre of “the probation officer” going the same way as the lamplighter in the age of electrification looms even larger. Soft “people skills” might well survive in future work with offenders – because empathy can’t be automated – but not (unless it is fought for) as the basis of organised professional employment, more as lower status work such as part-time mentoring. Thus, all future critical engagement with EM in Britain, indeed in Europe, must now be grounded in a more informed understanding of the affordances of the digital world, and of the potential and limits of “technological solutionism” more generally (Morozov, 2013). The focus must be on constructively resisting excess in EM – and using it wisely – rather than a wishful, anachronistic belief that it is still simply a discrete and peripheral intervention, easily derided and readily contained, and without capacity to disrupt existing penal arrangements – especially probation services.

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Notes

1. Two representatives of potential bidders for the third contract, initially uncertain of its commercial viability, separately told me that in private meetings at the Ministry of Justice in 2013 officials tantalized them with a figure of “about 75,000 per day” as the anticipated, eventual size of the GPS market. Tipped off by Napo, an associate business editor at The Independent phoned the Ministry of Justice media office to confirm the 75,000 per day figure, which they did – only to withdraw it a day later. I wrote “Upgrading EM, Downgrading Probation: reconfiguring offender management in England and Wales” (Nellis 2015) specifically to expose and critique the Ministry of Justice’s ambitions for GPS, once I had found out what they were. I am grateful to Ioan Durnescu, the editor of the European Journal of Probation, for publishing it so quickly. 2. Both US pioneers of prototypical thinking on EM in the 1960s and 70s, the Schwitzgebel brothers and Joseph Mayer, were confident that monitoring technology would inexorably – and massively – reduce the need for imprisonment in the future. In England, journalist and EM champion Tom Stacey believed the same. Despite all experience to the contrary, such techno-utopianism dies hard. It misunderstands the enduring symbolic and material power of physical imprisonment. Only if monitoring technology and supportive supervision regimes are fused with sustained political will and operationalised by appropriate institutions might there be such a transformative effect on penal practice, and with good or ill results (or both), depending on how the technology was used (see Nellis, 2013). 3. The term “hacker” did not originally denote activists who illicitly accessed and exposed computerised data, but activists who would put the burgeoning affordances of the coming digital society to creative and democratic use, not least because, without informed political intervention from below, the new technologies could so obviously be used to bolster corporate and governmental authority. The term “hacker ethic”, which has some affinity with the “community justice” emphasis on action-from-below, was shortlived, but the sensibility lives on and, in respect of EM, can usefully be commended to probation interests and penal reformers (see Himanen, 2001).

This article argues that probation policy needs to take much greater account of the important role of emotion in probation and other criminal justice practice. Drawing on the findings of three separate pieces of research, we argue that emotions play a critical role in practice despite their absence from policy in recent years. Emotions, we argue, are important in terms of developing effective practice. Moreover, there are several consequences of using emotion in practice and relevant organisations need to recognise this and provide sufficient support for staff in dealing with such consequences. This, we argue, would allow for practitioners to be both emotionally literate whilst also enabling practice which encourages offenders to take responsibility for their actions. In sum, it will lead to an intuitively intelligent system of justice.

Introduction
This article begins with the paradox that, on the one hand, recent years have seen emotions largely get written out of probation policy whilst, on the other hand, they remain important to practitioners’ accounts of their work and feature heavily in terms of their understanding of how to work effectively with offenders. We deal with the second half of this paradox in more depth below by drawing on data that have been generated in three separate but related pieces of research.

The first half of the paradox can be identified in several areas of probation practice and broader criminological theory. The rise of managerialism has been documented in several publications and we do not need to go into this in any great depth. Rather, it is sufficient to point out that the recent tendency to measure the ‘success’ of probation practice with reference to the wholly quantitative measures of KPIs, timeliness targets and compliance rates illustrates the way in which the ‘ineffable’ has been sidelined in favour of the concrete.

A separate example comes from research conducted by Phillips (2014) in which he examined the architecture of probation offices and how the layout and use of probation offices served to constitute particular forms of practice and reflected such shifts in policy over recent years. We can see how the design of the building reflects, in many cases, the way in which offenders are seen with a considerable amount of distrust, and that where an emotion does arise it tends to do so in the form of fear. Indeed, it might be argued that the increased securitisation of probation offices through CCTV, panic alarms and key fobs projects an identity of dangerousness onto offenders in a similar way to how risk assessment technologies might impose risky identities (Aas, 2004). We can also look to recent work that has used photographs to generate data on probation across Europe. Carr et al. (2015) asked practitioners to photograph their working environments. Whilst the study was small in scale, to the degree that no concrete conclusion can be drawn, it is interesting to note that one of their initial themes was that of security and that an artefact of probation is ‘security’.

These two examples are far from exhaustive in terms of how we might go about demonstrating that probation policy, discourse, and the environments which surround probation practice, have become increasingly devoid of emotion. Yet, as we see below, probation practice is still, as it always has been, about dealing with people, with all their messiness, contradictions, and emotions, and to lose sight of this, through the rise of managerialism and the prioritisation of fear and distrust in relation to offenders, risks severely constraining probation practitioners and their ability to assist offenders in desisting from offending.

This article identifies some key themes in relation to emotions and criminal justice. It traces the exploration of emotion work in three different areas of practice and argues that the rise of managerialism, which contributed to the throwing of the emotional baby out with some of the murkier water of earlier, less structured and unaccountable practice, was a mistake. It explores evidence of preliminary findings from research on emotional labour in the National Probation Service, emotional literacy in probation practice with sex offenders in the Midlands, and the practice of restorative justice in Northern Ireland, to try and make visible the crucial role that emotions play in causing conflict and criminality, but also in offering the opportunity and potential to restore equilibrium, heal the damage caused and bring insights to complex human interactions and behaviour.

The ambivalence of criminal justice policy
Garland (2001) has summarised the changes that had occurred over a twenty year period in criminal justice in the USA and UK. He connected the decline of rehabilitation with expressive justice and an increasingly emotional tone in crime policy particularly related to the fear of crime and the need to protect the public and address the needs of victims. This populist politics led to the reinvention of prison as something that works rather than as a last resort (Garland, 2001). The function of criminology was transformed to generate knowledge and practices, which would be effective to control crime and reduce offending. These trends produced a managerialist approach to the administration of the probation services and ultimately privatisation. This almost paradoxical combination of emotionalism and instrumentalism is sustained by a perpetual sense of crisis. Even though criminal justice has been modernised, it is always seen as failing in some respect.

In this context probation responded to the public’s fear of crime by developing its capacity to manage risk and to enforce court orders more rigorously. It also adopted the findings emerging from ‘what works’ research (Maguire, 1995) and evidence-based practices (Chapman & Hough, 1998). These practices based upon cognitive behavioural psychology addressed emotions such as anger as risk factors, and encouraged a highly technical approach to the application of knowledge through standardised assessment systems and procedures and prescribed offending behaviour programmes designed to teach offenders to make more rational decisions uncontaminated by cognitive deficits or emotion. Paradoxically, while the public’s emotional reaction to crime is validated in this discourse, the emotions of offenders are assessed as dangerous and requiring correction.

Bringing back the feelings
Reflections on the way in which people regulate and use their emotions in their work has become a significant area of study and research in recent years. Emotion management and ideas of emotional labour in the home and in organisations such as the service industry and nursing practice have been developing since the 1980s (Hochschild, 1983). Goleman introduced the idea of emotional intelligence in business and management (Goleman, 1995). Bunting wrote of the gendered exploitation of emotional labour and commodification of emotions in the workplace. Orbach described the significance of emotional literacy in a range of settings including within politics, and Killick in an educational setting (Bunting, 2005; Orbach, 2001; Killick, 2006). Knight developed some of these ideas in relation to the use of emotional literacy by practitioners working within a criminal justice sector (Knight, 2014).

Emotional labour has been defined as the display of expected emotions by service agents during service encounters and is seen to stimulate pressure for the person to identify with the service role (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993). The use of feeling rules, as developed by Hochschild, implies a control, and to some extent manipulation, of the emotions of the workforce to further the needs of the organisation in satisfying customer demand; initially examined by Hochschild through the meeting of the needs of airline passengers to feel well cared for by the aircrew (Hochschild, 1983). Bolton’s typologies of emotion management in the workplace extended this territory by identifying four different ways in which workers can manage their emotions including pecuniary (meeting the financial demands of the organisation), presentational (the ‘surface acting’ of emotions designed to follow accepted social rules about emotions, such as to be polite, helpful and friendly at all times and to conceal expressions of negative emotion); prescriptive (adhering to notions of professionalism, the control of emotions in line with an ‘agreed’ notion of professional conduct), and philanthropic, (emotions offered as a gift by the worker to the service user) (Bolton, 2005). Although there is evidence of all of these typologies within criminal justice practice it is the concept of emotions offered as a gift that is most closely associated with the practice of workers with offenders and victims. Emotions can run high, and workers need to be able to manage their own feelings, respond appropriately to the emotions of the service user and use the emotional content of the discourse to enable narratives to be told, heard and reshaped in pursuit of pro-social behaviour and the resolution of conflict. The following three settings provide examples of how emotions impact on, and bring depth and meaning to, practice with offenders and victims.

Emotional literacy as a concept in criminal justice defines the skills that practitioners may use in understanding their own emotions and working effectively and appropriately with the emotions of offenders, victims and witnesses (Knight, 2014). The knowledge base for emotional literacy builds on the concept of emotional intelligence and identifies the components as including self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social competence. It is recognised that a degree of emotional literacy could be employed by staff whose main motivation is to meet the pecuniary needs of the organisation, for example a skillful debt collector may extract more money from his/her debtors (Bachmann et al., 2000). A superficial, emotional empathy may well draw in customers and encourage a positive responses. However, in a probation setting it is argued that the worker’s response needs to be authentic, and an underlying value base of positive regard, a non-judgmental approach and treating offenders with respect, is crucial to the use of emotional literacy in building relationships, gaining knowledge and insight and working towards a rehabilitative shift in the offender’s outlook and behaviour. This is based on a humanitarian approach to work with offenders that promotes the capacity of people to change and adapt, to develop inner controls, and recognises that this is most likely to happen through the medium of a strong working relationship.

Study 1: Emotional labour in probation practice in the NPS
One of the authors is involved in a piece of research which looks at probation practice through the lens of emotional labour. This interest arose from the observation that emotional labour had been operationalised in research that was concerned with other areas of the criminal justice and legal systems (for example, with lawyers (Westaby, 2010, 2014), prison officers (Crawley, 2004) and police officers (Van Stokkom, 2011)) but not specifically in probation, although Knight (2014), as discussed below, has taken a broader look at emotional literacy in probation and covers emotional labour. We (i.e. the researchers) were also interested in the impact of Transforming Rehabilitation on the use of emotion in probation practice, focusing on the fact that some probation practitioners now work for private companies whilst others remain in the public sector. Much of the literature on emotional labour focuses on the way in which the use of emotion is related to the aims of the organisation and so we are drawn to examine the way in which a privatised probation service may differ from a public sector service in that respect. We decided to use emotional labour because we were interested in the way in which practitioners use emotions in their work (in a similar vein to emotional literacy) but also in the consequences of doing so. Whilst we are at an early stage in the process, we are able to offer some emerging findings that illustrate why we think it is important for emotions to take centre stage when it comes to imagining probation practice in 2020.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 probation officers in the National Probation Service. 12 participants were women, and 5 were men. Participants ranged from 30 to 64 and post qualification experience ranged from 6 months to 29 years. Analysis was conducted by the research team and comprised thematic analysis using both pre-defined sensitising concepts as well as an approach which allowed for themes to emerge from the data.

At the time of writing, we are still in the process of undertaking analysis and so what follows is an account of our emerging thoughts and their relevance for the argument to bring emotions back into probation policy and probation discourse. The first thing to note is that participants found it remarkably easy to talk about the emotions that are relevant to probation practice. This is despite many participants reporting that emotions were rarely, or only superficially, discussed during qualification and post-qualification training. It was clear from the outset that emotions are considered key to probation practice and that practitioners place a considerable emphasis on their utility in terms of building relationships, setting boundaries, supporting people through difficult periods, encouraging pro-social behaviour and creating mutually supportive relationships with colleagues.

Empathy was cited most frequently as an emotion which practitioners use in their work whilst other commonly discussed emotions included stress, excitement, worry, anger, disappointment, pleasure and pride. Emotion work in probation is diverse and participants appeared able to deploy particular emotions in different contexts and with different aims. For example, participants suggested that positive emotions such as pride or pleasure were useful in terms of encouraging pro-social behaviour, encouraging people to continue complying with a sentence or addressing an area of their life which they needed to work on. On the other hand, emotions such as disappointment when, for example, an offender failed to comply, needed to be deployed judiciously as participants saw that this risked appearing judgmental towards offenders’ ways of living as well as reflecting on the personal attributes of both them and the client. Several participants discussed the way in which they used the self-disclosure of emotions in order to invoke a particular emotion in their client:

‘I said ‘I was sat with my fingers on the panic alarm last week and you need to know that because you need to know how bad you are when you…’ So although at the time I didn’t let him know that I was scared of him, I felt it was important to let him know when he was sober because I can sort of  imagine how victims have felt – because he has assaulted victims in drink – and when he’s sober he does not want to be that person, he genuinely doesn’t, he almost burst into tears when I told him.’ (NPS2)

We asked participants about the consequences of their use of emotions and it was clear that participants found emotion work draining, difficult, stressful and anxiety-increasing. One example comes from the way in which probation work appears to transcend the boundary between home and work life. For example, several participants reported how their work affected the way in which they parented their children.

