An Explanation

It goes deeper than probation as a service. What we’re really seeing is the result of society and government failing people earlier and earlier, and those failures being funnelled into the criminal justice system. When housing, mental health care, education, youth services and addiction support are stripped back, people don’t disappear, they fall forward. By the time probation meets them, the harm is already layered and entrenched.

Probation was originally built on the principle of advising, assisting and befriending because it recognised that reality. It needed people with life experience, emotional intelligence, credibility and the confidence to exercise judgement. That model naturally attracted practitioners motivated by understanding people and working with complexity, not just enforcing rules.

The current model is based on something else entirely. It treats social failure as individual non-compliance and manages risk through restriction, surveillance and recall because meaningful support has been hollowed out elsewhere. In doing so, it reshapes who the service attracts and retains. Experience becomes inconvenient. Judgement becomes risky. Longevity becomes expensive.

Instead, the system now favours staff who can tolerate high throughput, follow process, meet targets and apply rules consistently, even when those rules don’t improve outcomes. That isn’t a criticism of individuals, it’s a consequence of design. When discretion is discouraged and autonomy removed, the role no longer rewards depth or experience, it rewards compliance.

Younger people are arriving already failed by multiple systems, and probation inherits the responsibility without the tools to repair the damage. When outcomes don’t improve, the response is tighter control rather than upstream investment.

Probation hasn’t just lost its original purpose. It has been deliberately reshaped to absorb social failure while presenting enforcement as solution, and in the process it is transforming both who the service is for and who it wants working in it.

Anon

Read All About It 2

Thanks to the sterling efforts of 'Getafix, our star contributor, we can now read that Daily Telegraph article about the forthcoming book publication and TV adaptation. (I think there's just a small bit missing):- 

Being a probation officer is hell. Britain’s prisons are more broken than you know

An ex-case worker paints a picture of public servants doing a vital (and often horrifying) job, undermined by cuts in funding and staffing

A Murderer’s Guide to Cleaning sounds like a lurid thriller – until you read the subtitle, And Other Stories From My Life as a Probation Officer. In the book we meet characters such as Steve, who spent hours meticulously scrubbing the blood off the kitchen tiles after he killed his wife; Chantelle, who sang obscene songs through a speaker in her daughter’s playground; and Barry, a sex offender who… well, you don’t really want to know what Barry did.Steve, Chantelle and Barry are all real cases – with their names changed – whom Elizabeth Baxter tried to help as a probation officer. During her 25-year career, Baxter worked tirelessly with murderers, sex offenders, rapists, arsonists, fraudsters and burglars, seeing them at her office, in prison, at their homes or in court. The idea was to stop them reoffending, or to help get them a life outside prison. And she really loved her job.

But the fact is that probation officers don’t get a very good rap. “I wanted to raise the profile of probation officers,” she tells me now, over lunch at a restaurant in Kings Cross, “because they don’t get portrayed well or even accurately on television or film. I’ve never seen a good one, nor have any of my colleagues.” They are invariably portrayed as incompetent – “like Diane Pemberley in The Outlaws, or Janice in Back to Life, who just ate biscuits” – or simply as someone minor criminals report to in order to prove they are still wearing their ankle tag.

As of March 2025, there were approximately 5,636 full-time probation officers in the UK, responsible for supervising 241,540 offenders. Yet despite being an intrinsic part of the justice system, most people are barely aware of the work of the Probation Service, until something goes wrong. As Baxter says, “Things working isn’t very newsworthy, is it?”

A good probation officer is a cross between a counsellor, social worker, careers adviser and police officer. And the Probation Service, says Baxter, used to be “a quietly competent pillar of the criminal justice system”. It worked. All was going well until then-justice secretary Chris Grayling stepped in and part-privatised it in 2014. The service was split in two: one part remained in the public sector (the National Probation Service) and was responsible for high-risk offenders, and 70 per cent was privatised, creating Community Rehabilitation Companies – these contracts were primarily won by multinational companies, which would be responsible for supervising offenders deemed to be of low or medium risk. The change sparked near-universal condemnation.

