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."
chapeau!, Jim Brown... the British Library is a result, as was the NAO revelation. I'm pleased you'll let the blog run. I suspect there'll be intrusive interlopers initially attempting to take advantage of the 'care & maintenance', but they tend to get bored when there's limited reaction. Thanks for all you've facilitated to date... it aint over.
ReplyDeleteThe British Library archiving the blog is indeed a result. Much has been said here over the years, and much of it has proven correct. There is no real future for the current iteration of probation under MoJ and civil service control, nor under the current Labour administration. There is no agency, body, institution or individual willing and capable of speaking up for the Service who is not, in some way, also part of the problem rather than the solution. Academic institutions delivering probation training, or those hoping to bid for it, along with much of the research community, will not express openly critical views about the current direction of travel.
DeleteA standalone Probation Service outside the Civil Service and separate from prisons is sensible starting point, but that now is a pipe dream. I read a comment in Napo News earlier that summed it up rather well.
Over the summer, Napo published a series of (now largely forgotten) articles exploring “professionalism in probation”. While some conclusions may be idealised, they underline an important point: the only people who can truly speak for probation are its practitioners.
Reflections on the meanings of professionalism in probation practice
https://napomagazine.org.uk/reflections-on-the-meanings-of-professionalism-in-probation-practice/
The Concept of Professionalism in Probation – A View from the Frontline
https://napomagazine.org.uk/the-concept-of-professionalism-in-probation-a-view-from-the-frontline/
A strong passion – professional identity in Probation
https://napomagazine.org.uk/a-strong-passion-professional-identity-in-probation/
If that is still not persuasive, we need only look at jurisdictions where probation continues to function tolerably well, Scotland and Ireland being the clearest nearby examples.
Alas, none of this seems likely to happen here. Real probation in England and Wales is quietly passing into history, and, fittingly, this blog may become one of the few places where its story is preserved.
Yes thanks Jim without this avenue of expression the darker days of the split would have been darker still, you provide a sense of a ‘ probation community’ than anything the centre has been able to provide. The comparison to the Post Office scandal event has already started with pressure groups and some MPs supporting the damage that IPP has ( and continues to have) on those blighted by this abhorrent sentence. In 2004 I attended an event in Preston at which the architects of IPP explained how they saw its function,which was significantly different to how it turned out in practice and on that basis the Parole board itself has to be in the dock.
ReplyDeleteThe impact that this blog has had cannot be measured in metrics but by conversations with colleagues who saw beyond the Goebbels style propaganda thrown out by the centre and knew thanks to you, that what was happening in our office was echoed more or less throughout the land- a useful thing to know when you feel as though you are the only one, this then is not goodbye but merely au revoir……
The mis-selling of IPP was as deliberate as the OASys sleight-of-hand... regardless of political colours, it was simply the political classes finding weasel ways to navigate the justice system towards its current retribution model.
Delete(hit send too early)... and the killings inside the prison system are testament as to how the retribution-centric bastards want it to go, i.e. death sentence by peers.
Delete"The brutality of his crimes made him a target in prison and he had been attacked several times previously."
Deletehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80jmm00379o
"Ian Huntley, the former school caretaker who murdered two 10-year-old schoolgirls in Soham, died on Saturday following an attack in prison.
The 52-year-old suffered significant head trauma after being attacked with a makeshift weapon by another inmate at HMP Frankland on 26 February and had been on life support in hospital."
"Since 2015 3,601 people have died in prison in England and Wales. Of those deaths, 965 were self-inflicted... of which 41 were homicides."
Deletehttps://inquest.org.uk/campaigning-for-change/statistics/deaths-in-prison/
Au revoir Jim. Thanks for keeping the lights on for as long as you have done no doubt at some personal cost and impact on your health and wellbeing. I expect those loyal to the blog must now step up and act by sending you guest blog posts to keep things going between peaks in the crisis rather than relying on you as much as they have been for emotional support and guidance. Thank you for your service.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jim, for everything.
ReplyDeleteProbation is dead in the water, and by design. Probation managers, regional directors and ministers are all complicit and part of the problem. Their solutions, an obsession with technology, AI, cost-effectiveness and propping up prisons, are alarming and part of that same design. The disrespect and disregard shown toward probation staff fits within it too.
I said on an earlier post that there have been countless contributions here documenting exactly this drift. Letters have gone to HM Inspectorate of Probation, to senior leaders, to ministers and to the unions. Yet nothing materially shifts. There has been no departure from the sobering reflections of the late Paul Senior and his band of courageous TR critics:
https://probationmatters.blogspot.com/2025/09/sobering-reflections.html?m=1
Nor is there any meaningful answer to Rob Canton’s call for “probation as social work”, or at least a return to something recognisably aligned with it:
https://probationmatters.blogspot.com/2025/10/mic-drop.html?m=1
One piece that particularly stands out is the argument even citing Fergus McNeill about “shaping probation’s identity”, where it was said we were heading in the wrong direction and would likely remain an embarrassing outlier. Nothing changed, and here we still are:
https://probationmatters.blogspot.com/2025/07/outlier-england.html?m=1
We were told privatisation and “modernisation” were necessary. We were told unification would stabilise things. We were told successive restructures would embed professionalism. We were “reset” and “reviewed”. Yet here we remain: over-centralised, metric-driven, and steadily hollowing out professional discretion while publicly insisting it still exists.
And it’s not as if alternatives are absent. There are multiple blueprints for something better, comparative international models, academic proposals, practitioner-led reform ideas. Even the Wales model demonstrates there is another way:
https://probationmatters.blogspot.com/2026/01/there-is-another-way.html?m=1
My favourite post ever published here remains the guest blog on “advise, assist and befriend”:
https://probationmatters.blogspot.com/2015/02/guest-blog-26.html?m=1
That phrase, once foundational, now feels like an artefact from another settlement entirely. It describes a philosophy that no longer meaningfully exists within the operational reality of probation. The knowledge, experience and evidence exists. The will to act on it does not.
So when you describe a profession dissolving through incremental change, you’re not describing an unseen tragedy. You’re describing something documented in real time. Many of us said this would happen. We set it out clearly. We explained the likely consequences. And still the direction of travel continued. Perhaps that’s the most dispiriting part. Not that probation evolved or was replaced, but that the trajectory was visible, contested, and allowed to proceed anyway. We’re not short of diagnosis. We’re short of credibility at the top.
If the blog now moves into “care and maintenance” mode, then perhaps its most important function is exactly what you describe: preserving the record. An audit trail showing that the warnings were given, the arguments were made, and the alternatives were set out, long before the consequences became undeniable. Future researchers will not struggle to understand what happened to probation in England. The evidence is here, written in real time.
The tragedy is not that nobody knew. It’s that those in a position to change course chose not to.
And so, here we are.
/ Probation Officer
Jim, I completely understand your position and the direction of travel you’ve described.
ReplyDeleteWrap it up. Put your feet up. Take a breath. You’ve carried the torch for a long time, but the flame itself went out some time ago.
You’ve made your mark. The magic and the mystery of what probation once was will remain with many of us, in our memories, and in the older academic texts that captured it properly not that current HMPPS backslapping malarkey.
Do make sure you end the blog with a final post that’s properly snappy and nostalgic. It deserves that kind of send-off.
And after that, let it rest.