It is of concern that they also reported that supervisors (line managers) did not seem to be adequately equipped (in terms of skills and/or time) to help them work through the implications of doing such emotionally draining work and that the majority of participants’ main sources of support were colleagues or, in some cases, partners/spouses in what (Korczynski, 2003) calls ‘communities of coping’. Interestingly, the exceptions to this were participants who were on the Offender Personality Disorder Pathway programme which included regular clinical supervisions with a psychologist. This allowed participants to ‘offload’ their concerns and worries onto a trained professional and allowed them to cope with the seriousness of their work in a more structured and constructive manner. Moreover, we identified a distinct theme that appeared to stem from the fact that all work was now high risk work. For example, participants discussed how the high risk nature of their work was relentless and the potential ramifications if something were to go wrong created a significant amount of anxiety. There are serious implications of this for practitioners if they are to avoid rapidly becoming burnt out.

Despite this research being relatively small and the fact that we are at an early stage in our analysis it is clear that 1) emotions play a considerable role in the work of probation practitioners; 2) that the use of emotions has consequences on practitioners’ home and work lives; and 3) that the NPS could do more in terms of supporting practitioners with this element of their practice.

This is important because practitioners saw the use of emotion as critical to the effectiveness of probation work. As we suggest above, emotions were used to encourage non-offending behaviour, to prevent offending behaviour, or as a tool to highlight the victim’s voice. If the service is truly committed to supporting practitioners to work effectively with offenders then it needs to bring emotions back, in terms of training and in terms of policy especially around staff supervision.

Study 2: Emotional literacy in probation practice with sex offenders and domestic violence offenders
Interviews conducted with 28 experienced probation practitioners, working particularly with sex offenders and domestic violence offenders, asked them to define what they understood by the concept of ’emotions’ and how they managed their emotional lives in the context of their work with offenders (Knight, 2014). Some of the insights gained from these interviews illustrated the way in which practitioners use their emotional skills to get alongside offenders, many of whom had committed very serious crimes – to ‘stand in their shoes’. By doing this they were able to build relationships within which the potential for change could be negotiated. They were able to draw out often quite complex information about motivation and reasons for criminal behaviour, which aided their assessment, and they were enabled to manage the risks posed because they had a better understanding of the offender’s mind-set. Some were able to work with challenging behaviour when they recognised the reasons behind the outward show of distress and anger, for example a rejection of a parole application, where a less experienced worker might chose to simply terminate a difficult interview (Knight, 2014).

Some respondents were able to recognise that offenders may also be victims and that without some focus on the distress and potential abuse they may have suffered historically, they were unlikely to engage them in a change process. Most understood that disclosures would only come if the offender felt trust in the relationship.

‘It’s really important, but we have got a really good professional relationship and you know since then he has disclosed lots of other things to me, not for me but to me, which have been really useful in managing his risk.’ (Victoria) (Knight, 2014:137)

In terms of intervention, the ability to draw out information and then offer it back to the offender for clarification was seen as a powerful tool in enabling the offender to reflect on their behaviour. This has to be undertaken carefully and responsively, as opposed to in an aggressive and challenging manner.

‘They are also very shocked. They’ve come to realize the extent of their behaviour when you reflect it back to them. In order for me to note it down I’ll say to them ‘so you’re telling me that after a while you became sexually attracted to…’ ‘and took this and this measure…’ ‘have I understood you rightly’? They’ll realise fully what they’ve done.’ (Indira) (Knight, 2014:138)

A further layer of complexity relates to managing contrasting and sometimes conflicting positions and feelings at the same time, best described as ‘managing ambivalence’. A worker may grow to like a particular offender but have to constantly remind herself of the appalling crimes they may have committed. The worker may be angry or disappointed with the failure of a particular offender to learn from a group work intervention but at the same time remember that this person has deep rooted difficulties with self-image and esteem. They may have to face disappointment or anger from offenders when they have to impose sanctions for failure to comply but also have to continue to work with this person. One of the criticisms of earlier forms of probation practice was that the worker was taking too close and collusive a stance with the offender at the expense of challenging their offending behaviour (Cherry, 2010). An emotionally literate practitioner needs to be able to hold the tension between managing the contract between them and the offender and imposing sanctions if necessary, whilst simultaneously holding out the potential of a positive relationship from which belief in change for the offender becomes possible. They need emotional courage to face an offender with the consequences of their behaviour and not hide behind the easy option of sending breach letters.

‘The thing I’ve learnt is to be much more upfront with people…about the implications and the processes involved. Ultimately that’s a much better way of working with people. I think you have to be transparent.’ (John) (Knight, 2014:143)

Practitioners who are unable to manage or control some of their own feelings, for example disgust at the account of a sex offender, will effectively shut down any possibility of disclosure taking place.

‘I think it is not being judgmental, not colluding, but not showing your horror at something that someone has done, because they are so tuned in and that would just shut the person off…’ (Jai) (Knight, 2014:141)

The emotional strains of the work also take their toll and many of the practitioners in the research study felt that their organisation had little understanding of either the value or the impact of the emotional work they were undertaking. They felt themselves to be squeezed and constrained by a performance management culture in which bureaucracy and managerialism had become the drivers through which the service aimed to meet its targets of reducing offending and protecting the public (Whitehead, 2010). However, the significant emotional issues and trauma related to crime and offending behaviour that can challenge workers in powerful, subtle and often contradictory ways, remained largely invisible, unexplained and unsupported.

‘It’s very much performance, targets…cases in through the door, are we meeting this, are we getting the money in, is your high risk review done, you know I feel we are very much on our own with the emotional literacy side.’ (Angela) (Knight, 2014:164)

Emotionally literate practice requires a capacity to integrate and work with emotions in a manner congruent with the needs of both practitioners and offenders. However, this capacity needs to be developed and supported within the working environment if it is to be effective and if the mental and emotional health of staff is to be sustained and enhanced. Respondents in the research found a range of ways to seek this support in an environment that did not welcome emotional expression as a means of ‘letting off steam’ or reflecting on the causes and consequences of emotional responses. Some were fortunate enough to have good line management supervision, although they were in a minority. Most felt they gained release from discussion with supportive colleagues and debriefing after traumatic working experiences. However, this was seen as incidental to the core aims of the organisation, which was to service the need for quantitative information.

Study 3: Restorative justice in Northern Ireland
Compared to probation practice, restorative justice validates and offers greater scope for the working with and through emotions. One model of restorative justice (Wachtel et al., 2012) places emotions at the heart its practice. It is derived from affect script psychology (ASP) as developed by Tomkins (Tomkins, 1962, 1963). ASP is based upon a biological understanding of the distinctions between affects and the affect system, sensory systems and emotions. This enables practitioners to implement a ‘blue print for restorative healing’ (Kelly & Thorsborne, 2014) strategically to achieve restorative outcomes. The primary technique is known as the script, which consists of several carefully designed questions, which are put to each party. ‘In properly managed conferences, it is biologically inevitable, therefore, that undesirable negative feelings will begin to diminish as each individual is motivated to minimise negative affect.’ (Kelly, 2014:70) Each party’s emotions move from negative to positive as they listen to the other’s responses to the questions. This restorative practice relies upon a biologically determined model and the strategic facilitation of the practitioner.

For the Ulster University restorative justice programme this model was too strategic and deterministic to allow people to articulate their feelings in an authentic way of their choosing. The practice model (Chapman, 2012; Zinsstag & Chapman, 2012) developed in Northern Ireland by Ulster University conceives emotions within narrative rather than biological constructs. Following Rosenberg this model understands emotions as arising from events and as signifying needs that must be addressed (Rosenberg, 2003). The restorative process is founded on understanding each party’s narratives of how they experienced the harm. Through this approach each narrative begins with the facts of what happened in relation to a past harmful event. Then it explores how each party is feeling about it and what they need to be restored now. Finally it invites the individuals to consider what they wish to be done about it in the future.

Ulster University researchers’ observations of restorative conferences and consultations with practitioners who have facilitated hundreds of conferences have led us to conclude that the most recurrent emotions that arise from the harm associated with offending are anger, fear, anxiety and shame. These emotions may be felt both by the person responsible for the harm and by the person who has suffered the harm. Each of these emotions indicates a need that is not being met or a value that has been violated. While victims and perpetrators will identify needs that are specific to their unique narrative, there are common general areas of need associated with these emotions.

Anger is often associated with being treated unjustly and the need to have justice restored. Clearly many victims believe that they have experienced an injustice through a crime committed against them. Equally many people may also be driven to commit offences by a sense of injustice. Those whose prevailing emotion is fear may be preoccupied with the need for safety. Anxiety usually signifies the need to regain control over one’s life or to move on from the incident. Shame may denote the need to restore the respect (or as Ahmed and Braithwaite put it ‘humble pride’) of others (Ahmed & Braithwaite, 2011). In this framework needs are closely associated with culturally constructed values.

Strongly felt and distressing emotions open individuals to adopting broad cultural (or, in the case of persistent offenders, subcultural) discourses not only to explain their situation but also to provide a solution to it. For many victims justice may be framed within a discourse of revenge and retribution. For others the physical control or incarceration of the offender may be the only protection that they can imagine. For some offenders (Gilligan, 2000) respect or justice can only be restored through violence. Other offenders believe that their only means of sustaining control over the lives is through crime.

The skill of the restorative practitioner is to facilitate victims and offenders to be less reliant upon general discourses on crime and punishment so that they can tell their own authentic story of the harm and understand more specifically what justice, safety, respect or control might mean to them as individuals. This requires the practitioner to put their own emotional narratives to one side as far as they can and to enable each party to examine their emotional responses to the harm and to consider what they signify. In doing so the practitioner is being both emotionally intelligent and emotionally literate.

To be a victim is to be forced into a harmful situation unjustly. It is to be deprived of choice and power. The restorative process offers an opportunity to restore justice, power and dignity to the victim. In most cases, when victims meet those who offended against them, they have the opportunity to express their feelings about the harm and to experience the offender being accountable to them personally, expressing remorse and making commitments to avoid harming them further and to make amends for the damage, loss or hurt that they have caused. This process enables victims to act rather than be acted upon. The retribution that victims seek is replaced through the restorative process by recognition of the injustice that they have suffered and a restoration of the control that the offence had taken from them.

Offenders will also have the opportunity to tell their story of what they did and why. This may or may not cause them to feel ashamed and express remorse. It is important that the person responsible for the harm is not ‘shamed’ strategically as this may result in stigmatising shame, which will reinforce criminality and resistance to change. Braithwaite (1989) argues that shame, if aroused by responsibility for the harm rather than through awareness of personal moral deficits, can serve to reintegrate the individual.

Remorse can arise as much from emotional connection with, or empathy for, those one has harmed. For Rossner it is not shame that reintegrates but the interactive ritual nature of the restorative process (Rossner, 2013). It generates an emotional energy, which produces solidarity among the parties. The commitments that the perpetrator makes to the victim are strengthened by this solidarity rather than a written contract.

A restorative process, while initiated by distressing emotions such as anger, fear, shame, and anxiety, generates moral or pro-social emotions such as respect, empathy, remorse, trust and forgiveness. It can effectively address critical problems in criminal justice: the difficulty that victims have in recovering from harm and the difficulty offenders experience in ridding themselves of the stigma of offending. It provides a practical response to the irreversibility of a harmful act and its consequences (Arendt, 1958). The restorative process can enable both parties to move on and get on with their lives no longer preoccupied with emotions generated by what happened in the past.

This does not happen overnight for most offenders. Leaving the past behind is a process. Calverley and Farrall describe the prevailing emotions at each stage of the desistance process (Calverley & Farrall, 2011). The individuals that they interviewed reported that their path to desistance began with feelings of hope that their lives would become better followed by shame and guilt over their past actions. This led to building trust and pride in their achievements, which eventually resulted in a sense of normalcy.

A model of practice which combines emotional literacy with restorative principles and research into desistance, resists splitting the rational from the emotional by understanding that feelings are inextricably connected to thoughts. Emotions enable people to work out what is going wrong and to motivate themselves to do something about it. As Katz (1999:322) observed, ‘Emotions give dramatically new and emphatically visible forms to the narrative themes that had been less visibly present in social life.’ However, as Katz has stated, the revelations that emotions offer can only be traced with great difficulty (Katz, 1999). People, who are experiencing the distressing emotions, arising from complex needs, require practitioners skilled in emotional literacy and confident in balancing accountability and support.

Future prospects
We would argue that emotional labour and emotional literacy in criminal justice practice should not be commodified for the benefit of the organization, as is the case in a number of service industries and business enterprises. In a probation context it should not be seen as a ‘technique’ to be practised but rather as an authentic human quality. Undertaking emotional labour or practising with emotional literacy is not about ‘being emotional’ or about unconditional empathy. Practitioners need to be able to recognise, and be empathic towards, the distress and possible victim status of offenders, but they also have to face the offender with the harm they have caused and their need to take responsibility, and make reparation for, the harm caused, where possible. This can take emotional courage on the part of the worker, particularly in the context of a restorative justice mediation.