Privatisation was a disaster,” Baxter writes. “Experienced officers were made redundant. Staff were overstretched and underqualified, risk assessments were not carried out properly, and the categorisation of high versus low-risk offenders was routinely muddled… To cut costs some junior staff were left supervising up to 200 offenders [instead of 60].” The previous regime of regular face-to-face contact with offenders was replaced by one phone call every six weeks. And inevitably, neglected prisoners are more likely to reoffend. The Ministry of Justice is now employing AI to “predict” the risk of reoffending.

The system was renationalised in 2021, but, Baxter says, it has never recovered. Poorly paid and overworked staff left in droves, and it was difficult to replace them. According to leaked official documents, the shortfall in staffing stood at 10,000 as of September 2023.

When the caseloads were manageable, Baxter felt she was really helping. “Manageable” was when she was full-time, with a case load of 30, could see offenders once a week and she “could really get [her] teeth into it”. Towards the end, she was working part-time and had 60 on her books. She had a breakdown and left in 2015.

Baxter says her new book is about “those halcyon days before privatisation, when officers had the time and experience to make a difference”. And in many cases, she really did make a difference. A measure of success was if her clients didn’t reoffend, but in some cases Baxter was able to achieve a lot more.

Stella, for example was charged with threats to kill, possession of an offensive weapon and criminal damage. She lived with a violent man with whom she was in an abusive relationship, and she had endured a rough upbringing: her mother was an alcoholic, her father died when she was 12. But after several meetings with Stella, Baxter could see she was “a good egg” with potential; in court, she pleaded for probation instead of a prison sentence. Stella received an 18-month probation order. Shortly after Baxter began working with her, Stella started volunteering with a women’s centre, then enrolled on a computer skills course, took GCSEs, got her first ever job (as a receptionist), got married and ended up training to be a social worker.

And there are smaller, less tangible successes. Sometimes Baxter was a lifeline – the only consistency in an offender’s chaotic world. Once, in the visiting area of a prison, she recognised a man who was there with both his father and his son. “Three generations of criminals and they were all inmates in the same prison,” says Baxter. “And I’d been the probation officer or youth offending team officer for all of them, at one time or another, and they said that I was the most consistent person in their lives.

“But they were all in prison – so I thought, ‘Well, it didn’t work then, did it?’ But they all said it had worked, because they were there for only minor offences; it could have been much worse. I felt oddly pleased – it was quite a strange feeling.”

Baxter’s entry into the probation service was not a conventional one. It happened after she was arrested for possession and supply of a class A drug. She was the only child of quiet, conventional, conservative parents. They read The Daily Telegraph, lived in a council estate and her father worked in the local factory. After Baxter left school, she became a dental nurse and moved into a flat with friends.

But her life changed one night after a party where she met two men who turned out to be drug dealers and persuaded her to steal some anaesthetic from the dental surgery where he worked. She was terrified by the idea but, feeling intimidated, took some out-of-date phials of anaesthetic and gave them to the men. A week later she was arrested.

Baxter was suddenly faced with an offence serious enough to send her to prison. Before her court sentencing, she met the probation officer who had been assigned to write a pre-sentence report on her. His name was Mick, and he was a kindly man who could see how scared she was, and he told her he would recommend that she not be sent to prison.

The magistrate gave her a two-year probation order, and she reported to Mick regularly. He told her his was the most rewarding job in the world, and she decided to join him and became one of his “projects”. She enrolled at university and got the qualifications needed to join the Probation Service. Shortly afterwards, she was assigned her first murderer.

Steve” killed his wife after spending a day in the pub together. They had returned home drunk, had an argument, and he had grabbed the frying pan and beaten her to death with it. He cleaned up until the kitchen was spotless. Then he called the police. It was a first offence and he was sentenced to life with an 18-year tariff. Baxter was assigned to see him regularly, after his previous parole officer retired, and visiting him in jail for the first time, she asked him to describe what happened.

Steve was matter-of-fact and showed no obvious remorse about the murder, but went into great detail about the cleaning process, describing how he used Ajax and Flash spray, and made some Persil into a paste for the grouting on the tiles. Baxter noticed that his cell was spotless, too. She saw him regularly for three years. When pressed, he admitted that he regretted killing his wife but said that the relationship was toxic, and that he was relieved she was gone.

