Future of Blog

Jim,

I can understand the weariness in that conclusion. After years of writing, arguing, documenting and warning, there must be a temptation to step back and say: “What’s the point?” If the prevailing mood — as aired on Free Thinking — is that the public and politicians want revenge, then perhaps the honest response is simply to accept it and move on. But from where I sit — retired, yes, but still profoundly attached to what probation once meant — I don’t believe it is quite that simple.

It is certainly true that political rhetoric increasingly trades in punishment. “Toughness” wins headlines. Nuance rarely does. Yet in over four decades of practice, I never found the public to be a monolith baying for vengeance. I found fear, yes. Anger, certainly. But also confusion, contradiction and — when given the space — a surprising appetite for prevention over spectacle. The appetite for revenge is often amplified; the appetite for effectiveness is simply quieter.

What troubles me more is not that politicians talk tough — they always have — but that we in probation risk internalising that narrative and conceding the ground. If we say, “All anyone wants is revenge,” then we effectively declare the rehabilitative project obsolete. And that feels less like realism and more like surrender.

Your blog has not been shouting into the void. It has been documenting — patiently, persistently — the slow re-engineering of a service away from relational work and towards managerialism and surveillance. It has provided testimony. And testimony matters, particularly when institutions are being reshaped in ways that future generations will struggle to understand without a record.

If you wind it up, I would understand. No one is obliged to carry the burden of bearing witness indefinitely. But I would gently suggest this: the moment when it feels most futile is often the moment when the record becomes most important. Revenge may be fashionable. It may even be electorally useful. But probation was never meant to be fashionable. It was meant to be principled.

If those of us who still believe in that principle fall silent, then the narrative really does become “End of story.” And I, for one, am not yet ready to concede that the story of probation — real probation — is over. And by the way, you deserve a medal for your work on this blog overall the years!

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Hi Jim 

I think it is time to call it a day. Probation as we knew it no longer exists. Once you accept that it is a relief. An old friend fondly remembered has died. You have mourned. Let it go and move on. You did your bit. When HMPPS want advice and inspiration they head to Texas the workforce has no voice. AI is very much in ascendancy with the aim of replacing Probation professionals with call centres and Tags. Is Probation even fit to call itself a profession- where is the independent professional association? Those who manage AI are the new bosses with all the power and the money. Who are they even and all others like the laughably named Chief Probation Officer are all froth, frills, and window gazers. How is this blog even relevant. It is wailing in the wilderness. We will all be slaves to the machine with everything we say and do will be recorded and scrutinised and scripted by the machine. We are living the Orwellian dream.

Unions watch in bewilderment as the white heat of AI tools  march on crushing them and drowning their feint cries in the relentless onward surge. At best we will have some oversight as rubber stampers. I would wrap it up now and admit defeat. Defiance was admirable but in the words of the late great Douglas Adam’s ‘We’ll see who rusts first!!!’ but then the Vogons destroyed the world and nothing much else mattered from that moment. It was good while it lasted. So long and thanks for the blog.

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"probation was never meant to be fashionable. It was meant to be principled."

There are too few people left in the world who understand those words, the work they do & the weight they carry. This blog took a principled stance. It has been a cheerleader for commentary on the realities of probation work, the positives and negatives, and it has always delivered; having been managed with considerable skill & judgement whilst retaining the option of allowing contributors to post anonymously. Relatively few have abused that privilege, save for a handful of disruptive posts.

Was I hallucinating or do I recall some way back that Jim announced the blog was being saved as a contemporaneous record of the probation story?

For what its worth, given the mindless vandalism being dished out by politicians & civil servants, I think now is as important a time as any - maybe more so - to keep the running reports on record. Then the eyes of the future can understand that not everyone was in thrall to the liars & bullies & greedmongers... some of us are fucking furious at the disgraceful, shameless, amoral shitshow.

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Jim, don’t wind the blog up, this is a safe space for discussion and getting rid of the frustrations of working for buffoons. The current Our Future Probation Service 2026 update just highlights how the work has and will change. Courts will no longer gate keep PSR’s all will be FDR’s , no layer 3 OAsys, reduces the input and knowledge base which means you can get Band 4 staff back into operations. Justice transcribe means that you can have a queue of punters and just roll them in and record the conversations, so no need for QDO’s they can get back into the operational roles as well. It is pointless releasing prisoners they just get recalled so let’s get all the POMs back into operations and save money from additional pay. Get all Band 4 qualified operational staff on the same pay banding if you’re not a qualified probation officer you don’t need band 4 pay or put all band 4 probation officers up to band 5 like NSD.

Do you see where we are going? The management have been divisive in splitting probation into groups playing staff off against each other, promoting non-qualified operational staff into higher pay bands , promoting more SPO’s and PDU Deputies forcing larger caseloads on already overworked staff, forcing an increased stress, sickness absence and resignation of those experienced staff close to pension maximum and leaving a group of newly qualified staff to take the hits with SFO’s etc. AI is here, it is 1984 come to fruition, Animal Farm is the management model and I am off to buy a De Lorean.

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Jim,

I’ve been reading your blog a long time and I can understand why you are thinking it might be time to wind the blog up – but I really hope you don’t. Whatever else has changed, this space has become something far more important than commentary. It’s a record. A living archive. A witness statement. Probation as many of us knew it has, for all practical purposes, been dismantled, reshaped, centralised, rebranded and bureaucratised beyond recognition. Structures have come and gone but what this blog has done – patiently, stubbornly, week after week – is document it as it happened. And that matters. Because memory is fragile. Institutional memory even more so. The official version of events will always tidy things up. It will speak of “modernisation”, “improvement”, “alignment”, “public protection outcomes”. It will rarely speak of what it felt like on the ground: the loss of professional discretion, the hollowing out of relationships, the quiet exodus of experience. This blog does.