Probation practice has always involved managing both care and control elements; holding this ambivalence and the feelings it can generate in both worker and service user is a crucial element of practice. However, in order to achieve the required levels of emotional literacy to undertake effective criminal justice practice and to be able to manage and recover from the emotions stimulated within themselves, workers need a work environment that understands the significance of emotions and supports the training, reflection and safe spaces needed to nurture this work. Unfortunately current evidence suggests that this is largely lacking in organisations committed to a managerial philosophy that prioritise quantitative measurement of outcomes and targets over qualitative processes. The workers who feel most sustained in their practice of emotional labour or emotional literacy are those with access to supportive and like-minded colleagues, understanding line managers, clinical supervision or mentoring and in a context of open and frank discussion of emotions that do not make them feel labelled as somehow weak, vulnerable or incompetent, but just ‘human’.

In the new probation landscape the Community Rehabilitation Companies may have a greater potential for flexibility, creativity and innovation in practice if they really want to push the boundaries of current practice. They may need to be persuaded to see the development of emotional skills in the workforce as leading to improved results, better engagement with offenders and a more fruitful way to achieve the results they are contracted to achieve. The National Probation Service (NPS) has an overwhelming concern with risk, and the work undertaken can be particularly onerous and relentless, although we believe the need for emotional literacy in NPS staff remains crucial. If emotion work is legitimised by the agency and staff feel that their emotional needs and skills are validated and supported by the agency, they are less likely to be stressed, become burnt out or take sick leave. This is a significant human resource issue. An emotionally healthy workforce is likely to work more effectively and be more cost effective. So too, emotionally literate practice that treats offenders as humans and responds appropriately to their emotional needs is more likely to be effective.

In late modernity many of the sources of social control have been weakened. There is less deference for authority and fear of the agents of the criminal justice system. The informal control of community and kinship is declining. As Green (2014:195) observes: ‘In an environment increasingly devoid of stable social institutions, trust is achieved through mutual openness and self-disclosure rather than pre-existing social networks’ (Green, 2014). Desistance in such a world is a continuous self-reflexive process, which requires emotional openness to be authentic.

A probation practice that is emotionally literate yet still enables people who offend to be accountable both for the harm that they have caused and their efforts to desist from offending can make a substantial contribution to an intuitively intelligent system of justice (Sherman, 2003) in 2020.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Chalen Westaby and Andrew Fowler for generously allowing us to use the findings from our work on emotional labour in probation practice for this article.

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Van Stokkom, B. (2011) ‘Dealing with Defiant Citizens: Building Emotional Intelligence into Police Work,’ in S. Karstedt, I. Loader and H. E. Strang (Eds.) Emotions, Crime and Justice. Oxford: Hart Publishing.
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Westaby, C. (2010) ‘Feeling like a sponge’: the emotional labour produced by solicitors in their interactions with clients seeking asylum, International Journal of the legal profession, 17:153-174.
Westaby, C. (2014) What’s culture got to do with it? The emotional labour of immigration solicitors in their exchanges with United Kingdon Border Agency case owners, European Journal of Current Legal Issues, 20.
Whitehead, P. (2010) Exploring Modern Probation. Social Theory and Organisational Complexity. Bristol: The Policy Press.
Zinstagg, Z. and Chapman, T. (2012) ‘Conferencing in Northern Ireland: Implementing Restorative Justice at the Core of the Criminal Justice System,’ in E. Zinstagg and I. Vanfraechem (Eds.) Conferencing and Restorative Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A former probation chief, writing in 2013, targeted the Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition government’s ‘Rehabilitation Revolution’ (Conservative Party, 2008) with withering scorn. It was, he wrote, nothing more than a ‘rehashed search for the holy grail of credible community sentences based on even more punishment delivered within an incomprehensible and fragmented framework of privatised provision in order to deliver rehabilitation’ (Collett, 2013:175). Collett was making a fundamental point about the erosion of probation’s original reintegrative ethos by rampant neoliberal policies, and the formation of a systematically marketised environment. There can now be little doubt that a momentous cultural shift is being engendered as probation is propelled swiftly down the road of privatisation. The pace of change is fast. While this is a partial privatisation (those assessed as posing the highest risk remain subject to public sector supervision), the eventual endgame of neoliberal political philosophy may be total privatisation. When ideology and neoliberal logic dictate that probation can be reduced to a commodity that can be bought and sold, why then should the government halt at an arbitrary point where probation is only 70 per cent privatised? Regardless of the rehabilitative rhetoric, the reality may be that the privatisation of probation is about the deprioritisation of rehabilitation and penal-welfare intervention.

Neoliberalism is not just a political and economic philosophy (Harvey, 2007), but also an entrenched ideological framework, embedded and institutionalised within our justice and penal systems (Reiner, 2007). The ideological nostrums which buttress this framework have inevitably been reproduced in the transformation in probation over the last three decades. Bell (2011) provides a meticulous account of the political economy of neoliberalism and the dynamics of neoliberal governance and the justice system. Neoliberal governments assiduously support privatisation (Mercille & Murphy, 2015), not least because it promotes the power of business interests in the economy. Privatisation demands that those sectors previously operated by the state are unchained from state regulation and pass to the private sector’s operational control (Whitehead & Crawshaw, 2012). Under neoliberalism, everything is viewed as a commodity. The growing recourse to privatisation can be theorised using the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, which includes the ‘commodification of assets outside the market’ (Mercille & Murphy, 2015:90).

Probation may have survived for over a century outside the market, sustained by exceptionally dedicated and creative practitioners. However, neoliberal ideology dictates that markets provide the definitive guidance for decision-making in every sphere of human endeavour, including the optimum allocation of resources. Perennial claims are advanced by advocates of neoliberalism for increasing efficiency, enhancing quality and effectiveness, cutting bureaucratic red tape, and saving public money; all of these arguments have been relentlessly rehearsed to reinforce the imperative to ‘reform’ probation. As Harvey (2007:165) argued, ‘Commodification presumes the existence of property rights over processes, things, and social relations, that a price can be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract.’ This is precisely what has occurred within probation, just as it has in other public institutions (including prisons). Every practitioner understands that intervention with those who may pose a significant risk to society is challenging and demands high levels of interpersonal skills, yet probation has been transformed from ‘a people-orientated service into one of commodities and products that can be competed for in the market-place’ (Whitehead, 2010:89). The commodification of rehabilitative intervention is fully underway.

The practice of rehabilitation (and punishment) has been impacted by the conditions created and fostered by neoliberal policies and their cultural underpinnings. These include the marketisation of society, notions of individual responsibility for behaviour, poverty, inequality, and discrimination in terms of race and ethnicity (Goldberg, 2009). All of these have clear implications for probation practice. Neoliberal culture, which typically depicts individual offenders as ultimately personally culpable for their offending, rather than understanding offending as related to neoliberal social and economic structures – may be linked with a tendency to punish. Reiner (2007a; 2007b) has argued that neoliberal economies are associated with higher levels of serious offending than may be found in social democratic economies, and that crime may be an inevitable outcome of neoliberal political structures. In a culture which is propelled by consumption, places a strong value on competitive individualism, and is riven by widening inequality, crime is able to flourish (Hall, Winlow & Ancrum, 2008). Neoliberalism may also be associated with increased offending, higher levels of violence, and even murder (Hall & McLean, 2009).

Wacquant (2009) contends that neoliberalism’s predominance has been paralleled by a shift towards greater punitiveness, in order to ensure the maintenance of social order. He observed that in American prisons, ‘the therapeutic philosophy of “rehabilitation” has been more or less supplanted by a managerialist approach… paving the way for the privatisation of correctional services’ (2009:2-3). This process has been replicated in the transformation of probation in England and Wales (Teague, 2012a). What had been, in essence, an organisation engaged in social welfarist intervention was metamorphosing into a more punitive, target-driven agency, propelled by the twin imperatives of enforcement and compliance. Robinson and Ugwudike (2012:301) noted that prior to the 1990s, enforcement ‘was neither a key, nor a consistent, aspect of practice’. This has now changed, perhaps irreversibly. Neoliberal culture has permeated probation.

The shift in probation’s professional ethos (Canton, 2011; Mair & Burke, 2012; Senior, Crowther-Dowey & Long, 2008; Whitehead & Statham, 2006) has been paralleled by the advent of neoliberal governance since 1979. Probation has – like other public sector agencies – experienced the impact of a radical transformation in the overarching ethos of public provision. Support for privatised intervention has crossed the continuum of party affiliations; Conservative, Labour and Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition governments have supported public sector reforms rooted in free market principles (for example, Blair 2010; Conservative Party 2010). In their typology of economies and their penal tendencies, Cavadino and Dignan (2005:15) cited England and Wales as archetypal neoliberal economies. For most of the twentieth century, the public provision of justice and penal services was universally accepted throughout Western Europe. However, privatisation within the UK justice system gained a significant profile when privatised imprisonment was introduced in the early 1990s (Teague, 2012b).

A decade later, the Carter Report endorsed private profit as a key component of public sector provision, citing a classic neoliberal justification for change: ‘Effectiveness and value for money can be further improved through greater use of competition from private and voluntary providers’ (Carter, 2004:5). The seismic shift to private provision within probation was presaged by a Conservative party policy statement asserting that ‘The old monopolies in the prison and probation system need to be opened up to create a far more diverse range of suppliers of criminal justice services’ (Conservative Party, 2008:49). When the then probation and prisons minister, Crispin Blunt, addressed frontline practitioners at the 2010 Napo conference, he assured them that he was a pragmatist, unconstrained by ideology. His audience was demonstrably unimpressed to learn that, in practice, this meant outsourcing much of their work to private companies (Blunt, 2010). It hardly needs stating the imposition of privatisation was not an initiative propelled by grass roots practitioners. Nor were the changes to probation evidence based. As Oldfield (2002:93) had bluntly concluded, ‘late modern transformations in probation can be seen as the result of political rather than epistemological influence’.

However, the most radical alteration to probation’s public sector identity came in 2013, with the Coalition Government’s Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) programme (Ministry of Justice, 2013). TR outlined policies so controversial and contested that the British Journal of Community Justice devoted an unprecedented double issue of painstaking analysis to them (2013: Volume 11(2-3)). These debates need no further rehearsal here, but there can be little doubt about the profound impact of the changes imposed by TR. The Coalition government’s stance on probation was unambiguous; they offered the classic neoliberal analysis that it was essential to ‘free up funding through increased efficiency and new ways of working’ (Ministry of Justice, 2013:3). This was to be achieved by a combination of the private, voluntary and public sectors.

Competition for running probation is an inevitable part of the deregulation and marketisation of the justice system. The state’s function under neoliberalism is simple: to nurture and develop an institutional structure which supports private profit and the free market. If there are no existing markets in a particular sphere, then they must simply be created, even if this should necessitate direct state action. To this end, the Ministry of Justice shortlisted 30 bidders (including large multi-national companies) to deliver probation intervention. A total of eight providers were eventually selected. This was followed by the creation of 21 new Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). Private sector led partnerships controlled 20 out of these 21 CRCs (one is run by a probation ‘mutual’). Sodexo Justice Services, which already profitably operates prisons, was awarded six of the 21 CRCs in partnership with Nacro, while Interserve (as part of the Purple Futures partnership) bid successfully in five CRCs. This means that just two multi-national companies were chosen by government to operate over half of all the CRCs in England and Wales (11 out of 21 CRCs). Though the CRCs were initially publicly owned, they were transferred from public to private ownership in February 2015. In June 2014, the public sector new National Probation Service became responsible for the management of high risk offenders, but the majority of probation service users in England and Wales (around 70 per cent) are now supervised by CRCs. This much is a matter of public record. Practitioners will scrutinise and debate the effectiveness of the changes, and it is right that they should do so. However, it is also essential is to consider the broader economic, political and ideological context which has determined the mechanics of these changes.
Burke and Collett (2010:244) observed that probation practice, engaging with individuals, ‘developing their personal capacity and enhancing their social capital… is ultimately a human and moral enterprise’. It is not primarily concerned with private profit. The inexorable focus upon the centrality of the market and an ‘offender management system that harnesses the innovation of the private and voluntary sectors’ (Ministry of Justice, 2010) reflects an ingrained, ideologically dogmatic support of privatisation (Senior, 2013). The changes in probation can be viewed as part of the continuing transformation of our justice system into a competitive market place, in which the attainment of financial return takes precedence over social justice and the wider social good. As McNeill (2013:85) cogently but vainly noted in the wake of TR, ‘Doing justice is not a task that we should contract out because it is a civic duty that citizens owe to one another.’

Harvey’s (2007) definitive analysis of neoliberalism and its drive to marketise social assets provides us with a framework for understanding the advent of CRCs and Payment by Results (Hedderman, 2013) within probation. The privatisation of public assets has a single, overarching aim, namely ‘to open up new fields for capital accumulation in domains hitherto regarded off-limits to the calculus of profitability’ (Harvey, 2007:160). Probation, as a ‘human and moral enterprise’, was formerly viewed as outside the ‘calculus of profitability’. Not any more. It may have survived, and even flourished, for over a century as it embraced the rehabilitative ideal, but in the new neoliberal world, it simply represents an industry worth at least £820m a year (Warrell, 2012).