Baxter noticed how he never looked at her, that he hated loud noises, and she was struck by his obsession with cleanliness. She thought he might be autistic, and arranged for him to be assessed. She was right. “Of course, being autistic doesn’t mean someone will be violent, but the diagnosis provides context for his actions,” she says.

Steve ended up serving 21 years, three more than his 18-year tariff because, in Baxter’s words, “he didn’t do well in parole hearings – didn’t show any remorse”. When the next parole hearing came up, Baxter wrote in her report that it was due to his autism that Steve was not capable of displaying remorse in the traditional sense, and that she thought his risk of reoffending was low.

Steve got parole, but will remain on licence until his death. Baxter continued to see him for another eight years, making it 15 years in all that she worked with him. He gave up alcohol, never reoffended, and during their meetings continued to talk about cleaning. Baxter says he was the most boring man she ever met. “He’s 72 now and lives in a sheltered housing complex.”

Baxter says she has never felt physically threatened by any of her clients except once, when she was in court and a parole application was denied, and the inmate whispered in her ear, “I’ll kill you when I get out.” She says: “Occasionally when I was sitting across the table from a rapist I might feel uncomfortable, but you have to brush it aside.”

The threat is real for today’s probation officers, 76 per cent of whom are women: last year, a 35-year-old man, Ryan Gee, stabbed his probation officer, a woman in her 30s, during an appointment at the probation office in Preston, Lancashire. In January, Gee was jailed for life for the premeditated attack, with a minimum term of 16 years

Sometimes the job would get to Baxter, though. The worst way it manifested itself, she says, was a sort of paranoia; seeing potential sex offenders everywhere. She says: “In front of our house there’s a play area with a lovely tall hedge around it. Loads of kids play there, and I was constantly on the phone to the council, asking them to cut the hedge down in case there were paedos hiding in it. My husband would tell me not to be ridiculous, and I’d say, ‘It’s a safeguarding issue – that hedge shouldn’t be there.’”

Did the council cut the hedge down? “No, I think they thought I was a bit weird,” she laughs. “I hadn’t realised how strange my life was until I left.” She had a lot of therapy after she stopped working for the Probation Service; she thinks everyone....(missing)

Baxter is married with two children, and her husband is known as Tom in the book. She writes amusingly about him, particularly how he is the most untidy man she’s ever met. Has he read it? “Not yet. I just hope he’s not cross. He’s such a lovely man, but he does think he’s perfect.” She has just found out that the book is to be adapted for television. She will be involved in writing the script and is enjoying the idea of her husband “being publicly humiliated on telly”.

The final chapter of the book is titled “What probation is like now”. Though Baxter left the service more than 10 years ago, she spoke to current probation officers for their experiences on what conditions are like today. “With little public interest,” Baxter writes, “it is beholden to the whims of the political party of the day, and has been subject to regular, sweeping changes. Today, it’s limping along, chronically understaffed, hollowed out, and increasingly unsafe.”

It is poorly paid, comparatively. The starting salary for a 37-hour week as a probation officer is £26,474; marginally above the equivalent of minimum wage, £24,454. She shows me a graph recording overall public sector pay increases from 2010 to 2024: for health workers it is 32 per cent, local government 35.7 per cent, police 39 per cent, and for the probation service, 11 per cent.

It was a really well-functioning service that has never recovered,” Baxter says. “Lots of experienced officers left. I think there were 14 in my office, and six of us went off sick and then left. So there is a huge deficit of experience now. It was catastrophic.”

If she could make changes, what would help?

“More staff is key. There is a recruitment drive going on now.” However, recruits are increasingly younger: you can now apply to become a probation officer from the age of 18 if you have five GCSEs. “I think it would really help to recruit older people. They used to come from all walks of life, with different backgrounds, some from university, some ex-criminals, some victims – all had a social conscience and wanted to help people. I would focus on recruiting people who want a second career.” The new intake, she says, is “lots of young white women. A friend of mine who trains them said nearly everyone is called Hannah or Emma”.

