Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article is based on the 24th annual Bill McWilliams memorial lecture which was delivered at the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge on 9 June 2022. Coinciding with the first anniversary of the unification of probation services in England and Wales, the lecture considered the recent past, present and potential future of the service through the lens of a central concept in probation work: namely, rehabilitation. Three ways of understanding this concept are considered: rehabilitation as restoration; rehabilitation as a process of building back better; and looking‐glass rehabilitation. It is argued that each perspective suggests a different orientation to, and a different set of issues and questions about, probation's future and the work that is needed to help the unified service move on from a traumatic recent past.

AbstractThis article draws on insights from the organisational studies literature to make sense of the recent history of probation in England & Wales in the aftermath of the failed Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reform programme. It considers that recent history as a crisis of legitimacy, necessitating active strategies of re‐legitimation aimed at recovering from reputational damage. It argues that top‐down plans to restructure the service will only go so far in this endeavour: the expanded National Probation Service must also be prepared to engage in legitimation work on its own behalf. However, this is likely to be challenging for a number of reasons that include the mixed constituency of external stakeholders whom probation seeks to satisfy, and important questions of identity, agency, and voice.

This article presents findings of a study of pre-sentence probation work in Magistrates' courts in England and Wales in the wake of a process of partial privatisation of probation services in that jurisdiction. Specifically it addresses the subjective experiences of probation workers in two court teams and seeks to make sense of the finding that, despite clear evidence of a process of McDonaldization in the court setting, probation practitioners in this study experienced their work in terms that were largely positive. Using a Weberian analytical framework, it is argued that this finding can only be fully understood with reference to the recent history of unprecedented rupture in the probation arena, and to a generalised perception of the court team as a 'place of safety' in an otherwise hostile and turbulent field. Thus, whilst confined in Weber's metaphorical cage, practitioners experienced this less as a cage of iron than of rubber and velvet.

This article presents findings from an exploratory study of court work in two English Magistrates' courts which was conducted in 2017. The study involved two principal research methods: observation of the daily activities of court team members and semi-structured interviews with 21 members of the two teams, which took place towards the end of the research. The aim of this article is to provide an insight into contemporary probation work in Magistrates' courts, in the wake of two major reform programmes: Transforming Rehabilitation and Transforming Summary Justice. The findings of this study raise questions about the contemporary relevance of the 'narrative of decline' that has featured in previous research and commentary on court work, and further suggests that – whilst it is early days – the creation of specialist court teams has not inevitably led to the 'incorporation' of probation workers into the dominant court culture.

This article explores the neglect of community sanctions (probation, parole etc.) in contemporary punishment and society scholarship, and seeks to understand why this part of the penal field has not attracted significant attention from researchers, despite expansion and diversification in a variety of jurisdictions. Following a review of punishment and society scholarship, which confirms the 'Cinderella' status of community sanctions, three arguments are proposed to help make sense of this finding. These concern the problems of language and labelling, the (in)visibility of the field and the debateable penal character of community sanctions. The article concludes with a 'call to arms' for punishment and society scholars, which entails recognising Cinderella as a key actor in the stories we tell about penal change, and pushing her out of the shadows of punishment and society scholarship.