References

Bell, E. (2011) Criminal Justice and Neoliberalism. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Blair, T. (2010) A Journey. London: Hutchinson.
Burke, L. and Collett, S. (2010) People are not things: What New Labour has done to Probation, Probation Journal, 57:232-249.
Canton, R. (2011) Probation: Working With Offenders. Abingdon: Routledge.
Cavadino, M. and Dignan, J. (2005) Penal systems: A comparative approach. London: Sage.
Collett, S. (2013) Riots, Revolution and Rehabilitation: The Future of Probation, Howard Journal, 52:163-189.
Conservative Party (2008) Prisons with a Purpose: Our Sentencing and Rehabilitation Revolution to Break the Cycle of Crime. London: Conservative Party.
Conservative Party (2010) Conservative Manifesto. London: Conservative Party.
Goldberg, D. T. (2009) The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Oxford: Wilely-Blackwell.
Hall, S. and McLean, C. (2009) A tale of two capitalisms, Theoretical Criminology, 13:313-339.
Hall, S., Winlow, S. and Ancrum, C. (2008) Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture. Cullompton: Willan.
Harvey, D. (2007) Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hedderman, C. (2013) Payment by Results: hopes, fears and evidence, British Journal of Community Justice, 11:43-58.
Mair, G. and Burke, L. (2012) Redemption, Rehabilitation and Risk Management: A History of Probation. Abingdon: Routledge.
McNeill, F. (2013) Transforming Rehabilitation: Evidence, Values and Ideology, British Journal of Community Justice, 11:83-6.
Mercille, J. and Murphy, E. (2015) Deepening Neoliberalism, Austerity, and Crisis: Europe’s Treasure Ireland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ministry of Justice (2010) Draft Structural Reform Plan. Ministry of Justice, London.
Ministry of Justice (2013) Transforming Rehabilitation: A revolution in the way we manage offenders, vol. Cm 8517. London: The Stationery Office.
Oldfield, M. (2002) What Works and the Conjunctural Politics of Probation: Effectiveness, Managerialism and Neo-Liberalism, British Journal of Community Justice, 1.
Reiner, R. (2007a) ‘Neoliberalism, crime and justice’, in R. Roberts and W. McMahon (Eds.) Social justice and criminal justice. London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.
Reiner, R. (2007b) Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime Control. Cambridge, Polity Press.
Robinson, G. and Ugwudike, P. (2012) Investing in ‘Toughness’: Probation, Enforcement and Legitimacy, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 51:300-316.
Senior, P. (2013) Privatising Probation: The Death Knell of a Much-Cherished Public Service? 16th Annual Bill McWilliams Memorial Lecture. Cambridge: Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Senior, P., Crowther-Dowey, C. and Long, M. (2008) Understanding Modernisation in Criminal Justice. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Teague, M. (2012a) ‘Neoliberalism, Prisons and Probation in the USA and England and Wales’, in P. Whitehead and P. Crawshaw (Ed.) Organising Neoliberalism: Markets, Privatisation and Justice. London: Anthem.
Teague, M. (2012b) ‘Privatising Criminal Justice: A Step Too Far?, in V. Helyar-Cardwell. (Ed.) Delivering Justice: The role of the public, private and voluntary sectors in prisons and probation. London: Criminal Justice Alliance.
Wacquant, L. (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Warrell, H. (2012) ‘Call to open probation service to competition’, The Financial Times.
Whitehead, P. and Statham, R. (2006) The History of Probation: Politics, Power and Cultural Change 1876-2005. Crayford: Shaw and Sons.
Whitehead, P. and Crawshaw, P. (2012) Organising Neoliberalism: Markets, Privatisation and Justice. London: Anthem Press.

Is it possible that innovation can arise out of the privatisation of the probation service in England and Wales? A frequent justification for the creation of the Community Rehabilitation Companies to supervise the majority of probation clients is that it can.

However, there is a paradox here that must be addressed. It is almost a truism that the long term development of probation in England and Wales since the 1990s has involved a shift away from rehabilitation and desistance through community re-integration towards risk management through surveillance and discipline administered by an increasingly deskilled workforce (Fitzgibbon, 2007; 2011).

This shift has taken place irrespective of privatisation (Fitzgibbon, 2013; Fitzgibbon & Lea, 2014). A graphic illustration of this is the fact that the recent introduction of biometric reporting now being deployed by Sodexo this year to effect a 30 per cent cut in probation staff in the CRCs under its control, (Travis, 2015) was in fact piloted by London Probation back in 2012. The pilot project was justified at the time as a bureaucracy reduction exercise which would liberate practitioners from excessive time spent on administration (Doward, 2012). Many feared it would be used to justify staffing cuts and redundancies  and this appears to have now been true.

Nevertheless probation practitioners have opposed privatisation precisely on the grounds that it accentuates such tendencies, of deskilling, insecurity and an erosion of working conditions and continues the increasing precariatisation of the practitioner labour force (Standing, 2011). Practitioners now talk about the ‘end of the probation ideal’ and are demoralised and concerned about their futures (Deering & Feilzer, 2015).

What this ideal refers to is obviously not the recent history of national standards and the role of the Ministry of Justice in deskilling but rather the semi-autonomous social work tradition which still survives in the probation service but which will, practitioners fear, be effectively killed off by privatisation and the new CRCs.

Thus the issue is not in fact privatisation per se as a form of organisational change but the final destruction of the autonomous probation culture. As Whitehead and Crawshaw noted (2013) Probation:

 ‘…has a textured and semi-autonomous cultural history … [with] … its own internal dynamics, professional routines, primary tasks and ethical-cultural configurations … [which exhibited the ability] … to challenge, resist and modify the prevailing hegemonic order.’ (Whitehead & Crawshaw, 2013:10)

That culture has been crucial in sustaining the importance of traditional rehabilitation methods and it is this culture that has been placed under threat as much from the state as from the private sector (Fitzgibbon & Lea, 2014).

In this context the role of academic research in the probation area is complex and important. On the one hand much Home Office/Ministry of Justice sponsored research (e.g. on risk management) has supported the conventional state agendas. It can be expected that the private sector may start to take over direct funding of such research e.g. into most cost-effective forms of surveillance and biometric reporting.

But much academic research has sustained the probation ‘counter-culture’ of traditional rehabilitation methods in working with offenders in the face of the risk agenda. One immediately thinks of such research as the Liverpool desistance studies by Shadd Maruna and others (Carvalho, Maruna & Porter, 2004).

The question is what the role of such research will be in the new world of privatisation. One example to illustrate this issue is some recent research undertaken with academics and practitioners in a European context on the role of Photovoice as a rehabilitation technique.

Photovoice is an established method developed initially by researchers in the area of health promotion (Wang & Burris, 1997). By utilizing photographs taken and selected by participants, respondents can reflect upon and explore the reasons, emotions and experiences that have guided their chosen images. This visual approach is a potentially powerful research tool to examine supervision experiences from the offender’s perspective in an innovative and engaging manner.

Supervisible, a Photovoice research project, arose out of a paper presented at a meeting of the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Offender Supervision in Europe Group. This European network involved researchers across 23 countries working for almost four years (from 2012-2016) to promote cooperation between institutions and individuals in different European states (and with different disciplinary perspectives) carrying out research on offender supervision. The primary aim has been to explore and Innovation and privatisation in the probation service in England and Wales share best practice in supervision. The sub-group ‘Experiencing Supervision’ felt that a new visual method of exploration of offenders’ experience of supervision would be helpful and would enable participants to feel empowered and enriched by the process of being involved in a creative research project. Offenders are often people who have had negative experiences in terms of their educational achievement and their literacy skills (McNeill et al., 2011). This often inhibits their confidence and ability to verbally articulate their
experiences and feelings, in common with other marginalised groups within society. Creative interventions can enable participants to increase their self-esteem and selfconfidence as well as develop new skills with which to communicate to themselves and share their emotions/experiences with others (Palibroda et al., 2009). Supervisible aims begin to bridge the gap in academic knowledge of how supervision is experienced and understood by those subject to it. It uses a visual and innovative Photovoice methodology to understand the perspectives of service users. Participants are invited to take a series of photographs, select specific ones and discuss their choices and motives with the researchers and fellow participants.

The technique was found to be highly successful not just in providing rich research data but in enabling supervisees to gain insight and begin to build a more confident and selfaware perception of themselves as worthwhile people who could be re-integrated into society. By creating a visual biography which dealt with the whole person this method of engagement clashes with fragmentation of ‘datavidual’ into risk scores (Franko Aas, 2004). This is a labour-intensive way of working and clients need reassurance that photos are not about surveillance, they need time and space to tell their stories. However it has been widely and successfully used in a variety of settings in many countries (Wang & Burris, 1997; Rose, 2006).

How can this type of labour- and time-intensive, ‘whole person’ oriented research help the work of practitioners? Obviously it is viable research as such, in a European context, because no other jurisdiction either in the UK or in the EU has followed the privatisation ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ agenda imposed on England and Wales. Comparative research utilising such techniques can potentially demonstrate which methods of engagement and support work most effectively with offenders on supervision as well as highlight policies which obstruct or impede meaningful interaction. Thus insight gained from England and Wales as well as other European countries enables practitioners to learn from one another and to strengthen their professional knowledge and integrity. However could such skilled innovative techniques be successfully deployed within a Community Rehabilitation Company?

There are two issues: are the CRCs likely to be innovators and is Photovoice the sort of innovation they might be interested in? Much centres on the debate on payment by results (PbR). If desistance targets can be achieved by the ‘Sodexo model’ – redundancies and kiosk reporting- then the only type of research the CRCs will be interested in will be that which explores and refines the use of technology and pacification. If they kill off the old probation culture through redundancies and recruitment of a new ‘precariat’ labour force of surveillance operatives then there will be no link any longer with desistance research such as that of Liverpool or Photovoice (see Fitzgibbon & Lea, 2014).

But the argument has been made – by the National Audit Office (NAO) – that CRCs may be in a position to break free from the surveillance and risk management agenda which was – remember – imposed by the state through  National Standards and subsequent National Probation Service targets and uniform methods of working. The reason for this break is that PbR is open minded about how the results are delivered, as long as they are delivered. A recent NAO study argued:

‘Payment by Results potentially offers benefits such as innovative solutions to intractable problems. If it can deliver these benefits, then the increased risk and cost may be justified.’ (National Audit Office, 2015)

This is probably combined with the assumption that the voluntary sector, small and medium sized charities, are hopefully going to play a significant role in the CRCs.

Yet the fact is that labour-intensive methods like Photovoice will be competing with technology based surveillance systems like biometric reporting and will require longer and more intensive practitioner training at a time of austerity and slimmed down staffing levels.

The crucial issue is what the CRCs’ definition of rehabilitation will be: keeping people quiet through surveillance or reintegration into employment and community? From a PbR perspective the latter is increasingly unpredictable. The ‘meaningful journeys’ of the Photovoice population, like those entering into meaningful non-criminogenic community relations in the Liverpool study, is predicated upon viable communities with employment opportunities and enhanced life chances. These are beyond the control of the CRCs while cheaper and more predictable surveillance mechanisms are available over the medium term (i.e. the period over which PbR is likely to be measured).

There may be simply a continuation of the mixed economy of Photovoice and similar intensive interventions for more serious offenders and this is likely to be restricted to the National Probation Service while CRCs concentrate on easily manageable and measurable desistance such as those involved in kiosk reporting, techniques which have no uncontrollable costs in terms of lifestyle and community integration.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that CRCs are in competition with each other for potential contract renewal and therefore may be reluctant to share or promote innovative methods with their market competitors to enable them to stay ahead in terms of tendering advantages.

An expanded version of this thought piece will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming book edited by John Lea and Sam King entitled Privatisation and Criminal Justice: recent experience in England and Wales published by Policy Press.

References

Carvalho, I., Maruna, S. and Porter, L. (2004) The Liverpool Desistance Study and probation practice: opening the dialogue. Probation Journal, 51(3): 221–247.
Deering, J. and Feilzer, M. (2015) Privatising Probation: Is Transforming Rehabilitation the End of the Probation Ideal? Policy Press.
Doward, J. (2012) ‘Probation officers to be replaced by electronic kiosks in pilot scheme’, The Guardian, 28th April 2012.
Fitzgibbon, D. W. (2007) Risk analysis and the new practitioner: Myth or reality? Punishment and Society, 9(1): 87–97.
Fitzgibbon, W. (2011) Probation and Social Work on Trial: Violent Offenders and Child Abusers. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Fitzgibbon, W. (2013) Risk and privatisation, British Journal of Community Justice, 11(2/3):87.
Fitzgibbon, W. and Lea, J. (2014) Defending probation: Beyond privatisation and security, European Journal of Probation, 6(1), 24–41.
Franko Aas, K. (2004) From Narrative to Database: technological change and penal culture, Punishment and Society, 6:379–393.
McNeill, F., Anderson, K., Colvin, S., Overy,K., Sparks, R. and Tett, L. (2011) Inspiring Desistance? Arts projects and ‘what works?’, Justitiele verkenningen, 37(5): 80-101.
National Audit Office (2015) Outcome-based payment schemes: government’s use of payment by results – National Audit Office. Available at: https://www.nao.org.uk/pressreleases/outcome-based-payment-schemes-governments-use-of-payment-by-results-2/. Accessed 11/02/2016.
Palibroda, B., with Krieg, B., Murdock, L., and Havelock, J. (2009) A practical guide to Photovoice: sharing pictures, telling stories and changing communities. Winnipeg: The Prairie Women Health’s Centre of Excellence
Rose, G. (2011) Visual methodologies: An introduction to researching with visual materials. London: Sage.
Standing, G. (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Travis, A. (2015) ‘Probation officers face redundancy in plan to replace them with machines’, The Guardian, 30th March 2015.
Wang, C. and Burris, M. A. (1997) Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3):369–387.

