Once gain thanks must go to long-time reader and supporter 'Getafix for ferreting-out the following article from 2020 and published on an American academic website. It really is a very good summary of our recent history and demise:-
Evidence versus politics in British probation
Highlights
- Twenty years ago, the Probation Service in England and Wales was widely regarded as world-leading.
- Since then it has been weakened by a series of politically driven and poorly evidenced changes.
- A badly flawed and ideologically driven privatisation programme implemented in 2015 has done serious damage.
At the beginning of this century the Probation Service of England and Wales (these two countries have separate Governments but form a single jurisdiction for criminal justice purposes) was regarded as one of the strongest and most advanced in the world. Twenty years later it finds itself under-resourced, understaffed, organisationally fragmented and partly demoralised, with little idea how it will look or how it will be run a couple of years from now. This is largely due to a series of decisions taken by politicians which were (believe it or not) intended to improve the Service, but which were not adequately informed by evidence or by an understanding of practical realities. The story of how this happened is an object-lesson in how not to do criminal justice reform and is summarised here in the hope that it may act as a warning to other jurisdictions.
To understand what went wrong, and what might be done about it, we need to look a bit further back, and my starting point is the development of the Welfare State in Britain after the second World War. Probation services in Britain were well established by then, and like other welfare services, they had good prospects for further development. Max Grünhut, a German lawyer and criminologist who escaped from the Nazi regime and established the teaching of criminology at Oxford, wrote ‘Probation is the great contribution of Britain and the USA to the treatment of offenders. Its strength is due to a combination of two things, conditional suspension of punishment, and personal care and supervision by a court welfare officer. With the growing use of probation, social case work has been introduced into the administration of criminal justice … ’ (Grünhut, 1952, p. 168). A few years later Leon Radzinowicz, another refugee from Nazi domination of Europe who founded the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, wrote ‘If I were asked what was the most significant contribution made by this country [i.e. England] to the new penological theory and practice which struck root in the twentieth century … my answer would be probation’ (Radzinowicz, 1958).
In addition to such expert endorsements, probation services were well respected and an integral part of both the developing social work profession and the criminal justice system. They were run by County-level committees which consisted mainly of magistrates, giving the main users of probation a stake in its success and a good understanding of how it worked. Chief Probation Officers played a significant role in social work's professional organisations, and expansion and development continued fairly smoothly until the 1970s. Even the proliferation of negative or discouraging research findings about the capacity of different sentences to reduce offending (for example, Martinson, 1974) did not significantly undermine probation in Britain, as it developed a new and useful mission as the provider of alternatives to custodial sentences. Governments were keen to encourage this for financial reasons. In this way the Service largely avoided the cuts in public services which were imposed by a Conservative government during the 1980s.
1. Populist punitiveness versus ‘What Works’
The tide began to turn in 1993. A Conservative Minister, hoping to achieve popularity through a display of toughness, declared to his party's annual conference that ‘prison works’, signalling an end to ‘alternatives to custody’. The Probation Service, under considerable political attack, needed a new way to present its role, and in due course its leaders (particularly the Chief Inspector of Probation, Graham Smith) launched the ‘What Works’ initiative to develop the Service's effectiveness in reducing reoffending (Underdown, 1998). By this time the ‘nothing works’ consensus of the 1970s was being replaced by new research which showed that some ways of working could have a positive impact on offenders' behaviour. Probation leaders and researchers were strongly influenced particularly by Canadian studies of effective rehabilitation (for example Andrews et al., 1990) and by British psychologists who disseminated similar ideas (such as McGuire, 1995). Money from a new Government of a different political colour enabled the establishment of ‘Pathfinder’ projects to develop and evaluate new methods, with a particular (though not exclusive) emphasis on cognitive-behavioural group programmes, and for a while at the end of the last century and the beginning of this, England and Wales were seen as global leaders in a very ambitious and comprehensive ‘What Works’ exercise. Gerhard Ploeg, a leading figure in Scandinavian probation, told the Confederation of European Probation that ‘The Probation service in England and Wales has always been in the vanguard in these developments, and many other European countries are watching it like a hawk, ready to accept that which seems to be working and to criticise that which isn't’ (Ploeg, 2003, p. 8).