If it disappears, a primary source disappears with it. Future researchers, practitioners, historians – even policymakers with a conscience – will have one less window into what really happened during these years of fragmentation and centralisation. Penal policy has long been vulnerable to populism. But that’s precisely why spaces like this remain necessary. When the public mood hardens, when nuance gets drowned out, when complexity is inconvenient – someone still has to say: this is what probation was for. This is what it did well. This is how it was undone. And crucially – this blog has never shied away from an uncomfortable truth: that what happened to probation cannot be laid entirely at the feet of politicians or civil servants.

Yes, there were catastrophic structural decisions imposed from above. Yes, ideological experiments caused damage. But the profession itself was not blameless. There were times when practitioners disengaged from leadership. Times when we failed to articulate our value clearly enough. Times when managerialism was tolerated in the hope it might pass. Times when professional confidence ebbed and collective voice weakened. Acknowledging that isn’t self-flagellation. It’s honesty. And honesty is the foundation of any meaningful record.

The strength of this blog has always been that it allows complexity. It holds anger and affection in the same space. It publishes dissent. It captures disagreement. That in itself reflects the best traditions of probation: reflective, critical, rooted in evidence and experience. Even if probation never returns to what it once was, the story of how it changed deserves to remain accessible. Not as nostalgia, but as evidence.

And there is another reason to continue: morale. For those still inside the system – often feeling isolated, unheard, or professionally diminished – knowing that there is a space where their experience is acknowledged has real value. It reminds them that what they remember wasn’t imagined. That standards once existed. That principles mattered.

You may feel the tide has turned irrevocably. Perhaps it has. Recording what has been lost is not futile; it is an act of professional integrity. If all the public and politicians want is revenge, then it becomes even more important that someone keeps writing about rehabilitation, proportionality, and the human realities behind risk labels. The blog has become part of the historical record of probation’s transformation. To close it now would be understandable. But to continue it would be quietly defiant – and profoundly useful.

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Jim,

I think the previous comment captures something fundamental about what this blog has become. It is no longer simply commentary. It is, as they say, a record — and not just of policy decisions, but of mood, morale, dissent, disillusionment, stubborn hope and professional memory. That matters. It really does. But I also think there’s something important to say that perhaps doesn’t get said enough: you have carried this thing for a very long time. Through restructures, privatisation, reunification, centralisation, endless “operating models”, shifting ministers, and more than one cycle of collective despair — you kept it going. Through thick and thin. And not just institutional upheaval, but your own health challenges as well. Most readers will never fully understand the toll that takes.

Producing a sustained, thoughtful, moderated space like this is work. Emotional work as much as intellectual work. It absorbs frustration. It absorbs anger. It absorbs grief for what was lost. That doesn’t come without cost. So yes — this blog is an archive. Yes — it is a witness statement. Yes — it has documented what the official narrative will never quite capture. But you are not an institution. You are a person. You should absolutely feel proud of what this blog has achieved. It has outlasted governments. It has outlasted policies that were once presented as irreversible. It has given practitioners a place to recognise themselves when the formal structures around them seemed designed to erase professional identity. That is no small thing. At the same time, you owe it to yourself to put your health first. No archive is worth your wellbeing. No act of quiet defiance should come at the expense of your recovery or peace of mind.

Perhaps the answer is not closure, but evolution. If the burden has become too heavy, then sharing it seems the obvious path. Bringing in someone trustworthy — someone who understands the history, the tone, the complexity — could both preserve the record and ease the load. Getafix certainly springs to mind as someone with the intellectual grounding and steadiness of judgement to help carry it forward. There may be others too. Succession is not surrender. It’s stewardship.

Whatever you decide, no one could reasonably accuse you of giving up lightly. If you chose to stop tomorrow, the blog would still stand as a substantial and important body of work. If you choose to continue — alone or with support — it will remain what it has always been: a place where probation’s story is told without slogans. You have done more than enough to justify stepping back if that’s what you need. But if there is a way of preserving this space without it costing you further personally, that would feel like the best of both worlds — for you, and for those who still find strength in reading it.

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Hi Jim,

Personally, I hope you’ll keep going. The blog has been a steady and important voice for probation through some very turbulent years, and that still matters. There is always something to say about probation; even when things seem to go quiet for a while, it’s rarely long before new issues emerge that deserve reflection or challenge. If, however, there were to be another structural upheaval on the scale of TR, particularly something as symbolic as a name change, that might be a natural point to pause and reconsider. Not because the conversation lacks value, but because it would signal that something more fundamental had shifted, locking probation into a quickening death roll.

And when I talk about an end, I don’t just mean for the blog. I mean for this particular chapter of probation as we’ve known it and worked within it. If it did ever come to a final post, it would need to be something fitting, somewhere between symbolic and a cracker, with comments closed after a few weeks, then left to stand as an ever-present record, resurfacing in conversations and Google searches for years to come. Whatever you decide to do, thank you for the thoughtful reading over the years, and for keeping our mini-rebellion alive.

--oo00oo--

Thanks to everyone for taking the trouble to respond so eloquently to my feelings of despair - it's important to know how people feel and it's giving me much to ponder on. One thing I need to be clear about is that the collective memory must be secured and I'm currently giving thought to the matter of Digital Executor and how the record can be archived safely. I'm genuinely unsure about this, but wonder if some academic institution might be an appropriate avenue?   .