In this short comment piece the authors attempt to visualise what probation practice might look like in the year 2020 through an account of a typical working day in the life of a CRC and NPS worker respectively.

CRC Day in the Life
Monday 10th February 2020

7.30am: I begin the week by checking messages on my work tablet while eating breakfast. The messages bring the news that Joe was arrested on Saturday, charged with an assault on his partner and will be in court this morning. There is also an urgent appeal for someone to cover for sickness absence and staff the report centre this evening. I skim through the report detailing our team’s performance against our January re-offending targets. Back in January my tablet was broken and I couldn’t check messages from home – that was better.

8.30am: Arrive at the office. I phone the NPS court office. No answer. I spent some time on Sunday evening checking my email, but still have 37 messages that have arrived since Friday afternoon. These are mostly updates from partner agencies about people on my caseload: referrals acknowledged, appointments made, appointments kept and missed. My colleague working in the local prison has emailed to let me know that, following a re-calculation of her sentence dates, Ella will be released from her 4 month prison sentence on Thursday morning. Our local hostel is not able to accommodate her – they have no empty bed spaces for women and, anyway, they are reluctant to have her stay again after the problems she caused there at the end of last year. I phone the NPS court officer’s mobile and leave a message asking to be called back.

10.30am: I spend two hours every other Monday morning at the community drugs team drop-in. This might be the best bit of my job. There are definite advantages in this ‘agile’ working as it gets me out and about in the local community although I do miss the fact that there is less opportunity to meet with my colleagues and discuss our cases, etc. It is also about the only time when I feel as though I’m building useful relationships with service users and I think that they benefit from having a range of services in one place. I miss a call back from the NPS court officer while I’m in a session with Steve who is just ready to think about getting back into work. I have heard that our owners are taking on casual staff in their cleaning division and have a target to provide employment for 5% of our service users. I tell Steve that I will make enquiries to confirm if this is true.

1.00pm: Back at the office eating a sandwich in front of the computer. I find out that I’ve missed a visit to the office from our CRC big boss. Apparently he brought a message congratulating us on the 5th birthday of the CRC but raised concern that our team’s reoffending rates are higher than expected. No doubt there will be threats of further job losses but I’m not sure how they can cut us back any further. He had indicated that Version 7 of their operating plan, Desistance Interface Model, is nearly ready. There are also rumours that we will be taken over by another company if our performance does not improve but I’ve no idea whether this is true. I’m disappointed that I did not see him as I hoped to find out whether the CRC is going to fund any of us through professional training. I’m one of the longest standing officers here (I’d been working as a PSO for a couple of years before TR) and I’m increasingly pissed off by the lack of career development. I’m thinking of applying to train as a community psychiatric nurse, but I don’t think I can afford to be a student.

2.00pm: Afternoons in the office are the worst part of my job. I split my time between updating records, answering email and seeing service users. Some service users just have to sign in at reception (apparently the automatic kiosks are finally coming later this year) but others ask to see an officer. I don’t like the open plan environment, I don’t like it that I don’t recognise most of the people, even those who are notionally on my caseload and I don’t like it that people are usually asking me for resources that I can’t provide. I spend the afternoon disappointing service users and failing to persuade the hostel to magically find space for Ella. I am becoming more and more frustrated with the demands to reduce reoffending whilst making sure that we are delivering revenues above our operational costs. I notice that the owners have increased the payments for services again which will no doubt go down well with the NPS!

5.15pm: Phone call from NPS court officer. Joe has been remanded in custody. The assault on his partner is serious. The court officer expresses frustration at having had no detail about Joe’s community order leaving him unable to answer questions from the magistrates and from Joe’s solicitor. I am leaving the building when I am stopped by Ella’s brother. He is on licence and has come to sign in. He may be able to have Ella stay with him, but his girlfriend will take some persuading.

7.00pm: At home. Write report about Joe’s community order while eating dinner. What will probation practice look like in 2020?

NPS Day in the Life
Monday 10th February 2020

7.30am: I arrive early at the office this morning to beat the traffic and in the hope that I will be able to get away promptly this evening as it’s my best mate’s birthday. The office is quiet but, and very frustratingly, there is some sort of IT problem and I can’t log on to the client database. I was going to prepare for a videolink sentence planning meeting that is scheduled for 2pm. There’s hardly anyone around that I can talk to in the office. I check the notice board in the admin pod and see that most of my colleagues are out working in the police stations across the area where we are all co-located for part of the week. The rest seem to be off sick and we have recently received a directive from NOMS about the number of staff days lost through sickness. They have given us access to a counsellor to support us if we are feeling stressed but she has to provide a service to staff across the whole area and has had her hours cut following the latest round of cut-backs. I spend some time talking to Gary, the court PSO. He’s only been in post for a couple of months and is still learning the ropes. Email is working, so we have a list of people appearing in court this morning, including those arrested over the weekend. Our IT problem means that we can’t check whether any of them are current NPS clients or are supervised by the CRC. Gary says that his job would be easier if he had more information about CRC cases. I spend the morning in the office. Happily the IT systems are back up soon after 9am so I am able to get underway with outstanding assessments and reports.

9.30am: I am interrupted for some advice by my colleague Jazmin. Jazmin has been in the team for about 15 months so she has nearly completed the probation officer qualification. (When I did the training it took longer than it does now, but I qualified back in 2014.) Jazmin has arrived at work to discover that someone she was supervising has gone off the rails over the weekend: he has been drinking and broken other rules at the hostel where he stays. He faces eviction from the hostel. He is on licence for a serious alcohol-related offence of GBH and this looks like a straightforward recall to me. I talk Jazmin through the procedure. She seems to genuinely appreciate this as there is little opportunity or time to discuss such issues with colleagues and we rarely see our regional manager.

10.30am: All five sex offenders due to report in this morning keep their appointments. There are the usual gripes about the GPS tags that all our service users are now required to wear and the level of police surveillance they encounter. Harry, one of the older men I supervise describes it as “worse than an open prison in the community”. I see each of them for about 20 mins. Tom reports next. He is quite anxious about the forthcoming domestic abuse groupwork programme run by the CRC. He doesn’t want to talk about his relationship with his girlfriend in a group of strangers. I try to simultaneously encourage him to attend and reassure him that the group will be well run. I’d like to introduce him to one of the group leaders, but one of them is off sick and the other is based at an office 50 miles away on Mondays. I have already had to make a strong case to the regional manager to finance Tom’s place on the programme especially since we’ve heard that the CRC are putting their prices up again. It’s hard to believe that we once worked together as one organisation!

1.00pm: I have a sandwich in front of the computer. I half-read the Deputy Director’s email newsletter. Further budget cuts are anticipated. There are rumours that the NPS will be absorbed into other parts of the criminal justice system with some staff working for court services with the rest employed by the police. Gary pops across from court to make a cup of tea and complain that he can’t get hold of anyone at the CRC. A CRC supervisee is at court this morning charged with a serious assault on his partner. The defendant’s solicitor is arguing for bail and the CPS lawyer wants to know more about the home circumstances.

2.00pm: The videolink with the prison goes mostly OK. The prisoner is a lifer and her first parole hearing is approaching. She is hoping for a move to open conditions and a prison nearer her teenage daughter. She was a bit negative about probation, but, given that we’ve offered her no continuity of contact since she was sentenced back in 2009, that seems reasonable enough. I hope I’m still around at the time of the next contact.

3.00pm: The day takes a turn for the worse. Shaun comes to the office. He is a young man with learning difficulties, still only 19, released on licence having been sent to prison for three sexual assaults committed at the hostel where he was living back in 2008. He has been living with his aunt, but she has just asked him to leave because she found him smoking cannabis in his room. I make lots of phone calls: to Shaun’s aunt (who is adamant that he’s not welcome just now), to the local emergency housing options (even though I know they probably don’t have space and, anyway, won’t take Shaun because of his conviction), to the adult social care team (who can’t suggest anything I’ve not already considered). Shaun calls his grandmother, who lives in London. She is prepared for Shaun to go there for a few days while something else is sorted out but I can’t approve that without a proper risk assessment. I have almost decided to go ahead with an emergency recall when Shaun’s aunt phones back to say that she supposes Shaun will have to return to her house for a couple more days.

7.00pm: At home. Worry about Shaun while trying to decide whether I have the energy to go out to my friend’s birthday drink.

Commentary
Each of these fictional scenarios of a ‘typical’ day in the life of a worker in the NPS and CRCs in 2020 are presented to illustrate some possible directions for and risks to the future of probation practice. Each account has elements that will no doubt resonate with contemporary probation practitioners in terms of the long working hours, competing workload demands and the need to balance scarce resources. One could be forgiven for thinking therefore that not much has changed but in another sense the context within which the respective workers are operating raises a number of fundamental practice questions regarding the sustainability of a probation ‘essence’ that has provided the theoretical backdrop to this edition. Firstly, each of the workers appear to be operating within their own practice ‘silos’ with inadequate communication between them. On one level, this could be viewed as the inevitable consequence of the organisational bifurcation of probation that has occurred as a result of Transforming Rehabilitation. However, even if one accepts that communication systems and processes will have improved by 2020
What will probation practice look like in 2020? (which is by no means certain) it would still seem to be the case that the way in which the two organisations relate to each other has fundamentally changed and this is likely to be even more pronounced as both the NPS and CRCs increasingly seek to establish their respective organisational identities and functional responsibilities. For the CRCs this may lead to further silos between different providers whilst within the NPS there might be operational silos between the courts, prison, approved premises and the community?

It is still the case that the two workers in our fictional scenarios appear committed to the individuals with whom they are working but their ability to undertake these tasks effectively is perhaps inevitably very much shaped and challenged by the environments within which they are located. The account of the NPS worker reflects the relentless pressures of working with those individuals who present the highest risks and the emotional toil involved. For the worker in the CRC there is perhaps the potential for more creative and innovative approaches but in our scenario these are undermined by an on-going lack of resources and the increasingly stringent demands of the contractual arrangements. In both accounts there remains an on-going uncertainty over the future organisational arrangements. What is clear though from our fictional accounts is that the demands faced by each of the workers in both the NPS and CRC will be no less than at present and so will the need for a skilled and suitably qualified workforce. The accounts paint a concerning picture of staff shortage and inexperience coupled with inadequate supervision and lack of training opportunities. Whether the application of technological advances will aid or continue to sometimes frustrate practice is not clear from our accounts but there is a danger that the relational aspects of probation work will be undermined if workers become increasingly distanced from each other and from those under their supervision.

Only time will tell how accurate our imagined accounts of probation practice in 2020 will be. We have no doubt that there will continue to be some continuities but there are also likely to be policy and technological turns that will influence and shape practice in ways that we have not envisaged. However, whatever practice models emerge over the intervening period our sincere hope is that the traditional ‘essence’ of probation will be retained, and hopefully developed, in some form.

This article is based on a discussion, between the four co-authors, that took place over two days during the ‘Conversation with Paul Senior’ in Kendal in January 2016. Conscious that we have each undertaken research into aspects of occupational cultures in probation and social work, we spent some time on the first day devising questions that we might ask ourselves in order to imagine what occupational cultures in Probation might be like in 2020. The following day, we decided that an innovative way to capture our musings might be to imagine ourselves as a focus group and to record our discussion. So this is what we did – using nothing more than a smartphone. Subsequently, the recording was transcribed and we set about editing it to form the core of this article. We have added an introduction and a conclusion but the core discussion is very much as it was – ‘warts and all’. We are aware that the arguments are not always presented in a polished fashion but we have resisted tampering too much with the spontaneity of the discussion. Our aim is to provide a few insights and stimulate further debate and research.

Introduction
The concept of culture embraces a diversity of notions, ideas and meanings which may be linked with roles, norms, and values. If culture is effectively a system of collectively held values, then as Schein (2010:21-22) noted, once ‘a set of shared assumptions has come to be taken for granted, it determines much of the group’s behaviour, and the rules and norms that are taught to newcomers that is a reflection of culture’.

Academics in the fields of social policy, sociology and economics have acknowledged that work is at the core of human social and cultural life (for example, Edgell, 2012; Vallas, 2012). As Vallas (2012:8) noted, ‘how work is arranged… has massive institutional and cultural effects’. Trice (1993:xii) observed that ‘occupations tend to be cultures in and of themselves’. Deering (2011:25), writing about the impact of penal policy upon probation practitioners, pointed to the plethora of definitions of culture in general, and more specifically the range of definitions of occupational culture.