Unfortunately the results of the ‘Pathfinders’ were not as good as probation's leaders hoped (Raynor, 2004). Over-rapid and top-down centralised implementation did not give probation staff time to understand and adapt: many of the new methods eventually became established, but this took at least twice as long as the three-year period allowed for the Pathfinders to prove themselves. In addition, political changes were reinforcing central Government control over probation, so that probation policy became more politicized and local influence and control, particularly by the Courts, was diminished. A new Criminal Justice Act in 1991 had redefined probation as a punishment in its own right (no longer Grünhut's ‘conditional suspension of punishment’) and in 2001 the Service became the National Probation Service, run from London. This also meant it was very visible to London-based politicians, and vulnerable to politicians of both major parties who wanted to be seen as ‘tough on crime’. In 2004 the Probation Service was merged with the larger and wealthier Prison Service to form the National Offender Management Service, which in theory might have led to better integration of offender management across the criminal justice system but in practice meant that the central administration of probation was dominated by officials who understood the needs and practices of prisons better than they understood probation.
2. Evidence versus delusion
Practice in the meantime had become dominated by risk assessment and risk management, with some officers having to spend more time on their computers than with the people they were supervising, and with a new official focus on enforcement as a priority. The evidence-base of practice remained primarily psychological, and there was less time to address social circumstances and social needs or to link people into the other services from which they could benefit. Probation officer training had been disconnected from social work training. However, the biggest changes were yet to come, as a new Conservative-led Government looked for opportunities to reduce social spending and to marketize public services by moving them into the private for-profit sector. A new Government Minister, Justice Secretary Christopher Grayling, was a particular enthusiast for privatisation and saw this as a way forward for probation. There was, in fact, no evidence to suggest that this was a good way to run community corrections in Britain, or that this might be profitable for the private companies jostling for a slice of the criminal justice pie. The Minister was encouraged to pilot the proposed arrangements but stated that there was no need to do so. This egregious example of evidence refusal was motivated by blind faith in markets and a right-wing Conservative tradition of scepticism about State-funded public services, and in 2014 seventy per cent of the Probation Service's work was handed to private companies, some with little criminal justice experience (Raynor, 2020).
After implementation in 2015, it quite quickly became clear that the private companies (known as Community Rehabilitation Companies) were in difficulty, and a series of inspections by the independent Inspectorate of Probation consistently showed them to be performing considerably worse than that part of the Service which had remained public. The companies had exaggerated what they could offer, and only a high degree of magical thinking by politicians could explain their confidence that the new arrangements would work. Before long the companies were trying to maintain profitability by making about a third of their staff redundant, leading to over-large caseloads handled by often inexperienced people. In short, although some innovations were interesting, overall the private companies damaged the services they claimed to be able to improve, leaving them in ‘a worse position than they were in before the Ministry embarked on its reforms’ (Public Accounts Committee, 2019. Eventually, after four years of bad results, politicians had to recognise their mistake. The decision has now been taken, by a new Justice Secretary, to terminate the contracts of the private companies and to re-unify probation as a public service. This is already happening in Wales, and England is following.
It is, of course, encouraging to see a bad policy decision reversed by considering the evidence; this does not always happen. However, the new Probation Service faces a considerable task of reconstruction and recovery, and discussions are still continuing about exactly how it should be organised and managed. Many commentators favour a greater degree of local involvement in governance with the restoration of some judicial input, not just central control by civil servants in London. In addition, practitioners and their managers need to be able to focus on the development and use of evidence-based skills, informed by what we already know about how to promote rehabilitation and desistance from offending. The coronavirus pandemic has shown that Government spending on public services is necessary and unavoidable, and there is less political clamour to shrink the State and hand over services to private enterprise. However, the post-Covid world will be short of money, and criminal justice will have to compete with other strongly justified demands for public expenditure. Perhaps the most important lesson learned from the rise and fall of British probation is that there is no magic bullet to bring about a step-change in the effectiveness of probation services: development needs to be gradual and incremental, and informed at every step by evidence and evaluation rather than ideology.
