What's the Recipe Today, Jim?

Yes, it was a long time ago - google it if it means nothing. At three in the morning, I often find myself pondering on what to publish that just might be of interest and keep a discussion going. We could run with any number of possibilities on the academic front, but experience tells me they generate little interest and are just too long for reading on a smart phone which is mostly how the blog is accessed nowadays. That's a shame of course and not how it used to be at the start. 

Overnight I see a regular contributor has brought to my attention an academic work from 2015, Privatising Probation: Is Transforming Rehabilitation the End of the Probation Ideal? by John Deering and Martina Feilzer - apparently the blog gets about a page for having  "meticulously documented the implementation of TR". Well, that's good to know because one of my intentions was to provide an audit trail for future historians when researching the background and reasons for the demise of probation. 

Naturally I looked back through the archive and noticed that the authors gave extensive evidence to the Justice Select Committee in 2018 and ended with this:- 

 
Conclusion

In our view the cumulative effect of the changes to probation’s corporate values, the divergence of values between practitioners and government and the recent dramatic changes to governance and organisational arrangements, may have already started to affect practitioners’ sense of self-legitimacy. This, in turn may have a long-term corrosive effect upon probation practice and its wider legitimacy. An important aspect of self-legitimacy is the extent to which practitioners feel that they are enabled and supported by their organisation and that they internalise the values represented by their organisation (Bradford and Quinton 2014). In our view, the current situation means that the self-legitimacy of many practitioners is, at the very least, in some doubt. This in turn may lower morale and foster discontent with the quality services provided to those under supervision. If practitioners come to feel that the service provided to supervisees is not what it had previously been, this may have a negative effect on their feelings of being the holders of legitimate authority.

There is evidence to suggest that practice is already changing and that probation provision is becoming increasingly fragmented with clear differences emerging between NPS and CRCs, different CRCs owners, and different regions (HMIP 2016a). In our view, considerable damage has been done to some individual probation staff’s sense of being a member of a ‘collective of professionals doing an important job well’ (Ugelvik 2016).

--oo00oo--

Well, as we now know, their concerns have sadly been proved to be well founded and it's interesting to note the miserable path to where we have now arrived, and evidenced by the weekend outpourings on OASys, was well established even back in 2018:-

"An important aspect of self-legitimacy is the extent to which practitioners feel that they are enabled and supported by their organisation and that they internalise the values represented by their organisation (Bradford and Quinton 2014). In our view, the current situation means that the self-legitimacy of many practitioners is, at the very least, in some doubt. This in turn may lower morale and foster discontent with the quality services provided to those under supervision"

A few days ago, under pressure, I cancelled an appointment to visit a vulnerable, traumatised woman in prison, in order to get ahead of the "performance" priorities. I didn't seek authority for this decision, and when I mentioned it to my manager, it was nodded through. After an afternoon battering a keyboard, and hitting every performance target I had, I came home feeling... like a bit of me had died. Lord knows how my client feels, I don't, seeing as I wasn't there.