Johnson et al. (2009:320) argued that occupational culture may exert such a significant impact that it ‘shapes perceptions of reality’. It is clear that probation practitioners, like groups of workers in many occupations, develop their own specific occupational culture. Research on the police (for example, Graef, 1989; Loftus, 2012; Reiner, 1992) underlines the importance of studying occupational cultures. Within the criminal justice system, Sir William Macpherson made the following observation about the power exerted by police occupational culture in his report on the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence:

‘We are all consumed by this occupational culture… we tend to conform to the norms of this occupational culture, which we say is all powerful in shaping our views and perceptions of a particular community.’ (Macpherson, 1999:25)

Writing about probation in particular, Mawby and Worrall (2011:4) observed that occupational culture may be viewed as ‘the values shared by individuals that manifest themselves in the practices of members of that occupation or organisation’. They cite an early definition of occupational culture by Schein as helpful for their discussion of probation cultures: ‘The deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organisation, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic taken-for-granted fashion an organisation’s view of itself and its environment’ (Schein, 1985 cited in Mawby & Worrall, 2011:5). If we want to understand what Schein labels as the ‘deeper level’ assumptions of probation workers, a consideration of how future probation occupational cultures may develop is essential. Such attitudes and perceptions may exist and function beneath the official presentational umbrella of the agencies which now cover what formerly constituted the probation service. The study of probation’s occupational cultures may provide access to understanding which may otherwise be relatively inaccessible, given that it is situated beyond the presentation level.

The deeply ingrained notions and ideas embedded in an occupational culture are effectively the substance of that culture; that is, they communicate to those who are part of the culture which particular activities they ought to be undertaking, and how they should understand them. There is, of course, the possibility of discrepancies between the probation agencies’ official mission and the everyday lived reality of practice as experienced by frontline practitioners. This underpins the importance of paying careful attention to probation occupational cultures as understood by a range of practitioners. How these cultures may develop in future is precisely what this focus group aims to discuss. It is also important to note that the process by which we view occupational culture did not develop independently, in a vacuum; it is inevitably shaped by wider political, social and economic forces. This discussion must also take account of that reality.

What do we mean by ‘occupational cultures’?

Michael: It’s very important to define what we’re doing. You could say it’s some kind of collective programming of what we do as a people, collective programming of the mind and shared values and ideas of how a particular job is undertaken. There are going to be as many different definitions of culture as there are sociologists and criminologists. If we’re talking about organisational culture, I would tend to see that as a top-down phenomenon, driven from the top of the managerial hierarchy, and if we’re talking about occupational culture that’s a process that is driven from the ground up, by frontline practitioners. So if we’re looking at occupational culture we’re looking at ideas that people are bringing to their job, why people come into probation. That might be one of the key areas that’s changing as the nature of probation changes and the CRCs develop. Linked with this are the ideas that practitioners embrace once they’re in the job: ideas of what they’re actually doing, how they understand what they’re doing, and what the job actually means. And interlinked with that are practitioners’ ideas of what punishment is, and what rehabilitation is. And those are all incredibly varied. If we’re looking forward we’ve got all sorts of ideas to draw upon from probation from the past. The original one is still the belief that if there was a return to social work education and a social welfarist ethos, everything would be magically resolved – that idealistic view – and then you could move it right up to the present day to confrontation, control, compliance – all of those issues. That whole idea of risk assessment interlinked with ideas about technology and how we communicate. Patterns of work can be altered by technology, which can mean the deskilling of practitioners, and the degradation of their work. If we characterise early probation as ‘advise, assist and befriend’ and maybe mid-probation as ‘confront, control and monitor’, is there a pithy three pronged analysis of what probation might be in 2020?

Anne: Going back to what you said earlier about organisational cultures and occupational cultures, if we look at where the boundaries are between those two, that might be the thing that has changed and is changing. But as you were saying that, I was writing down ‘autonomy and accountability’ because one of the key things in ‘traditional’ probation occupational cultures has been the autonomous professional worker being able to make their own judgements and that has been steadily eroded. The other phrase I’ve written down is the one about cultures being about ‘how things are done around here’. It’s the informal, the back story of how you’re socialised into a particular occupation and what the process of that is. Between us we’ve got quite a clear idea of what the process has been and I wonder if it’s the process of socialising into the occupation that has changed so dramatically with Transforming Rehabilitation.

Michael: And you’re not talking about training specifically here?

Anne: No, clearly training is one important element. That’s the key to how you get a raw person off the streets and into the job but that’s not the only thing about occupational cultures. It’s what happens after the training or alongside the training, it’s about the group dynamics and the way in which the group socialises its members into particular ways of doing things.

Michael: That’s important because how we organise work is going to have massive institutional effects, cultural effects, just the way in which it’s structured for practitioners on a daily basis, and occupational norms and values. That’s going to have a huge impact.

Dave: And things that were being talked about earlier in relation to open plan offices and the way the work is physically arranged has an impact. I’m just saying that as a side issue, I don’t know how that helps us.

Anne: I don’t think it’s a side issue, it’s absolutely crucial. We’ve done quite a lot of work between us on the physical environments. We’ve done the European project on photographing the physical environment of probation, for example, because we think it really is an important part of the culture, so I think you’re quite right to raise that.

Lol: Why I think it’s really important is that one of the things that Transforming Rehabilitation has done is very quickly changed the demographic of the organisation, so you’ve now got lots of new staff who are coming in and have not worked within the old culture. So the environment and organisational memory that the new providers are trying to create, for some workers that will be what they’ve been socialised into. The providers think that by concentrating a lot of their efforts in terms of the physical layout of the working environment for example, they are making a strong statement of intention.

Anne: Yes, why spend all that money on creating a particular kind of model of the physical environment if you don’t think that it’s going to impact on the way in which you’re working and how people see their role within the organisation? Also, the issue of values has to come through all the time, how you sustain (if you want to sustain) the values of traditional probation cultures and how those have to be changed in the new environment.

Dave: For me, connected to values is all that you were saying earlier about the impact on occupational culture of the changing demographic which is the gender changes in probation, of it becoming a woman majority occupation.

Anne: In a way the voice of the occupational cultures of probation has now become much more a female voice than it was in the past. It’s not necessarily that there are so many women in the organisation so you’re going to see a particular kind of change. It’s more that the whole voice has changed and you’ve got to take that into account in reactions to probation and it’s just a completely different dimension. You’d like to think also that there had been a change in diversity in terms of ethnicity.

Michael: Black and minority ethnic probation staff in terms of representation are over-represented compared to black and minority people in the general population. So in that sense, unlike prison and unlike policing, unlike sentencers, maybe not the magistrates but the judges in particular, the probation workforce is representative in terms of race and ethnicity. It depends again what your barometer for diversity and representation is. If culture is a collectively held set of beliefs, then everyone in an organisation contributes to that culture. So inevitably you look at the fact that compared to the representation of women in the general population, the percentage of women in the probation workforce is greater than in the general population.

Dave: That has an impact in terms of values in the sense of a demonstrable commitment to diversity and equality, but I was thinking more of the micro-practices which we were talking about, about women doing things in a different way to the way that men do things and how that may have changed working practices from a masculinist form to a feminist form of practice.

Anne: One of the things I’m really interested in finding out, and at the moment I don’t think we can, is how the demographics break down in NPS and CRC.

Lol: If we look forward five or 10 years, will there be a different demographic in each of those organisations? You could argue, as Anne’s research has suggested, that that demographic might not necessarily be what you’d expect it to be because it hasn’t been so far. The official discourse of public protection or machismo style of management hasn’t meant more male managers, in fact it’s meant quite the opposite. It will be fascinating to see where, over time, the NPS and CRC start to develop their distinctive identities and whether it’ll attract more males to the NPS, which you would expect, than the CRCs, but it may not.

Dave: One of things that was going round my head when we were talking earlier about women managers collectively being very impressive, was that, at the same time, we talk about the macho-isation of management styles. So it seems to me there’s something of a contradiction around. New Public Management has brought with it a style of management which is much more structured, target-focused, output-focused, much less ‘soft and cuddly’ than the old style management of probation through supervision; yet how does that fit with more and more women coming in with a different style and a different way of doing things?

Anne: I’m not sure whether the majority of probation managers, whether they be male or female, have ever really taken on board the macho approach. There’s always been an anxiety around probation management at a personal, individual level. Certainly the Chiefs that we spoke to were very exercised and very anxious about what they’d been required to do. So in a sense, there’s always been a degree of concern within probation management about the macho style.

Michael: There’s also a fundamental difference, if you think of women operating in an environment which is a primarily male environment. When we talk about the proportions of men and women in the workforce in probation, they must bring a particular series of values, because as well as being inculcated and subsumed under the cultural norms of probation that you join, you’re bringing with you to the job a particular understanding. If your workforce, the gender breakdown or breakdown in terms of ethnicity is structured in a particular way, that must have an impact. If you were operating in a primarily male environment, surely there would be different forces driving the cultural norms.

In what ways are occupational cultures changing in Probation work?

Lol: The question here is around how the occupational cultures that we talked about are changing and what have we observed from our various research projects?

Michael: Interviewing people who trained in the social work era, there still seemed to be a value base you could define, not as social work values, but a value base reflecting what Garland was talking about in terms of penal welfarism. So prioritising rehabilitation very much above punishment and what we might call, but don’t call, social welfarism, still felt very strongly rooted in probation and probation practitioners. There was also quite a strong critique of some of the technological influences, quite a strong critique of the utility of risk assessment.

Anne: I would agree wholeheartedly and alongside that I think was the importance of ‘the relationship’, however you define ‘the relationship’ as a means of rehabilitation. But one thing that had already changed and is continuing to change, and wasn’t completely incompatible with rehabilitation, is the notion of public protection. That had come into the culture a long time ago but certainly was a change from traditional probation values.

Lol: In our research into the impact upon staff of the changes brought about by TR, which commenced just before the split took place and then immediately after the transfer into new ownership, it was clear that before the split that those kind of trends you just talked about were evident, in terms of staff trying to hold onto something even though they weren’t quite sure what it was they were trying to hold onto. In the discussion we had yesterday about the essence of probation, we found it difficult to pin down what it was, often staff couldn’t articulate it either but there was certainly something about probation that they wanted to hold onto and part of that was linked into notions of public service. I think that’s why the privatisation agenda was so difficult for a lot of them. What TR did was to strengthen these feelings because it gave them something to unite against. Then the split comes along and all those emotional bonds and professional relationships very quickly appeared to dissipate and they seemed to organise themselves into camps (not everyone but a lot of them did) and rightly or wrongly the NPS were seen as the more elite group. Often this was communicated through office banter but it nevertheless seemed to have been felt sharply by some staff in the CRC which is perhaps understandable given that they were already feeling insecure (Robinson, Burke & Millings 2016). That surprised me because, if you think about all the research that’s been done, there’s always been that overarching set of values and homogeneity among probation workers that has endured regardless of all the changes. That felt much more tenuous after the split. In trying to make a bit more sense of that, I was thinking of the model of ‘lifers’ ‘second careerists’ and ‘offender managers’ deployed by Mawby and Worrall in relation to why staff exit an organisation. As a result of the split, particularly in CRCs, a lot of staff left to either join the NPS or left the organisation completely. And this notion around the ‘lifers’ – a lot of the so called ‘lifers’ who had probably been thinking about leaving the organisation for quite a while now had an opportunity to leave because they could take voluntary redundancy and they were at a stage in their life where they basically could walk away, so they left. Some of the ‘second careerists’ left because in some cases they had joined probation to get away from another occupation and were increasingly feeling that this wasn’t what they had signed up to. Some of the ‘offender managers’ were in a different position because they’re the post-1997, the younger people. They’ve got 20 years or more ahead of them, so they either look at what they can do in the CRC, and for some it was an opportunity, or for others it was a case of, ‘This is incompatible with what I trained for’, so they joined the NPS. All those three categories left the CRC and in effect, you had a significant turnover of new staff who from my recollection, tended to be young women. So that feminisation, which Anne talked about earlier, was further strengthened and they also tended to have not worked in the organisation and often had come from the private sector so they didn’t have the traditional notions of the public sector, so in effect a new culture was emerging very quickly.

Anne: Would the voluntary sector fit in here? Were the majority of the women from the private sector or are they women that have worked in the voluntary sector who would bring yet another culture?

Dave: Bring a culture of short term contracts, no job for life.

Lol: Yes absolutely, many of them came from the voluntary sector and a bit like the ‘offender managers’, they didn’t see this as necessarily a job they would be doing for more than the next five years because that was the environment they had been used to working in. Most of your traditional careerists had seen this as a job for life and a very secure occupation. It wasn’t secure any more.
Michael In terms of outside influence, it’s almost like neoliberal insecurity, deregulation, job insecurity, and precarity. So economic, political, ideological factors create a whole new culture on the ground in probation and those young women go into the CRC, it’s all interlinked.