Peter Raynor
1. Populist punitiveness versus ‘What Works’
The tide began to turn in 1993. A Conservative Minister, hoping to achieve popularity through a display of toughness, declared to his party's annual conference that ‘prison works’, signalling an end to ‘alternatives to custody’. The Probation Service, under considerable political attack, needed a new way to present its role, and in due course its leaders (particularly the Chief Inspector of Probation, Graham Smith) launched the ‘What Works’ initiative to develop the Service's effectiveness in reducing reoffending (Underdown, 1998). By this time the ‘nothing works’ consensus of the 1970s was being replaced by new research which showed that some ways of working could have a positive impact on offenders' behaviour. Probation leaders and researchers were strongly influenced particularly by Canadian studies of effective rehabilitation (for example Andrews et al., 1990) and by British psychologists who disseminated similar ideas (such as McGuire, 1995). Money from a new Government of a different political colour enabled the establishment of ‘Pathfinder’ projects to develop and evaluate new methods, with a particular (though not exclusive) emphasis on cognitive-behavioural group programmes, and for a while at the end of the last century and the beginning of this, England and Wales were seen as global leaders in a very ambitious and comprehensive ‘What Works’ exercise. Gerhard Ploeg, a leading figure in Scandinavian probation, told the Confederation of European Probation that ‘The Probation service in England and Wales has always been in the vanguard in these developments, and many other European countries are watching it like a hawk, ready to accept that which seems to be working and to criticise that which isn't’ (Ploeg, 2003, p. 8).
Unfortunately the results of the ‘Pathfinders’ were not as good as probation's leaders hoped (Raynor, 2004). Over-rapid and top-down centralised implementation did not give probation staff time to understand and adapt: many of the new methods eventually became established, but this took at least twice as long as the three-year period allowed for the Pathfinders to prove themselves. In addition, political changes were reinforcing central Government control over probation, so that probation policy became more politicized and local influence and control, particularly by the Courts, was diminished. A new Criminal Justice Act in 1991 had redefined probation as a punishment in its own right (no longer Grünhut's ‘conditional suspension of punishment’) and in 2001 the Service became the National Probation Service, run from London. This also meant it was very visible to London-based politicians, and vulnerable to politicians of both major parties who wanted to be seen as ‘tough on crime’. In 2004 the Probation Service was merged with the larger and wealthier Prison Service to form the National Offender Management Service, which in theory might have led to better integration of offender management across the criminal justice system but in practice meant that the central administration of probation was dominated by officials who understood the needs and practices of prisons better than they understood probation.
2. Evidence versus delusion
Practice in the meantime had become dominated by risk assessment and risk management, with some officers having to spend more time on their computers than with the people they were supervising, and with a new official focus on enforcement as a priority. The evidence-base of practice remained primarily psychological, and there was less time to address social circumstances and social needs or to link people into the other services from which they could benefit. Probation officer training had been disconnected from social work training. However, the biggest changes were yet to come, as a new Conservative-led Government looked for opportunities to reduce social spending and to marketize public services by moving them into the private for-profit sector. A new Government Minister, Justice Secretary Christopher Grayling, was a particular enthusiast for privatisation and saw this as a way forward for probation. There was, in fact, no evidence to suggest that this was a good way to run community corrections in Britain, or that this might be profitable for the private companies jostling for a slice of the criminal justice pie. The Minister was encouraged to pilot the proposed arrangements but stated that there was no need to do so. This egregious example of evidence refusal was motivated by blind faith in markets and a right-wing Conservative tradition of scepticism about State-funded public services, and in 2014 seventy per cent of the Probation Service's work was handed to private companies, some with little criminal justice experience (Raynor, 2020).
After implementation in 2015, it quite quickly became clear that the private companies (known as Community Rehabilitation Companies) were in difficulty, and a series of inspections by the independent Inspectorate of Probation consistently showed them to be performing considerably worse than that part of the Service which had remained public. The companies had exaggerated what they could offer, and only a high degree of magical thinking by politicians could explain their confidence that the new arrangements would work. Before long the companies were trying to maintain profitability by making about a third of their staff redundant, leading to over-large caseloads handled by often inexperienced people. In short, although some innovations were interesting, overall the private companies damaged the services they claimed to be able to improve, leaving them in ‘a worse position than they were in before the Ministry embarked on its reforms’ (Public Accounts Committee, 2019. Eventually, after four years of bad results, politicians had to recognise their mistake. The decision has now been taken, by a new Justice Secretary, to terminate the contracts of the private companies and to re-unify probation as a public service. This is already happening in Wales, and England is following.
It is, of course, encouraging to see a bad policy decision reversed by considering the evidence; this does not always happen. However, the new Probation Service faces a considerable task of reconstruction and recovery, and discussions are still continuing about exactly how it should be organised and managed. Many commentators favour a greater degree of local involvement in governance with the restoration of some judicial input, not just central control by civil servants in London. In addition, practitioners and their managers need to be able to focus on the development and use of evidence-based skills, informed by what we already know about how to promote rehabilitation and desistance from offending. The coronavirus pandemic has shown that Government spending on public services is necessary and unavoidable, and there is less political clamour to shrink the State and hand over services to private enterprise. However, the post-Covid world will be short of money, and criminal justice will have to compete with other strongly justified demands for public expenditure. Perhaps the most important lesson learned from the rise and fall of British probation is that there is no magic bullet to bring about a step-change in the effectiveness of probation services: development needs to be gradual and incremental, and informed at every step by evidence and evaluation rather than ideology.
