Guest Blog 106

Unintended Consequences or Quiet Conspiracy?

I'm retired a few years now but I spent nearly 40 years of my career in and around probation. Like Jim I'm old school CQSW trained probation - and I would be the first to admit that I'm distant from modern day probation practice. But that doesn't stop me from caring about what is happening to probation or trying to work out how we ended up in such a mess. So I jotted the following thoughts down. I thought I would share them here. I'm sorry they got too long so I'll have to do it in parts.

When you look at what has happened to probation and prisons over the past decades, you can approach it in two ways. Either it’s a story of unintended consequences—well-meaning reforms that spiralled into dysfunction—or it’s the product of a subtle, persistent ideological project driven by right-wing political and commercial interests. In truth, you don’t need to believe in conspiracy to see how powerful interests lined up behind the same direction of travel: marketisation, managerialism, and a performative toughness on crime. The outcomes, planned or not, have been the same.

1. Privatisation: When Ideology Meets Profit

The probation and prison services became testing grounds for the idea that the private sector can always deliver public services more efficiently. It didn’t matter that evidence was thin or that services relied on professional relationships rather than widgets on a production line—privatisation fitted a political worldview and appealed to commercial providers keen for long-term government contracts.

The result? Large outsourcing firms took over supervision, tagging, and entire prisons. Success was measured in contract compliance rather than human outcomes. Inevitably, quality gave way to cost-cutting. Staff were stretched. Services became fragmented. And when things went wrong, the response wasn’t to question the model but to double down on it.

2. Managerialism: The Belief That Targets Fix Everything

A deep belief in managerialism crept across the justice system. It told ministers that if you create the right KPIs, dashboards, and compliance regimes, services would magically improve. But probation and prisons aren’t factory floors. They’re complex, relational environments where trust and time matter.

The managerial turn shifted culture from professional judgement to box-ticking, from human contact to case throughput. Officers increasingly spent more time recording their work than doing it. Decisions became less about what helps an individual change and more about what satisfies the audit trail. In the process, creativity, discretion and empathy were squeezed out.

3. Appealing to the Public’s Punitive Instincts

Politically, there’s always been an easier sell in punishment than rehabilitation. Saying you're “tough on offenders” gets headlines and applause lines; saying you want to invest in rehabilitation gets you accusations of being soft.

So the political incentives tilted decisively toward enforcement: more tagging, more conditions, more surveillance, more breaches, more recall. “Help” became “compliance.” Probation’s identity shifted from a service that supported people into one that monitored them.

It is cheaper and more electorally convenient to promise punishment than to engage the public in the harder truth that rehabilitation is messy, individual, and long-term—and far more effective in reducing crime.

4. The Cultural Shift: From Care to Control

Probation once lived in the space between social work and criminal justice. It was a service that believed people could change and worked with them to make it happen.

But over time, the system moved steadily from care toward control. The pressure to enforce, the contractualisation of services, and the politicisation of crime all pushed probation to become an arm of enforcement rather than an agent of rehabilitation.

Prisons, too, became less about resettlement and more about containment. Overcrowding, underfunding and constant crisis management left little room for anything resembling rehabilitation.

5. So Was It a Conspiracy or a Collision of Interests?

You don’t need backroom plots or dark networks pulling strings. Right-wing political ideology, commercial interests, and managerialist thinking simply aligned. They didn’t have to coordinate—they shared assumptions:

the market is efficient
the private sector can do it better
punishment is popular
professionals need tighter control
rehabilitation is too complicated to sell

These beliefs produced structural change that hollowed out probation, overcrowded prisons, failed communities, and ultimately made society less safe.

What we’re living with now may not have been intended, but it certainly wasn’t accidental. When ideology, profit and political convenience march in the same direction, you don’t need a conspiracy. You just need a government willing to ignore the warnings.

6. And Now?

We’re left with a probation service recovering from fragmentation, a prison system bursting at the seams, and a political climate that still reaches for punitive solutions first. The road back to a system rooted in rehabilitation, professional expertise and humane purpose will be long.

But admitting the truth is a start: the damage didn’t happen by chance. It happened because the incentives favoured control over care, punishment over change, measurement over meaning, and ideology over evidence.

The question now is whether we’re willing to reverse that trajectory—or whether the unintended consequences will continue to play out exactly as some interests always expected they would.

Anon