Thanks go to Ian Gould, another long term blog supporter, for pointing us to the Daily Telegraph again for a strongly-worded piece yesterday. Is it too much to hope the paper is on a mission?
The public will pay the price for Britain’s toxic empathy towards criminals
Once the hard moral hinge between custody and liberty, our probation service is now compromised by sentimentalism
Britain’s probation service has become a tragic monument to well-intentioned ruin – a system where compassion without competence has curdled from virtue into vice.
Once the hard moral hinge between custody and liberty, probation is now compromised by what might be called fatal sentimentalism: the belief that kindness can substitute for control; self-discipline is oppressive; and that bureaucratic ideology can redeem lost public trust. The result is predictable and too often deadly – offenders released into communities not because they are safe, but because the machinery meant to protect us no longer believes it has to.
The late, unlamented experiment of merging probation with prisons was sold as reform. In truth, it was an annexation. The culture of seasoned instinctive judgment that once defined probation was submerged under the bureaucratic sludge of His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.
The probation officer, once the clear-eyed guardian of moral authority, has been rebadged as a “rehabilitation practitioner”, a title designed to soothe rather than safeguard. Ideological management theories have supplanted hard-earned craft. The new catechism demands unconditional empathy, a “trauma-informed” gaze for every offender, and a reflexive suspicion of anything that smells of retribution for harm done.
The damage did not begin with the current branding. Under the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), a Blairite construction, known colloquially as the “Nightmare on Marsham Street”, probation was already being pulled away from its roots in local knowledge. Later the ruinous “Transforming Rehabilitation programme”, led for a time by Antonia Romeo, the new Cabinet Permanent Secretary, completed this ideological vandalism.
Dreamed up in Whitehall and executed with breathtaking incompetence, it fragmented a coherent probation system into public and private silos with conflicting priorities, before being abandoned in the face of mounting evidence of failure. Profit was pitted against prudence, frontline expertise drowned in contracts and targets, and the ancient professional identity of probation was smashed. Its collapse was as predictable as its conception was reckless. Though the scheme has now been formally scrapped, its corrosive legacy endures in a service still struggling to remember what it is for.
I’ve seen this syndrome metastasising inside our prisons too. Ministers and mandarins preach about “rehabilitative culture” in establishments you’d hesitate to house livestock in – violence rampant, green staff overwhelmed and basic order barely clinging on. When ideology outpaces reality this much, catastrophe is close behind. And probation, the fragile bridge between our feral jails and the public realm, is now collapsing under the same delusions.
The watchdogs have been barking the alarm for years. Inspectors’ reports describe a probation workforce that is often well-meaning and sometimes impressive, but terrifyingly under-prepared for the offenders they supervise. They emerge from training steeped in therapy-speak and empty slogans about “believing in change”, yet many have never confronted a manipulative career criminal, or managed a volatile offender under pressure. In this vacuum of experience, risk assessments become box-ticking rituals. Offenders learn the script of contrition, the service duly records “progress”, and the cycle rolls on, until another tragedy drags the policy euphemisms into the headlines.
Probation has always needed heart – understanding what drives offending is part of the craft – but that heart must beat inside a ribcage of hard realism. Accountability is not cruelty. Retribution, properly understood, is society’s signal that wrongdoing has meaning and consequence. When probation loses that principle, it ceases to be justice and becomes social work with potential body counts.
The first step in recovery is honesty. The service must admit that it has lost its ethical backbone and professional confidence. We need to reclaim the language of responsibility and risk – not as relics of a punitive past, but as foundations of any credible public service. Training must return to first principles: risk management, proportionate enforcement, sound judgement, and deep knowledge of criminal behaviour. Senior leadership must be chosen for front-line competence, not ideological orthodoxy or “lived experience”.
Above all, probation must divorce itself from prison governance. The fiction that a single “correctional service” can simultaneously protect the public, manage custody, and engineer rehabilitation has crippled both arms. Probation belongs in local communities, as a professional service rooted in justice, truth-telling, and operational integrity. Not as a satellite of prisons, nor a branch of social care. The best probation officers (and somehow we have retained some brilliant practitioners) know this in their bones.