Peter Raynor
"Perhaps the most important lesson learned from the rise and fall of British probation is that there is no magic bullet to bring about a step-change in the effectiveness of probation services" - paracetamol? nurofen? aspirin? berocca? calpol?
ReplyDelete“Probation Service faces a considerable task of reconstruction and recovery…”
ReplyDeleteThere will be no fix in this climate, or with these leaders. They don’t speak for probation and they don’t listen to it. Do we really expect anything from Martin Jones, probation leaders, justice ministers, or even academics so far removed their rose-tinted policy ideas go nowhere? For years it’s been too little, too late. They’ve all had endless chances and failed every time.
The hypocrisy is staggering: leaning on staff goodwill to keep the system afloat, then using that goodwill as cover for their own failures, offering a carrot that can never be grasped. Too often staff are expected to applaud the very people pulling the rug from under them. Saying the right thing is theatre, not leadership. Real leadership would mean real change, and that’s exactly what they refuse to deliver.
The abused will often becomes the abuser. That's a theory often applied to the individual, but recently I've come to think that the same theory may well apply to agencies or organisations such as probation.
ReplyDeleteThe UK probation service is certainly a victim of abuse. It's been changed from a supportive, needs meeting and pro active agency into a punitive, all stick and no carrot agency of control that is measured by failure without been afforded the autonomy to achieve.
I believe that the whole concept and ethos of probation has been lost. Deliberately breed out may be more true. Policies being developed are prison centric and are constantly designed to embed probation further and further into the mindset of the punitive, punishment orientated thinking that belongs to the prison service.
The recall rate is a good example of how this is happening. The Government on one hand want to stop people being given short sentences. They do more harm then good is their rethoric. I actually agree with that. Yet at the same time recalling someone on probation is in itself a short prison sentence. Does that not cause more damage then good?
I understand that some people will necessarily need to be recalled for public protection reasons, but the reality is that most people being recalled are for punitive reasons for non compliance. It's probations equivalent of a short sharp shock.
Recall becomes a mockery when it's framed in the public protection theme, yet the Government instigate policy like THR48 and fixing the term of recall and releasing recalled prisoners early.
Q. Why are people being recalled to protect the public being released early?
A. Because they are really not there for public protection reasons. They are there for a short sharp shock. Punishment.
I see recall for most as nothing more then the probation services segregation unit. A month on the block for breaking the rules.
Probation needs it's full independence from the prison service. It needs to be allowed autonomy to function again along the pathway it was originally designed to walk.
https://insidetime.org/newsround/hundreds-of-recalled-prisoners-go-home-early-under-ftr48-scheme/
'Getafix
Makes sense gtx and on the same vein tubu is tackling unacceptable behaviour unit. It isn't listed in probation but it's from prison. Gone are the days when internal staff managed disciplinary inquiries it's outside to fiddle things down . Tubu a team of experts across a range of fields involving disciplinary conducts my arse. Aa bunch of skyvers what they do is investigate and claim to resolve but it's all a way of suppressing staff issues .
DeleteThe NPS have dominated and prevented staff from fair treatment . Hiding behind sscl and tubu.
An emergency scheme to tackle the capacity crisis in prisons by sending recalled prisoners home early has had an immediate impact – with the population dropping by more than 800 in the space of a fortnight.
DeleteThe scheme, known as FTR48, was approved by Parliament in June and began to take effect on 2 September. It means that most people serving sentences of less than four years (48 months) in England and Wales, who are recalled to prison for breaching licence conditions, should serve only a 28-day recall period rather than the longer ‘standard recall’ they might previously have served.
The early releases have gone ahead despite a warning from the National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO) that FTR48 is “a reckless and dangerous gamble with public safety”, because the scheme does not exclude prisoners assessed as posing a high risk to the public or those convicted of sexual, domestic abuse or stalking offences.
The Government introduced FTR48 as a temporary measure amid fears that jails would run out of cells this autumn. The prison population had climbed to 88,424 by the start of September – just 200 short of the all-time high set last year, and leaving fewer than 1,000 places free in men’s jails.
