Suchergebnisse

'The life history approach is peculiarly ignored in teaching contexts' wrote Ken Plummer in 1983 (p.74). Things may have changed on ordinary social science degrees, but offender/prisoner autobiographies — akin to the life story approach — are a still underused resource in the training of probation officers. The criminological importance of such autobiographies was recently affirmed by the late Steve Morgan (1999), adroitly re–therorised by Goodey (2000) and used constructively by Wilson and Reuss (2000) in a study of prison(er) education. This article describes, from experience, how they can be used at the beginning of a probation training programme, to develop a preliminary understanding of desistance, and to open up debate on what works with offenders and what doesn't, in and out of prison. An historical background to British prisoner autobiographies is provided to ground this approach to teaching in a distinctive criminological discourse, to provide a resource for those who wish to take debate on prisoner autobiographies further, and to indicate the kind of impact that the best of this writing has had on the penal reform process. The article should be read both as a contribution to an overdue, and at present meagre, debate on how an academically sound and vocationally relevant curriculum for trainee probation officers can be constructed, and as an at least partial substantiation of the deeper argument that probation training can draw productively on traditions of penal reform which it has hitherto neglected.

Amongst the staff in the highly managerialised agencies of contemporary criminal justice, there is a clear and often painful awareness of ever‐tighter deadlines and increasing time scarcity. Nonetheless it has been correctly observed that 'academic investigation of such issues has been hampered by the limited conceptions of time involved' (Whipp 1994, p. 100). This is particularly true in criminology. The sociological understanding of time has grown apace in recent years (Adam 1990, 1995; Hassard 1990) but tends to have remained a specialist preserve which has impacted little on reflection about criminal justice processes, Pratt (1990) and Matthews (1999) excepted. As a result 'our maps of time within [criminal justice] organisations of the late twentieth century are still woefully inadequate' (Whipp 1994, p. 112, my addition). This article is an implicit commendation of the 'sociology of time' to criminologists, and an explicit application of some of its concepts and insights to the emerging National Probation Service in England and Wales, as projected in its recent mission statement, A New Choreography. The targets and deadlines set for the new Service are premised upon a commonplace but problematic notion of 'managerial time', which in a variety of ways is at odds with the feasible pace of change in the many local communities with which the Service will be working.

After a decade of uncertainty, a new form of training for probation officers, separate from social work training, was established by the New Labour government in 1997. This article deals with the development of the academic contribution – a BA Community Justice – to the Diploma in Probation Studies at the University of Birmingham, one of nine universities contracted nationally to deliver the new qualification. It sets the new award in the context of the history of probation training at the University of Birmingham, and explores how the personal beliefs and experiences of the author have shaped his teaching on it. As such, it seeks to contribute to the under‐explored area of how criminology is taught in higher education, how it might be shaped to suit the needs of trainee probation officers, and to add a new chapter to established histories of probation training. The article was written to celebrate the graduation of the first cohort of newly trained officers.

The Probation Service in England and Wales has been caught up in the New Labour government's broader programme of "modernization". In a document more radical than anything produced under the previous Conservative government, New Labour has proposed that the Service be brought under centralized control, that its name be changed to reflect its new primary purpose of public protection, and that it be brought into closer structural alignment with the Prison Service. This paper discerns in the case made for centralization and the need for closer ties with prisons an authoritarian impulse which is deeply at odds with the Service's own local traditions, and questions whether the undoubtedly necessary process of modernization must take the form being proposed by the government.

ABSTRACTHaving been offered — and prepared to accept — a "centre‐stage"role in the operation of the criminal justice system as recently as 1991, the Probation Service in England and Wales seems increasingly to be marginalized by politicians who, in a more punitive climate, have changed their minds about what is expected of it. As a probation spokesperson has recently said: "the big vision has gone". One strand of policy which the Probation Service was expected to develop in 1991 was increased partnership with voluntary organizations, but, although progress has been made, it is a policy about which the Service has been very ambivalent, fearing that it may lead in the longer term to privatization of their work. This paper will outline the origins and implications of the policy, note how some local Services have so far responded to it, and suggest that, if pursued in certain fields of activity, partnership could contain an alternative vision to the one that has been lost.

Abstract:The task of re‐assessing probation values assumed a new urgency when even its own Chief Inspector (Chief Inspector of Probation 1994, p. 4) complained that the probation service (in 1993) was still 'clinging to its welfare ethic and had not fully integrated the notion of punishment in the community into its repertoire'. But the way forward is not easy. Those who seek to re‐affirm social work values, (to which welfare is supposed to be central), against the punitive inclinations of the Home Office, do so without regard to the limitations which the new managerial culture in the service ‐ benevolent corporatism ‐ imposes on the expression of personal care and concern. The 'social work' school have also, repeatedly and perversely, failed to draw on normative debates within criminology which have prim a facie relevance to the future of the probation service. It will be argued here that a more criminologically sophisticated value‐base, built around the linked notions of anti‐custodialism, restorative justice and community safety will serve the probation service better than a simple restatement of 'the welfare ethic', and, by developing its role as a community justice agency, provide it with a means of resisting a wholly punitive identity.

Abstract: My aim in this paper is to contribute both to penal and film history, by examining the relative absence of feature films dealing with adult imprisonment in Britain (compared to America) and discussing in detail the making of the first British example. 'Now Barabbas' (1949) was a film of some importance, but has been surprisingly neglected by film historians. I will attempt to explain that neglect.