What makes a good probation officer? “Someone who listens and really takes it in. Because you might hear one story one week and then by the next it’s totally changed – you need to remember what they said so you can challenge the difference. “And somebody who isn’t too easily shocked. I think you need to be a bit cynical, and still think the best of people. Because I do believe people can change.”

A Murderer’s Guide to Cleaning: And Other Stories From My Life as a Probation Officer by Elizabeth Baxter (Oneworld, £18.99) is out on April 16

Lament for Seasoned Instinctive Judgment

Thanks go to Ian Gould, another long term blog supporter, for pointing us to the Daily Telegraph again for a strongly-worded piece yesterday. Is it too much to hope the paper is on a mission? 

The public will pay the price for Britain’s toxic empathy towards criminals

Once the hard moral hinge between custody and liberty, our probation service is now compromised by sentimentalism

Britain’s probation service has become a tragic monument to well-intentioned ruin – a system where compassion without competence has curdled from virtue into vice.

Once the hard moral hinge between custody and liberty, probation is now compromised by what might be called fatal sentimentalism: the belief that kindness can substitute for control; self-discipline is oppressive; and that bureaucratic ideology can redeem lost public trust. The result is predictable and too often deadly – offenders released into communities not because they are safe, but because the machinery meant to protect us no longer believes it has to.

The late, unlamented experiment of merging probation with prisons was sold as reform. In truth, it was an annexation. The culture of seasoned instinctive judgment that once defined probation was submerged under the bureaucratic sludge of His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service.

The probation officer, once the clear-eyed guardian of moral authority, has been rebadged as a “rehabilitation practitioner”, a title designed to soothe rather than safeguard. Ideological management theories have supplanted hard-earned craft. The new catechism demands unconditional empathy, a “trauma-informed” gaze for every offender, and a reflexive suspicion of anything that smells of retribution for harm done.

The damage did not begin with the current branding. Under the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), a Blairite construction, known colloquially as the “Nightmare on Marsham Street”, probation was already being pulled away from its roots in local knowledge. Later the ruinous “Transforming Rehabilitation programme”, led for a time by Antonia Romeo, the new Cabinet Permanent Secretary, completed this ideological vandalism.

Dreamed up in Whitehall and executed with breathtaking incompetence, it fragmented a coherent probation system into public and private silos with conflicting priorities, before being abandoned in the face of mounting evidence of failure. Profit was pitted against prudence, frontline expertise drowned in contracts and targets, and the ancient professional identity of probation was smashed. Its collapse was as predictable as its conception was reckless. Though the scheme has now been formally scrapped, its corrosive legacy endures in a service still struggling to remember what it is for.

I’ve seen this syndrome metastasising inside our prisons too. Ministers and mandarins preach about “rehabilitative culture” in establishments you’d hesitate to house livestock in – violence rampant, green staff overwhelmed and basic order barely clinging on. When ideology outpaces reality this much, catastrophe is close behind. And probation, the fragile bridge between our feral jails and the public realm, is now collapsing under the same delusions.

The watchdogs have been barking the alarm for years. Inspectors’ reports describe a probation workforce that is often well-meaning and sometimes impressive, but terrifyingly under-prepared for the offenders they supervise. They emerge from training steeped in therapy-speak and empty slogans about “believing in change”, yet many have never confronted a manipulative career criminal, or managed a volatile offender under pressure. In this vacuum of experience, risk assessments become box-ticking rituals. Offenders learn the script of contrition, the service duly records “progress”, and the cycle rolls on, until another tragedy drags the policy euphemisms into the headlines.

Probation has always needed heart – understanding what drives offending is part of the craft – but that heart must beat inside a ribcage of hard realism. Accountability is not cruelty. Retribution, properly understood, is society’s signal that wrongdoing has meaning and consequence. When probation loses that principle, it ceases to be justice and becomes social work with potential body counts.

The first step in recovery is honesty. The service must admit that it has lost its ethical backbone and professional confidence. We need to reclaim the language of responsibility and risk – not as relics of a punitive past, but as foundations of any credible public service. Training must return to first principles: risk management, proportionate enforcement, sound judgement, and deep knowledge of criminal behaviour. Senior leadership must be chosen for front-line competence, not ideological orthodoxy or “lived experience”.