However, after the first two tranches of early releases under FTR48, on 2 September and 9 September, the population had dropped to 87,572 – a fall of 846 in two weeks. Four further tranches are planned for 16 September, 23 September, 28 October, and 25 November – with the total number of people released early expected to reach several thousand. The decision as to which tranche each individual prisoner falls into is based on their sentence expiry date.
A spokesperson for NAPO said: “In the interests of trying to free up hundreds of prison spaces the Government has chosen not to exclude people who are assessed as posing a high risk to others or those serving sentences for committing sexual, domestic abuse and stalking offences.
“All of those included in this scheme have, to have been recalled in the first place, been subject to an assessment by Probation workers that concluded the risk these individuals posed to others was such that they could not be managed in the community.
“Where previously they would have been subject to a Standard Recall, involving a much more robust risk assessment and management process in the months after recall involving Probation workers and the Parole Board, now they will be automatically re-released, regardless of any existing risk assessment.”
NAPO said the releases would increase the risk of serious further offences taking place in the community. It warned that FTR48 would create thousands of additional hours of work for probation officers, which it called “the latest example of an unprecedented, and apparently never-ending, increase in work we’ve been subject to from the various schemes introduced to try to reduce Prison overcrowding.”
There are limited exclusions to FTR48 – for people convicted of terrorism offences, those managed under Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) levels 2 and 3, and those recalled to custody because they were charged with a further offence. Under-18s are also excluded.
By the middle of this year there were more than 13,000 recalled prisoners in English and Welsh jails, taking up 15 per cent of all capacity. The Government’s new Sentencing Bill, introduced to Parliament last week, will include a measure to standardise recalls at 56 days, and once this is implemented, FTR48 will cease to operate.
"The abused will often becomes the abuser. That's a theory often applied to the individual, but recently I've come to think that the same theory may well apply to agencies or organisations such as probation."
DeleteBeen there, done that. It was said many years back & the post was slated as "inappropriate" by a raft of deeply offended people.
The probation service has been a serial abuser for decades. It seduces, entices, grooms & then brutalises its staff.
The bullies in senior local positions are more than happy to be the lieutenants dishing out this abuse, claiming the moral high ground wearing the cloak of "public protection" as they reduce targetted individuals to tears, humiliate them & defenestrate them.
The choreography of the NPS in 1999/2000 was merely the prelude to the dance of the seven veils whereby successive layers of protection for the probation service & staff were systematically discarded - noms in 2004, OM Act 2007, trusts from 2008, tr in 2013, civil service in 2014, hmpps in 2017 & reunification in 2021.
I wonder if the current recruitment interviews start with "hello, now grab your ankles..."
I submit this previous (recent) post in evidence:
Jim Brown22 September 2025 at 13:51
From Twitter:-
"This is how my therapist described my relationship with probation before I left. It’s taken me a long time to realise they were the problem not me."
Here you go 15:08 have you seen this another attack. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/civil-service-staff-networks-to-only-meet-outside-working-hours-and-have-all-events-signed-off-by-senior-managers
Delete"Ministers and Civil Service leaders have been concerned by recent reports of inappropriate events being conducted by some networks in the Civil Service.
DeleteThe new guidance states that all events must now be signed off by a senior civil servant before preparations even begin. The changes also make clear that events should always take place outside working hours, unless they directly benefit the organisation, such as learning and development
the guidance provides further clarity to all networks to ensure any activities, communications or meetings comply with the Civil Service Code."
This is the funniest bit:
"The code sets out that all civil servants must act impartially and with integrity - putting the obligations of public service above any personal interests."
Hmmm... what about the activities, the personal ambitions, of senior civil servants who sacrifice the careers of hundreds of lesser mortals to expedite inherently flawed, partisan political ideology without hesitation, please their political masters & thereby further their own progression up the greasy pole of reward & recognition?
brennan, romeo, spurr, rees, copple... "impartially and with integrity - putting the obligations of public service above any personal interests." ???
Not a bad summary, with the exception of the suggestion that politicians ever actually believed that privatisation would improve services -TR was a cynical exercise in transferring public money into the hands of private providers a philosophy which continues to the present day with, for example the continuing expansion of tagging. Grayling was only persuaded against total privatisation of the Service by the argument that in order to avoid political embarrassment the risks posed by High Risk cases could and should only be managed by the public sector.
ReplyDelete