A probation service so stripped of confidence, experience and principled judgement, cannot be patched up with another review or a new “values framework”. It needs wholesale reconstruction: rigorous professional training, unapologetic public protection as its central creed, and leadership unafraid to confront the sentimental dogmas that have hollowed it out. I’m aware of how battered the service feels with endless, often fatuous, reinventions. But until we find the courage to perform this radical surgery, more innocent people will pay the price for the state’s fatal confusion between mercy and naivety.
Professor Ian Acheson is a former prison governor and senior official with the Home Office
There are parts of this that ring true — particularly around the loss of experience, professional identity, and the need for probation to be rooted in communities rather than subsumed within a prison-led system.
ReplyDeleteBut the diagnosis is wrong.
This isn’t about “toxic empathy” or officers being too soft. It’s about how the system now operates.
Training doesn’t prepare people in the way it once did — not because of values, but because it’s compressed and removed from the realities of frontline work. More importantly, there’s little opportunity to consolidate that learning. New staff are carrying complex caseloads far too early, with limited time to develop judgement or learn alongside experienced colleagues.
That experience gap is then compounded by rapid progression into senior roles, meaning fewer people have had the time to build the instinctive judgement the article talks about.
You can’t accelerate experience. And you can’t replace it with process.
So what’s being described as a loss of professional judgement isn’t the result of “kind-heartedness” — it’s the result of a system that no longer allows that judgement to properly develop.
Fix the conditions, and you fix the problem.
Blame the values, and nothing changes.
The article is right, and Ian Gould is right to call it out. I agree there are other factors at play, experience and autonomy being key, but the wider narrative clearly needs to shift. Articles like this, and others over the past year, have been steadily exposing that tension between what probation is becoming and what it should be.
Delete“Probation centred on punishment and public safety will falter, whereas probation focused on rehabilitation and reintegration will thrive. For probation to expand its scope in supervising individuals in the community, is perhaps fundamental to the success of rehabilitation-focused approaches”
https://www.probation-institute.org/news/shaping-probations-identity
The Author has suggested that he welcomes feedback. The above gives an informed and thoughtful perspective. Hopefully, Ian will become aware via X that this has been shared in this blog and I hope many more perspective will be shared to further inform Ian’s thinking and perspective. Thinking of ALL those still thinking about how they will vote in the ballot. Very best wishes to ALL those working this weekend too IanGould5
ReplyDeleteI voted NO !! On principle, i couldn’t vote for a measly 2% more which shoehorns in unchallenged practice changes I don’t agree with. Unions have failed and the more I hear from the higher ups “6% - it’s the best you can expect” the less I believe it.
DeleteThere are some positives in the article outweighed by the dross. Probation has too much empathy? Is too soft? Probation has become spiteful, malicious and sometimes downright cruel. The sheer number of recalls does not suggest soft. Acheson comes across as a hang 'em, flog 'em merchant which I'm sure isn't true. The DT publishes to a well known agenda and is not minded to see probation as anything other than an agent of punishment.
ReplyDeletesox
Also from the Telegraph.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/11/probation-officer-broken-prison-system/
Being a probation officer is hell. Britain’s prisons are more broken than you know
DeleteAn ex-case worker paints a picture of public servants doing a vital (and often horrifying) job, undermined by cuts in funding and staffing
A Murderer’s Guide to Cleaning sounds like a lurid thriller – until you read the subtitle, And Other Stories From My Life as a Probation Officer…
What happened to respect for client confidentiality.
DeleteSomeone was always going to do something like this at some point. It is disappointing the author has no regard for the damage written into the pages.
DeleteBy the authors own account she left the probation service over 10 years ago. If I remember correctly, was part of the London training team.
DeleteSo because of these fictionalised practice stories from past memory we’re all now gonna be hit with new confidentiality clauses.
Nice money spinner though at £18.99 a book. Wish I had written it.
That flashed across my mind but as you say it will impact now no doubt. So what we have is an out of date ex po claiming more skills than can be true then breaching all the ethical codes of client comments and writing it up in a junket book of shite to grab cash in a storm of contention. Nasty idiot springs up.
DeleteCan anyone kindly supply the whole article?
DeleteA Murderer’s Guide to Cleaning sounds like a lurid thriller – until you read the subtitle, And Other Stories From My Life as a Probation Officer. In the book we meet characters such as Steve, who spent hours meticulously scrubbing the blood off the kitchen tiles after he killed his wife; Chantelle, who sang obscene songs through a speaker in her daughter’s playground; and Barry, a sex offender who… well, you don’t really want to know what Barry did.
