Interrogating the failed probation experiment, or it wasn't broken, so why did they try to fix it?

Hamerton, Christopher and Hobbs, Suzanne (2022) Interrogating the failed probation experiment, or it wasn't broken, so why did they try to fix it? In, Privatising Criminal Justice: History, Neoliberal Penality and the Commodification of Crime. 1st ed. Abingdon. Routledge, pp. 256-285. (doi:10.4324/9781315709819-11).

Abstract

With private companies predators rather than partners and the Probation Service particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of successive governments’ forays into privatisation, in a series of incremental changes, the Probation Service was progressively softened up for ‘selling off’ to the private sector. This chapters focuses exclusively on the balkanisation of the Probation Service, with the majority of community sentences and rehabilitation packaged off and outsourced to the private sector through the policy of transforming rehabilitation. With the ‘new’ National Probation Service marginalised, reduced to initial risk assessment, advising courts on sentencing options and the direct management of convicted lawbreakers deemed ‘high risk’, the various steps involved in turning the policy vision into a programme of action from consultation, to green papers, to bills and enacted legislation, and its humiliating reversal after a mere four years of operation, are traced.

Charting the resistance by penal reformers, trade unionists and parliamentary allies; the concerns and warnings issued by opponents during the consultation stage; and the series of excoriating reports compiled by government watch-dogs during the period of its implementation, the authors explore how the short-lived failed experiment of outsourcing the delivery of low- to medium-risk offenders, driven by ideological dogmatism, political hubris and austerity underfunding, transformed a first-class service into one ‘not fit for purpose’: a disastrous development that ultimately forced the Ministry of Justice to abandon the project, with the announcement of a partial U-turn in 2019, followed a year later by total U-turn, removing the private sector from the delivery of all core aspects of the provision of probation services.

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Contributors

Author: Christopher Hamerton

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