Dave: Neoliberalism permeates and creates a kind of ideological hegemony which says that it’s now a good thing not to expect to have a secure job. That is the norm, to expect to have a life of so called ‘job churn’ and, indeed, to be a good citizen you have to buy into that. And if you’re like us – the dinosaurs who’ve had jobs for life – we’re accused of being totally out of touch in suggesting that job security is a good thing and that it’s wrong that young people don’t have secure jobs. It’s us who are ideologically deviant!

Anne: But what does that then also say about your willingness to invest in working with particular offenders? We will all have known offenders that we worked with for years on and off and yet if you know that you’ll only work with this offender for the next six months or whatever, and that’s it, there’s a distancing.

Dave: And what kind of climate does this create for training because what’s the point of training somebody expensively for three years if they don’t expect to work over the long term? So it plays into all these ideas of short-term training for the job and, behind that, that higher education is simply about creating transferable skills which you then take off to whatever organisation you end up working in.

Anne: And how does that all relate to what we know about desistance if the probation worker just becomes a kind of ‘fly in, fly out’ person in an offender’s life. So it’s all very random and happenstance, because we know that desistance can take years and is a very long-term thing, yet the people who are working with offenders are now in this very short-term culture.

Lol: But the language hasn’t changed which is interesting. If you ask many of these young workers, they would still sound like traditional probation officers in many ways. They still talk the same language, but what’s also interesting is that the providers often talked in these terms also. They claim, ‘our new model is a desistance-led model’ and then they go through it and I think ‘This doesn’t look anything like desistance to me’. They’ve adopted the language but tried to put it in a neoliberal structure so inevitably you’ve got a conflict there. It might work itself out over time but something’s got to give?

Anne: So we have desistance but we have desistance now, we have desistance in the next couple of months, not the next 20 years.

Dave: But this is this whole thing about having a language which carries values but which aren’t implemented in practice and is just a smoke-screen to create something which seems to be good and worthy but, underneath, there isn’t the practical action which is in any way connected with the values.

Anne: Or even worse, it’s the exact opposite, so that what you are saying is the exact opposite of what you’re actually doing but you call it something else, it’s very Orwellian.

Dave: Well it’s the neoliberal co-option of empowerment as a set of attributes which are disconnected from values and purposes grounded in a critique of the status quo and the need for social change.

Anne: Yes, you’re empowered to make the choices we want you to make.

How can we intervene and influence these developments?

Dave: I suppose I’m moving to arguing for something which is not about saying that neoliberalism per se is a negative force, but asking how can we engage with neoliberalism on its own terms and begin to undermine it and expose the inconsistencies in the neoliberal project. That’s why I believe that what works best in achieving work objectives, is when teams work together. Teams that work together effectively have the same characteristics of what we would recognise as emancipatory empowered groups, seeking self-realisation, self-direction, achieving their own objectives on their own terms.

For me one of the inconsistencies in neoliberalism is that it needs people to work together effectively in order to achieve its economic and material outputs but, potentially, within that are the seeds of its own destruction, in that if it wants to do that efficiently it has to empower people. There are examples of companies which operate in that kind of way. In Scandinavia there’s the Swedish model; there’s the Silicon Valley groups with their open spaces for people to get together and become creative; there’s the way the Japanese car firms work with groups of workers working together to find solutions to production problems.

On the one hand, we’ve got the CRCs coming in with their New Public Management styles which are very authoritarian, structured, almost Fordist in their division of labour, which are contrary to the values of the workers who are working in them. What we can argue for, it seems to me, is a style of teamwork which is consistent with those values which should be attractive to the organisations – because groups become creative and come up with solutions. However, these may well be different to the ones which may be expected. This opens up the potential for moving towards creating the kind of organisations which will have embedded in them the essence of probation values that we’ve been talking about earlier.

So, what I’d like to argue for is something about needing to return to and reassess the value of real groupwork skills. These are the ones which are based on group dynamics and facilitating people rather than what has come to predominate in probation and permeate its occupational culture – group work which is a very authoritarian, a top-down approach. Reintroduce real groupwork into organisational practice – it should be attractive to the organisations because we’re offering them something that will help them to operate more efficiently and more effectively to achieve the targets that are set for them. But, within that, we’re actually offering a better work culture to key into, a work environment for the people who work within them which will be more conducive to what we see as traditional probation values.

Lol: I wouldn’t dispute any of that and I like your vision but I don’t think we should underestimate the challenge in that. That’s not a reason for not doing it, but we have to accept that attitudes, and the individualism embodied within them (for example, seeking personal advancement ahead of working in a good team), have been hardened by neoliberalism. I’m not dismissing what you’re saying, I’m just making the point that this is the challenge.

Dave: That’s why I was exploring whether the kind of approaches that I’m talking about are ones which are very much grounded in second wave feminism and feminist practice. We’ve moved into third or fourth wave, which is what you were describing as the modern female voice, which is different to the female voice of the consciousness raising groups. It carries a different set of expectations, different set of challenges. Yet when we were talking about what underlies all of it, what it is that is different and special that women bring, there is that sense of humanity, if I can use the word. OK, we realise you want ‘advancement’, but how are you going to best achieve it? And that’s when you go back and say, ‘Is it either me or you or can we do it together?’

Anne: I think there’s an underlying thing we can do to influence things and it sounds very trite but it’s being positive about what’s happening. The stuff I was talking about in the McWilliams lecture (last summer at Cambridge) about applauding the courage of people that are trying to make this work and seeing there is still a lot of good work going on and applauding that rather than saying ‘isn’t it all dreadful and you must be so depressed’. And that fits in with the group work argument about how you support people in what they’re doing and making them feel good about what they’re doing.

What will be the effects of working with other professions and organisations?

Lol: We’ve talked a bit around relationships in terms of intra-organisational relationships within the organisation. Perhaps we could think about the impact of some of the things we’ve encountered in terms of professional relationships external to the organisation. So we could think about the role of the voluntary sector, relationships with other statutory agencies like the courts, police etc. How can we see that emerging over the next few years?

Dave: I think the word is inter-professional, that’s the thing that we have to recognise that it is all about. Probation needs to get out of its bubble. In other parts of the public sector this has been worked through and the problems are there in all of the human services: health, child protection, etc. This has been big for a long time and there are a lot of lessons being learned that we should be studying rather than reinventing the wheel. In my view, insularity is probation’s Achilles Heel.

Anne: And the irony is that when you begin to work with other professionals, your own role then becomes more clearly defined. So going back to Integrated Offender Management, it’s when probation started working alongside the police and alongside the voluntary sector that they began to see where the boundaries of their own role were and where they don’t need the boundaries. The fear is that when you’re working with other professions you will lose your identity but in fact the opposite can happen, that you become much clearer about your own identity and it’s about respecting the domain of different professions. I’m very much in favour of a model that says we work alongside the police, prison service, but we work alongside them, we don’t become absorbed by them. The danger of NOMS has been that prison has absorbed probation rather than seen them as equal partners. You’re right about probation needing to get out of its bubble, but, in a way, once it does it will actually have a clearer sense of its own identity.

Lol: I take a slightly different reading of the situation in the sense that I think the probation bubble you talked about was certainly true up until about 10 years ago. Over the last 10 years a lot of work has been done to burst out of the bubble, both on a statutory level through IOM and related developments but also through working with the voluntary sector. So that bubble was starting to be broken but yes it was there, there’s no doubt about that. I think what TR has done, in some ways, is put people back in a bubble in the short term because people aren’t quite sure of each other and a lot of the outside stakeholders were not sure about who to talk to – is it NPS or CRC? Who is probation any more? And that’s been difficult, but that will be overcome I’m sure in time. So I don’t see that as being a longer term impact because one of the things TR could do well is that it should mean by definition that the bubble has to go because it’s the nature of the whole enterprise that you’ve got to link with other organisations.

Dave: Stepping entirely out of the world of probation and into a conservation group I’m involved with, probation with a small p is just so firmly embedded in the public’s thinking and knowledge. It’s taken for granted, but even the officers of the local authority who are buying into the CRC to do unpaid work (community payback) on recreational facilities in the area, say ‘I go and talk to probation’. But in fact they’re going to a CRC and the CRC doesn’t want to be called probation. If they think they’ve got something that could make useful unpaid work, they still talk about going to the local probation office – but they aren’t the people who are providing the unpaid work. Maybe, ironically, in order for the CRC to be able to maximise opportunities for unpaid work they have to be known as probation. I just find it really amusing that people think they’re working with probation. I say ‘probation doesn’t exist anymore, this is a privatised CRC, Community Rehabilitation Company’ – and people look at me as if I’m mad.

Lol: That was a real issue for the staff in the early days in our research, because they were contacting the police and saying ‘we’re the CRC’ and they were saying ‘who are you?’ so they all said ‘we’re probation’ in the short term. Over time the language has changed as people get more used to the new landscape and I think on the statutory level at least they’re more clued in now but ‘probation’ is still the term that’s generally used. When we had the CRC managers together some of them were saying ‘let’s ditch probation, get it out of the language’ because basically ‘community rehabilitation’ is a better term. It’s about doing rehabilitation in the community, that’s what we do.

Anne: But the word is so tenacious and universally, globally recognised and we’re never going to get away from that.

Lol: Multi-national organisations spend millions trying to get ‘brands’ established so you associate a product with something and we’ve got it in probation and then what do we do! Whether it’s an accurate brand is on one level irrelevant because it’s about the image that draws in people’s emotions or whatever.

Dave: Maybe something we could be saying is that it’s something that should be celebrated because it is such a renowned brand, like Apple!

So what lessons can we learn from these changes?

Dave: The brand is really important. All that we’ve been talking about, we could brand it as about probation occupational culture – let’s not be ashamed of that.

Anne: It’s a bit like someone was saying yesterday, nursing is a profession and an occupation and wherever you work, whatever organisation you’re in you have that basic profession of being probation.

Dave: People know what a probation officer is better than they understand what a social worker is, yet social work is now a protected title, registered title and probation’s in this nowhere-world but the brand is tenacious.

Anne: So you can’t call yourself a social worker unless you have certain things.

Dave: No, unless you’re registered.

Anne: Does that raise the question of the Probation Institute’s register of probation workers as being a way forward?

Dave: That was one of the questions. I’m a registered social worker and I’m a Visitor with the Health and Care Professionals Council. A couple of years ago, there were some tentative explorations with the HCPC because they would have been very happy to consider being the host registering body for probation officers. But probation decided it wanted to go its own way – didn’t want to be associated with these health and social worky type people.

Anne: It’s a minor point but I think there’s a problem with the word ‘officer’. I don’t think that’s going to survive, nor should it, because there’s such a range of workers within probation doing different tasks. But a probation worker – I could have a vision of that being a protected title.

Lol: Yesterday we asked the question if probation is meaningless as a term and there’s a strong argument that it’s not. I suppose what’s going through my mind is, when we talk about probation, are we talking about probation being the sum of the parts of the NPS and the CRCs or is it something more than that?

Dave: Well that’s why we’re talking about culture isn’t it? It’s at a number of levels. Maybe in terms of the employees who you would call probation workers, they are the employees of the CRC and the NPS, but the professional values which probation represents are above that. If you formalise the title, you would have your probation values but then you have a connection with a code of ethics which registrants sign up to. The question would be whether everybody whom you would call a probation worker in the CRCs and the NPS would be able to sign up to a code of ethics which emerged out of the values that we’ve been talking about.

Lol: And in some ways that would formalise what the existing research suggests has happened anyway. That despite all the changes there’s been something that holds people together. And I suppose that’s the danger and that’s the caution, that we lose that, that it fragments, but the challenge is actually doing it, it’s about thinking through the bigger picture in terms of what holds those two separate parts of the organisation together – what’s their common bond? Not seeing themselves just in terms of the way it’s framed in TR, between a purchaser/provider or a customer/ purchaser, but both being part of a system, but just doing different functions within it. The work is complementary but they’re working to a bigger overarching set of principles and values.

Dave: I would argue that those values are connected together, not just in relation to what people do as officers with the people who are their customers or clients or service users, but also they’re embedded in the way the organisation works.

Lol: And they’re embedded in the way they treat each other. Which as we’ve seen has been one of the worrying recent developments. One would hope that over time they find a way through this.

Dave: So it’s not just about how basic grade officers treat each other but how managers and CEOs of the organisations they’re working in work with them and what kind of culture they create. That’s what’s wonderful about social work or probation work that ideally there’s not that disconnect between how you live as a member of an organisation with what you do with the people who you’re responsible for, the core values bridge both.

Anne: I sometimes wonder whether that is one of the things that is changing and that is one of the things we’re in danger of losing – that sense that ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ and that you actually have something in common with the offenders you’re working with.

Dave: But I would say what we have in common is a belief in people’s capacity for self-realisation and emancipation.

Michael: Looking outwards, it’s very interesting. If you accept the analysis of the UK as an example of a pretty classic neoliberal economy, then the other archetypal neoliberal economy in the world at the moment is the USA. If we’re looking at what’s going to happen in probation here, we can look at what’s happened in probation over there, in terms of the cultural change. What neoliberalism prioritises culturally and ideologically is individualism, rampant individualism. If we look at the way that probation has operated in neoliberal economies, particularly in some of the southern states of America, it’s been about prioritising profit over rehabilitation, and charging people for supervision, making the organisation self-financing. Often the charging for supervision means early breach and privatised prison companies can pick up the slack by making money putting people in prison. This reflects their lack of concern for rehabilitation and change, which has always been a fundamental part of probation culture. It is saying, this is an organisation which is primarily driven by a profit motive. That’s what counts, not people’s capacity for self-realisation; what counts isn’t people’s capacity for change; what counts is how much money we can make.