DeleteSteve, Chantelle and Barry are all real cases – with their names changed – whom Elizabeth Baxter tried to help as a probation officer. During her 25-year career, Baxter worked tirelessly with murderers, sex offenders, rapists, arsonists, fraudsters and burglars, seeing them at her office, in prison, at their homes or in court. The idea was to stop them reoffending, or to help get them a life outside prison. And she really loved her job.
But the fact is that probation officers don’t get a very good rap. “I wanted to raise the profile of probation officers,” she tells me now, over lunch at a restaurant in Kings Cross, “because they don’t get portrayed well or even accurately on television or film. I’ve never seen a good one, nor have any of my colleagues.” They are invariably portrayed as incompetent – “like Diane Pemberley in The Outlaws, or Janice in Back to Life, who just ate biscuits” – or simply as someone minor criminals report to in order to prove they are still wearing their ankle tag.
As of March 2025, there were approximately 5,636 full-time probation officers in the UK, responsible for supervising 241,540 offenders. Yet despite being an intrinsic part of the justice system, most people are barely aware of the work of the Probation Service, until something goes wrong. As Baxter says, “Things working isn’t very newsworthy, is it?”
Cont...
A good probation officer is a cross between a counsellor, social worker, careers adviser and police officer. And the Probation Service, says Baxter, used to be “a quietly competent pillar of the criminal justice system”. It worked. All was going well until then-justice secretary Chris Grayling stepped in and part-privatised it in 2014. The service was split in two: one part remained in the public sector (the National Probation Service) and was responsible for high-risk offenders, and 70 per cent was privatised, creating Community Rehabilitation Companies – these contracts were primarily won by multinational companies, which would be responsible for supervising offenders deemed to be of low or medium risk. The change sparked near-universal condemnation.
DeletePrivatisation was a disaster,” Baxter writes. “Experienced officers were made redundant. Staff were overstretched and underqualified, risk assessments were not carried out properly, and the categorisation of high versus low-risk offenders was routinely muddled… To cut costs some junior staff were left supervising up to 200 offenders [instead of 60].” The previous regime of regular face-to-face contact with offenders was replaced by one phone call every six weeks. And inevitably, neglected prisoners are more likely to reoffend. The Ministry of Justice is now employing AI to “predict” the risk of reoffending.
The system was renationalised in 2021, but, Baxter says, it has never recovered. Poorly paid and overworked staff left in droves, and it was difficult to replace them. According to leaked official documents, the shortfall in staffing stood at 10,000 as of September 2023.
Cont...
When the caseloads were manageable, Baxter felt she was really helping. “Manageable” was when she was full-time, with a case load of 30, could see offenders once a week and she “could really get [her] teeth into it”. Towards the end, she was working part-time and had 60 on her books. She had a breakdown and left in 2015.
DeleteBaxter says her new book is about “those halcyon days before privatisation, when officers had the time and experience to make a difference”. And in many cases, she really did make a difference. A measure of success was if her clients didn’t reoffend, but in some cases Baxter was able to achieve a lot more.
Stella, for example was charged with threats to kill, possession of an offensive weapon and criminal damage. She lived with a violent man with whom she was in an abusive relationship, and she had endured a rough upbringing: her mother was an alcoholic, her father died when she was 12. But after several meetings with Stella, Baxter could see she was “a good egg” with potential; in court, she pleaded for probation instead of a prison sentence. Stella received an 18-month probation order. Shortly after Baxter began working with her, Stella started volunteering with a women’s centre, then enrolled on a computer skills course, took GCSEs, got her first ever job (as a receptionist), got married and ended up training to be a social worker.
And there are smaller, less tangible successes. Sometimes Baxter was a lifeline – the only consistency in an offender’s chaotic world. Once, in the visiting area of a prison, she recognised a man who was there with both his father and his son. “Three generations of criminals and they were all inmates in the same prison,” says Baxter. “And I’d been the probation officer or youth offending team officer for all of them, at one time or another, and they said that I was the most consistent person in their lives.
“But they were all in prison – so I thought, ‘Well, it didn’t work then, did it?’ But they all said it had worked, because they were there for only minor offences; it could have been much worse. I felt oddly pleased – it was quite a strange feeling.”
Cont..
Baxter’s entry into the probation service was not a conventional one. It happened after she was arrested for possession and supply of a class A drug.
