Care and Maintenance

Following quite a bit of soul and heart-searching I thought I'd share my thoughts regarding both the future of probation in England and the blog. To keep things as simple as possible, I've reluctantly decided there is no future for the current iteration of probation under MoJ and civil service control, or indeed under the current Labour administration. I see no agency, body, institution or individual willing and capable of speaking up for the Service being anything other than part of the problem rather than a solution. Academic institutions currently delivering PO training, or others interested in bidding, are willing to agree and sign up to not allowing any negative expressions as to the direction of travel. 

We have a home secretary who wants AI, universal tagging and facial recognition technology to usher in the modern equivalent of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon and we only just stopped her bringing back a modern version of the stocks by photographing, publishing, naming and shaming those undertaking Community Payback. The final straw was the BBC radio 4 Free Thinking episode on criminal justice policy which never mentioned probation at all. Lord Jeremy Sumption summed things up perfectly by declaring that "all the public and politicians want is retribution".

I could go on with a litany of other contributing factors, but as regular readers will be fully aware, all these have been aired and discussed ad nauseam over the years to little effect and therefore the number one priority becomes ensuring the audit trail remains for posterity and benefit of future researchers and historians. With this in mind, I've recently had the following from the British Library:-

"I have set the web crawler to capture the site quarterly. Our initial capture was a successful, in-depth crawl that archived approximately 11 GB of data. The crawler follows internal links back through your archives to capture any published material and comments from the beginning. Moving forward, the crawler will return every three months to ensure new posts and discussions are preserved.

The Library will keep this copy as part of non-print legal deposit regulations, meaning a version of the site will indeed reside with us for long-term preservation and access across Legal Deposit Library Reading Rooms. Please be advised that this is not considered a backup copy."

Now I think this must be viewed as good news and indeed it gives me a degree of satisfaction, however I also need to point out that if or when it might ever be available is in the lap of the gods due to the catastrophic hack the Library suffered in October 2023. If you want a scary read as to what the future looks like, read the report the Library published in 2024. I've heard it said privately by the Library that the 'safest form of archive is paper'. Bear that in mind as you all continue to put stuff 'in the cloud'.

So, what happens to the blog now? It stays available and I will continue to monitor it and reserve the right to publish new posts as and when I think something interesting and significant occurs. It tends to spring into life at times of crisis and I will give it more attention at such times, but from now on I think it's fair to say I've given up on any hope probation can be anything but part of the problem uniquely here in England. To be perfectly frank, only a major crisis on the scale of the Post Office scandal and declaring the MoJ to be 'unfit for purpose' will shift the dial and even the Green Party will realise there's no votes in talking about rehabilitation and building less prisons. It's been fun though and we did change government policy once according to the National Audit Office. I suppose doing it a second time was always going to be a long shot.