I would take issue with the point you made that everybody recognises what a probation officer is. Many people may have heard the name but almost nobody knows what probation officers do. As part of my research, I was asking probation officers, how do you think the public recognises you, and what do they think you do? Everybody bar none said it was seen as being about making excuses and being soft. It was universally felt that probation wasn’t understood. The practitioners themselves feel that there’s not a clear understanding of what probation stands for. If you go back to the MORI poll in 2002 they asked 1000 people what every criminal justice agency did and amazingly, more people thought Neighbourhood Watch was more effective than probation. So, people thought that a voluntary community group, was much more effective than probation. People thought the police were thirty eight times more effective than probation at reducing crime. So we shouldn’t go down the road of saying probation’s understood. When I looked at some of the media representations of probation, almost everybody, including broadsheet papers, would represent community sentences as, ‘it’s a let off’. ‘Walking free from prison’ is a classic piece of tabloidese.

So the main issue for the future is, if we go down the neoliberal road, there are clear links between neoliberalism and punitive penal policies. The culture of individualism leaves all sorts of issues around how that culture can change and you can end up with an organisation that’s fundamentally and primarily about punishment, not about rehabilitation.

Lol: In that notion of individualism as well, we can recall the earlier discussion about office design, and staff not being encouraged to come into the office but to work in the community – what the new owners are calling ‘agile working’. We would all see that as a good thing I guess, but what you lose there is exactly what we’ve been doing over the last couple of days where you’re sitting together with your colleagues discussing things. When I started my training I already had a fairly developed understanding of probation, because I’d worked for a number of years in the organisation. My views may have changed over time as a result of training and experience but a lot of those values that I’ve always held were formed sitting in the tea room talking to probation officers. Where will that fit into this new kind of agile working which they talk about where people are out with their laptops in the community? Where will be the opportunities to create those dynamics which are really crucial to making this a success? I think that’s a real danger as well if we move too far in that direction.

Conclusion
The overall tone of our discussion reflects our collective concern that the ‘essence’ of probation (as discussed by Paul Senior in this edition) could be endangered in the wake of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. There are undoubtedly considerable challenges ahead. Not least among these are the questions of what the working environment and composition of the future workforce will be; what training arrangements will be in place; and, what the influence and shape of new technological advances in service delivery will be (Burke & Collett, 2015; Robinson et al., 2016). Service users often bring the baggage that accrues from dysfunctional, disrupted, and chaotic life experiences to supervision. The centrality of building trust with them is fundamental to successful intervention. How will the changes in the structure of probation’s occupational cultures impact on the experience of service users? Will the primacy of probation’s reintegrative work be sustained?

At the time of writing we can only speculate what their outcomes will be but we are keen that our reading of the current situation is not seen as a counsel of despair. We accept that some aspects of ‘traditional’ probation may have been irrevocably changed by recent policy developments. Whether this proves to be a good or a bad thing remains to be seen and we suspect it will be a bit of both. Equally though, we are keen to ensure that the worst excesses of neoliberalism that dehumanise and commodify individuals, are averted (Teague, 2011). More positively, our discussion suggested the potential for further exploration of a) the influence of the ‘female voice’ in shaping the future of probation work (Mawby & Worrall, 2013) and b) the role of groupwork theory and practice in the maintenance and development of team identities and cultures (Ward, 2008; Pullen-Sansfacon & Ward, 2014). Probation work might be unglamorous but as Mawby and Worrall (2013) note, it is necessary work and someone has to do it. It is important therefore that those that do it in the future do so with the compassion and humanity that has been the hallmark of probation staff both past and present. In order to ensure this though, it is important that we continue to develop our understanding of the occupational cultures of probation and build on recent insights into what attracts individuals to this work and sustains them in their endeavours.

References

Burke, L. and Collett, S. (2015) Delivering Rehabilitation: The Politics, Governance and Control of Probation. London: Routledge.
Deering, J. (2011) Probation Practice and the New Penology: Practitioner Reflections. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Edgell, S. (2012) The Sociology of Work. London: Sage.
Graef, R. (1989) Talking Blues: Police in Their Own Words. London: Fontana Press.
Johnson, S. D., Hian Chye Koh and Killough, L. N. (2009) ‘Organizational and Occupational Culture and the Perception of Managerial Accounting Terms: An Exploratory Study Using Perceptual Mapping Techniques’, Contemporary Management Research, 5:317-342.
Loftus, B. (2012) Police Culture in a Changing World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Macpherson, W. (1999) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, vol. Cm 4262-I. London: The Stationery Office.
Mawby, R. C. and Worrall, A. (2011) ‘Probation workers and their occupational cultures’, University of Leicester and Keele University, Leicester.
Mawby, R. C. and Worrall, A. (2013) Doing Probation Work: Identity in a Criminal Justice Occupation. Abingdon: Routledge.
Reiner, R. (1992) The Politics of the Police. London: Wheatsheaf.
Robinson, G., Burke, L. and Millings, M. (2016) Criminal justice identities in transition: the case of devolved Probation Services in England and Wales, British Journal of Criminology, 56,1:161-78.
Pullen-Sansfacon, A. and Ward, D. (2014) Making Inter-professional Working Work: Introducing a Groupwork Perspective, British Journal of Social Work, 44(5):1284-1300.
Schein, E. H. (2010) Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francisco: Wiley.
Teague, M. (2011) ‘Probation in America: armed, private and unaffordable’, Probation Journal, 58(4,), 317-32.
Trice, H. M. (1993) Occupational Subcultures in the Workplace. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.
Vallas, S. P. (2012) Work. Cambridge: Polity.
Ward, D. (Ed.) (2008) Groupwork, 18(2).

That the criminal justice system is discriminatory, is a fact that is probably disputed by very few in recent years (Knight, Dominey & Hudson, 2008). Statistics for the number of black and minority ethnic individuals who are either locked up or on supervision have been available since 1984 and section 95 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 enshrined in legislation the duty on the Secretary of State to publish data annually to enable the judiciary to know the consequences of their sentencing decisions. To paraphrase the language from a Probation Trust, still cited in a link in a new Community Rehabilitation Company website: public sector duties have been outlined in the Equality Act 2010 to give due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimization. Organisations must advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between those who share a protected characteristic. This is a noble sentiment and we argue that the new forms of language need to incorporate the original concepts of discrimination, difference and equality.

The language used by probation staff can influence how offenders are perceived by the judiciary, with Whitehouse, back in 1982 warning that stereotyping of Rastafarian offenders resulted in court reports being damaging to the client in terms of prejudicial language. Gatekeeping of reports was a process that enabled staff to share and question suppositions made in the workplace. Denney (1992) in his research on court reports found that white probation officers tended to conceptualise black offenders more in a ‘correctional’ manner than an ‘appreciative’ one. The need to constantly revisit practice in terms of understanding and challenging unwitting prejudice was evident from the HM Inspectorate of Probation Report (2000) Towards Race Equality, written after the Macpherson Report had been published, and which found that a much lower percentage of reports on African/African Caribbean offenders were considered satisfactory compared to white offenders (49%-63%). Just as worrying was that equal opportunities had been
translated into ‘treating everyone alike’ (p.22). The practice that emerged during this time to address the growing evidence of differential treatment, was referred to as ‘antidiscriminatory practice’ (ADP) and became embedded in training programmes and practice assessment at that time. Whilst this term has largely disappeared from the lexicon of probation, we choose to use it here because it accurately describes the work that was needed, and is still needed, to address injustices perpetuated with certain groups of offenders within the system. The current terminology of ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ in our
opinion, does not adequately address the power differentials between different ‘diverse’ groups of people in society.

Probation staff had earlier learnt that adopting a ‘colour blind’ approach did not help and clearly over the years this message needed to be relearnt and reinforced. Practice improved through a combination of gatekeeping of reports (understanding that only information that was relevant to offenders should be included) and considering the particular needs of certain groups of offenders. For example, in terms of gender, the Corston Report (2007) very eloquently made the point that equal outcomes for men and women required different approaches. This prompted responses from government and an
acknowledgement that the system at the time was not favourable to women.

Now that there is a major shift in the structural arrangements for work with offenders there is a danger that what has been learnt could be forgotten again to the detriment of service users and front line staff. Of course anti-discriminatory practice also applies to the recruitment, support, career structures and opportunities for staff. There must not be a glass ceiling for some, whether this is in terms of race, gender, religion, sexuality, disability and the many other factors that can be used to disadvantage individuals and groups. The minimization of risk of reoffending has supplanted many other aspects of work with offenders and there is a danger that individual differences can get lost in this process. “Risk assessment characteristically treats race, class and gender as controllable variables” (Denney, 2005:131).

The new world of probation and community rehabilitation is more complex in many ways and the splitting of one service into two hopefully has not lead to any inadvertent disadvantaging of any groups. We are not aware of whether this has been examined? In the new world of supervision the introduction of payment by results needs to be examined to ascertain whether it has the potential to lead to discrimination. Why might this occur? Rees, Whitworth and Carter (2013) examined this in the field of welfare to work and argued that discrimination does exist driven by cost pressures, performance targets and overly diverse claimant groups. In particular they refer to the concepts of ‘creaming and parking’, which they explain as follows:

”Creaming’ refers to providers skimming off clients who are closest to the labour market and targeting services on them in the expectation that they are more likely to trigger an outcome payment. ‘Parking’ refers to the opposite process, where those individuals deemed to be unlikely to generate an outcome payment are de-prioritised, perhaps receiving the minimum service specified in the contract.’ (2013:6)

These concepts can be transferred to the criminal justice sphere and the dangers of a new system that is not carefully scrutinized for discrimination are apparent. If practitioners look for easy ‘wins’ and do the minimum with others then the system will fail the most vulnerable and/or those who ‘appear’ to be least able or willing to change. This appearance might be because new staff do not know how to interact with some groups and indeed may be fearful of them. Staff development and training remains key here. Offenders whose ‘difference’ may not be immediately apparent to the practitioner, e.g. their sexual orientation or disability, may struggle to disclose the impact of their identity and any discrimination they have encountered, to a staff member who appears too busy or lacking the knowledge to understand. Any help or guidance offered to these offenders may fail to meet their needs and they may continue to offend if the underlying causes of their offending are not addressed within supervision (Knight & Wilson, 2016).

Payment by Results (PbR) can have unintended consequences that ironically increase the likelihood of reoffending. Addressing diversity and working in an anti-discriminatory way with all offenders takes time, care, resources and knowledge and may present as cost ineffective if the assessment of practice is merely the measurable outputs of reporting and attendance. Goodman (2012) linked this to a loosening of National Standards for community supervision. This could mean that the level of contact between the offender and their supervisor is decreased or made more superficial.
The following table highlights key hopes, fears and insights that function around working with diversity and good anti-discriminatory practice (ADP) as we move forward towards 2020. It requires a positive and open commitment by agencies and practitioners to be critical, reflexive and open to challenge however uncomfortable it might make individuals feel. Coupled with this is the imperative that this is a constant exercise that has to be ongoing and never allows complacency. This will only operate successfully in an organization that places such ideas at the centre of models of good practice and offers clear policies, staff training and support, and on-going systems of quality assurance.

The matrix of diversity and ADP in the field of offender supervision

Conclusion
The above matrix indicates the hopes, fears and insights to be discovered in relation to diversity and criminal justice supervision. Time will tell whether there will be a positive outcome in terms of supervision as performed by probation staff across the NPS/CRC organisations. What is essential is that there is no assumption that because the staff are employed to engage and deliver positive outcomes with offenders, this necessarily means that offenders will be dealt with in a non-discriminatory way. The long experience of offender engagement indicates otherwise. This is a process that has to be constantly monitored and challenged, with active engagement with the client/service user.

References

Corston, Lady J. (2007) The Corston Report. A Report on women with Particular Vulnerabilities in the Criminal Justice System. London: Home Office.
Denney, D. (1992) Racism and Anti-Racism in Probation. London: Routledge.
Denney, D. (2005) Risk and Society. London: Sage.
HM Inspectorate of Probation (2000) Towards Race Equality. London: Home Office.
Goodman, A. (2012) Rehabilitating and Resettling Offenders in the Community. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Knight, C., Dominey, J. and Hudson, J. (2008) ‘Diversity: Contested Meanings and Differential Consequences’, in B. Stout, J. Yates, and B. Williams (2008) Applied Criminology. London: Sage.
Knight, C. and Wilson, K. (Forthcoming April 2016) Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans People and the Criminal Justice System. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Rees J., Whitworth, A. and Carter, E. (December 2013) Support for all in the UK Work Programme? Differential payments, same old problem…, TSRC Working Paper 115
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/generic/tsrc/documents/tsrc/working-papers/working-paper-115.pdf Accessed 24.3.2016.
Whitehouse, P. (1982) Race Bias and Social Enquiry Reports. Probation Journal, 30(2):43-49.