DeleteShe was the only child of quiet, conventional, conservative parents. They read The Daily Telegraph, lived in a council estate and her father worked in the local factory. After Baxter left school, she became a dental nurse and moved into a flat with friends.
But her life changed one night after a party where she met two men who turned out to be drug dealers and persuaded her to steal some anaesthetic from the dental surgery where he worked. She was terrified by the idea but, feeling intimidated, took some out-of-date phials of anaesthetic and gave them to the men. A week later she was arrested.
Baxter was suddenly faced with an offence serious enough to send her to prison. Before her court sentencing, she met the probation officer who had been assigned to write a pre-sentence report on her. His name was Mick, and he was a kindly man who could see how scared she was, and he told her he would recommend that she not be sent to prison.
The magistrate gave her a two-year probation order, and she reported to Mick regularly. He told her his was the most rewarding job in the world, and she decided to join him and became one of his “projects”. She enrolled at university and got the qualifications needed to join the Probation Service. Shortly afterwards, she was assigned her first murderer.
Steve” killed his wife after spending a day in the pub together. They had returned home drunk, had an argument, and he had grabbed the frying pan and beaten her to death with it. He cleaned up until the kitchen was spotless. Then he called the police.
It was a first offence and he was sentenced to life with an 18-year tariff. Baxter was assigned to see him regularly, after his previous parole officer retired, and visiting him in jail for the first time, she asked him to describe what happened.
Steve was matter-of-fact and showed no obvious remorse about the murder, but went into great detail about the cleaning process, describing how he used Ajax and Flash spray, and made some Persil into a paste for the grouting on the tiles. Baxter noticed that his cell was spotless, too.
Cont...
She saw him regularly for three years. When pressed, he admitted that he regretted killing his wife but said that the relationship was toxic, and that he was relieved she was gone.
DeleteBaxter noticed how he never looked at her, that he hated loud noises, and she was struck by his obsession with cleanliness. She thought he might be autistic, and arranged for him to be assessed. She was right. “Of course, being autistic doesn’t mean someone will be violent, but the diagnosis provides context for his actions,” she says.
Steve ended up serving 21 years, three more than his 18-year tariff because, in Baxter’s words, “he didn’t do well in parole hearings – didn’t show any remorse”. When the next parole hearing came up, Baxter wrote in her report that it was due to his autism that Steve was not capable of displaying remorse in the traditional sense, and that she thought his risk of reoffending was low.
Steve got parole, but will remain on licence until his death. Baxter continued to see him for another eight years, making it 15 years in all that she worked with him. He gave up alcohol, never reoffended, and during their meetings continued to talk about cleaning. Baxter says he was the most boring man she ever met. “He’s 72 now and lives in a sheltered housing complex.”
Baxter says she has never felt physically threatened by any of her clients except once, when she was in court and a parole application was denied, and the inmate whispered in her ear, “I’ll kill you when I get out.” She says: “Occasionally when I was sitting across the table from a rapist I might feel uncomfortable, but you have to brush it aside.”
The threat is real for today’s probation officers, 76 per cent of whom are women: last year, a 35-year-old man, Ryan Gee, stabbed his probation officer, a woman in her 30s, during an appointment at the probation office in Preston, Lancashire. In January, Gee was jailed for life for the premeditated attack, with a minimum term of 16 years.
Cont..
Sometimes the job would get to Baxter, though. The worst way it manifested itself, she says, was a sort of paranoia; seeing potential sex offenders everywhere.
DeleteShe says: “In front of our house there’s a play area with a lovely tall hedge around it. Loads of kids play there, and I was constantly on the phone to the council, asking them to cut the hedge down in case there were paedos hiding in it. My husband would tell me not to be ridiculous, and I’d say, ‘It’s a safeguarding issue – that hedge shouldn’t be there.’”
Did the council cut the hedge down? “No, I think they thought I was a bit weird,” she laughs. “I hadn’t realised how strange my life was until I left.” She had a lot of therapy after she stopped working for the Probation Service; she thinks everyone
Baxter is married with two children, and her husband is known as Tom in the book. She writes amusingly about him, particularly how he is the most untidy man she’s ever met. Has he read it? “Not yet. I just hope he’s not cross. He’s such a lovely man, but he does think he’s perfect.”
She has just found out that the book is to be adapted for television. She will be involved in writing the script and is enjoying the idea of her husband “being publicly humiliated on telly”.
The final chapter of the book is titled “What probation is like now”. Though Baxter left the service more than 10 years ago, she spoke to current probation officers for their experiences on what conditions are like today. “With little public interest,” Baxter writes, “it is beholden to the whims of the political party of the day, and has been subject to regular, sweeping changes. Today, it’s limping along, chronically understaffed, hollowed out, and increasingly unsafe.”
Cont...
It is poorly paid, comparatively. The starting salary for a 37-hour week as a probation officer is £26,474; marginally above the equivalent of minimum wage, £24,454. She shows me a graph recording overall public sector pay increases from 2010 to 2024: for health workers it is 32 per cent, local government 35.7 per cent, police 39 per cent, and for the probation service, 11 per cent.
DeleteIt was a really well-functioning service that has never recovered,” Baxter says. “Lots of experienced officers left. I think there were 14 in my office, and six of us went off sick and then left. So there is a huge deficit of experience now. It was catastrophic.”
If she could make changes, what would help?
“More staff is key. There is a recruitment drive going on now.” However, recruits are increasingly younger: you can now apply to become a probation officer from the age of 18 if you have five GCSEs. “I think it would really help to recruit older people. They used to come from all walks of life, with different backgrounds, some from university, some ex-criminals, some victims – all had a social conscience and wanted to help people. I would focus on recruiting people who want a second career.” The new intake, she says, is “lots of young white women. A friend of mine who trains them said nearly everyone is called Hannah or Emma”.
What makes a good probation officer? “Someone who listens and really takes it in. Because you might hear one story one week and then by the next it’s totally changed – you need to remember what they said so you can challenge the difference.
“And somebody who isn’t too easily shocked. I think you need to be a bit cynical, and still think the best of people. Because I do believe people can change.”
A Murderer’s Guide to Cleaning: And Other Stories From My Life as a Probation Officer by Elizabeth Baxter (Oneworld, £18.99) is out on April 16
There's a couple of graphs missing (just won't copy on the phone), but thats the whole article.
Delete'Getafix
good work gfx
DeleteAlso on the Telegraph...
DeleteRapist serving two life sentences attacks student on unsupervised day release
Shadow justice secretary writes to David Lammy demanding answers after Neil Trennan absconds from open prison and targets 19-year-old woman
David Lammy is under pressure to explain how a convicted rapist was able to attack a student at knifepoint while on unsupervised day release from an open prison.
Neil Trennan, 61, who was serving two life sentences for separate attacks on women, was let out on day release without any supervision from HMP North Sea Camp near Boston in Lincolnshire when he absconded.
Instead of returning to the open prison, he travelled to Sheffield, where he attacked the 19-year-old student after following the woman into her home in Sheffield.
Trennan admitted to police he planned to inflict serious bodily harm on the student and commit a “violent rape” on her. He had previously told prison psychologists that violence was a trigger for his sexual arousal.
Nick Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, has written to Mr Lammy, the Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, demanding answers “as a matter of urgency” as to how the woman became victim to “an entirely foreseeable and preventable attack”.
Mr Timothy said it was “astonishing” that, given Trennan’s 40-year record of violent sexual behaviour against women, he had been transferred to an open prison.
prisons are designed for “low risk” inmates and have minimal supervision or perimeter security
Trennan was first jailed for life in 1990 after he broke into the home of a young woman in Sheffield, striking her with a dumbbell and causing serious head injuries. He then raped her while she was unconscious.
Twelve years into his sentence in 2002, he escaped from a prison officer in Norwich while on supervised day release and attacked a young woman with a brick in a women’s lavatory. He was handed a second life sentence for that assault.
Yet, in 2023, a parole board decided he was sufficiently low risk to be transferred to an open prison. His transfer was confirmed by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) under the then Conservative administration.
Cont...
In his letter, Mr Timothy said: “What steps have you taken to investigate the decision to transfer Mr Trennan to open conditions? Mr Trennan had escaped from supervised day release before and continued to express violent sexual impulses as recently as 2024. Will you say who authorised this decision and on what basis?
DeleteWhat changes will you make to ensure it cannot happen again? The public rightly believes that dangerous criminals should be kept behind bars. That did not happen in the case of Mr Trennan, and a young woman has paid a terrible price as a result.”
‘Irreparably damaged’
Trennan was handed a third life sentence for the attack on the student. In a victim impact statement, she told the court she thought she would be “irreparably damaged” by the incident. The woman said she had struggled with her mental health since the attack and had considered taking her own life.
Trennan pulled a kitchen knife on her in a spare bedroom in her home before trying to force her down on to the floor. She managed to fight him off, knocking the blade out of his hand, before locking herself in another room. He fled and spent three days on the run before he was arrested in York.
Judge Jeremy Richardson said it was “extremely surprising” that Trennan had been transferred to an open prison and “astonishing” that he was permitted to leave HMP North Sea Camp on unsupervised day release.
“I have heard no adequate explanation why this decision was made, and this is something the Lord Chancellor [Mr Lammy] will wish to investigate,” he said.
The judge said he “could not envisage” a future situation where it would be safe for Trennan to be released. “No-one is safe while you are at large in the community,” he told him.
An MoJ spokesman said: “These were horrendous crimes and our heartfelt sympathies remain with all the victims affected. Neil Trennan has rightly received the full weight of the law for his actions.
Protecting the public and victim safety is always our priority and transfers to open conditions are operational decisions put forward by the independent Parole Board, and after careful consideration, officials could find no clear grounds to reject this recommendation.
“We have not yet received the judge’s sentencing remarks, however when we do, we will closely review the judge’s comments to understand exactly what happened and to identify whether any procedures relating to this specific case need strengthening.”
'Getafix
The training such as it is,is supposedly risk based, in fact the risk factor is continually forced down our throats to such an extent that it carries a fear of the SFO and more importantly the response from the service, so eager to cover their backs and to apportion blame. Compassion and empathy need to go hand in hand with management of risk and not sacrifice either.
ReplyDeleteManaging risk is not something that can be measured or quantified, it’s a skill that develops slowly in a measured way that we initially learn from those whose experiences we glean and which we then go on to develop our own skills, hopefully while an experienced SPO keeps an eye on our development and gradually eases us in with more complex cases………the current reality however is whenever a new officer arrives they are often given a heavy caseload too soon with little managerial oversight……
Worth a read about SFOs - it’s not working. Good the probation journal is featuring articles and views from practitioners for once! https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02645505261437646
Deletehttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/10/music-fitness-perks-addict-british-prisoners-trial-results/
ReplyDeleteThere's some powerful language in acheson's piece; observations that many reading the torygraph will likely be surprised by. And it's there for a reason... we now have to figure out what message the torygraph owners are leading up to...
ReplyDelete"As of March 2026, the German media company Axel Springer SE has agreed to acquire the Telegraph Media Group (TMG)—which publishes The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph—for £575 million."
* the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), a Blairite construction, known colloquially as the “Nightmare on Marsham Street”
* the hard moral hinge between custody and liberty
the clear-eyed guardian of moral authority
* The culture of seasoned instinctive judgment that once defined probation was submerged under the bureaucratic sludge
* probation, the fragile bridge between our feral jails and the public realm
* Probation has always needed heart – understanding what drives offending is part of the craft – but that heart must beat inside a ribcage of hard realism.
* probation must divorce itself from prison governance.
* Probation belongs in local communities, as a professional service rooted in justice, truth-telling, and operational integrity.
* A probation service so stripped of confidence, experience and principled judgement, cannot be patched up with another review or a new “values framework”
Probation is like being an amateur boxer but fighting Mike Tyson in the ring. Only going to last few seconds before you the birds start circling and singing.
ReplyDeleteIntifada
Probation isn’t the overmatched amateur getting flattened in seconds, it’s more like Anthony Joshua. All the fundamentals are there: proven pedigree, a former champion, even a gold medal in its history. But it’s been through relentless rounds, taken too many hits, and now struggles to deliver when it really matters. It’s becoming harder to hide the truth that the championship years ended a long time ago, and aren’t coming back.
DeleteSo everything becomes carefully stage-managed, controlled, and risk-averse.
And HMPPS? That’s the corner team, not the seasoned trainer offering clarity between rounds, but the overbearing voice constantly shouting instructions, second-guessing every move, and stifling any remaining instinct. The more they try to control the fight, the less the fighter can actually fight.
And the irony? Even AJ himself once stood on the other side of the system, a shining example of rehabilitation and change, yet all HMPPS seems to want to talk about is AI, tagging, and punishment.