Above all, probation must divorce itself from prison governance. The fiction that a single “correctional service” can simultaneously protect the public, manage custody, and engineer rehabilitation has crippled both arms. Probation belongs in local communities, as a professional service rooted in justice, truth-telling, and operational integrity. Not as a satellite of prisons, nor a branch of social care. The best probation officers (and somehow we have retained some brilliant practitioners) know this in their bones.

A probation service so stripped of confidence, experience and principled judgement, cannot be patched up with another review or a new “values framework”. It needs wholesale reconstruction: rigorous professional training, unapologetic public protection as its central creed, and leadership unafraid to confront the sentimental dogmas that have hollowed it out. I’m aware of how battered the service feels with endless, often fatuous, reinventions. But until we find the courage to perform this radical surgery, more innocent people will pay the price for the state’s fatal confusion between mercy and naivety.

Professor Ian Acheson is a former prison governor and senior official with the Home Office

Read All About It!

Oh look what I've spotted, published 16th April! I'm really not sure what to make of this as PO's have a long tradition of keeping their mouth's firmly shut about clients. Unless heavily 'fictionalised', I'm unsure how confidentiality has been achieved.

 
A Murderer's Guide to Cleaning :And Other Stories From My Life As A Probation Officer

Elizabeth Baxter has heard it all. Thieves, rapists, drug dealers, burglars, murderers, abusers and arsonists – they’ve all confided in her.

Some are harder to shake than others. There’s sweet, baby-faced Stella who hurled a brick through her ex’s window and threatened to cut off his… well, you get the picture. Jake, who burned down his grandfather’s shed and prized model railway collection. And who could forget Steve, who set up a complex marmite-based distillery in his cell. The moonshine wasn’t for drinking though, but for cleaning. He remains, in Elizabeth’s professional opinion, Britain’s most fastidious murderer.

Recalling her twenty-five years in Britain’s probation service, Elizabeth Baxter offers a fresh perspective on care within the criminal justice system. Warm and humane, A Murderer’s Guide to Cleaning pays tribute to the work of probation officers everywhere, who not only protect the public, but often act as the final safety net for society’s most vulnerable, from teenage asylum seekers to survivors of domestic abuse.

Media Reviews

'In this book, Elizabeth Baxter sheds a forensic professional light on the complexities involved in supervising those who commit crimes. She highlights how the issues of deprivation, inequality and masculinity impact on offending, while setting this within the often chaotic personal circumstances of those whose stories she tells. The Probation Service has absorbed considerable, and often damaging, change over recent decades, but Elizabeth Baxter also reminds us of the necessity of a vital element of Probation intervention; the regular face-to-face engagement between those being supervised and "their" trained, diligent and compassionate Probation Officer. "Public Protection, Enforcement and Rehabilitation" may be the letter-head strap-line, but the actual process of effective supervision in the community will always involve "advise, assist, and befriend".' —Peter Wright, former Chief Probation Officer & Probation Trust Chief Executive

'This is the book I wish I’d written. Loved it.' —Katie Smith, former Head of Learning and Development for London Probation

Elizabeth Baxter is a retired Probation Officer who worked in the service for twenty-five years until its privatisation. A Murderer’s Guide to Cleaning is her first book.

Kind-hearted Probation?

Yet again our ace contributor 'Getafix was alert to the following article published yesterday in the Daily Telegraph. The pesky paywall makes it difficult to access, but due to its importance and 'Getafix's efforts at extracting it on his mobile, I think it's worth piecing it together here. PSR's used to be a vital part of a PO's job and their demise has been a shocking loss to the profession's usefulness.  

How Britain’s ‘kind-hearted’ probation service is letting killers go free.

Inexperienced officers with an aversion to imprisonment are fuelling a surge in serious reoffending. Is this soft system costing lives?"

Damien Bendall is one of Britain’s most dangerous prisoners. The 36-year-old is serving a “whole life” order for murdering his pregnant partner and three children. In February, he was given another life sentence for attempting to bludgeon a fellow inmate to death with a claw hammer at HMP Frankland in Durham.Given Bendall’s savage behaviour, it is almost impossible to believe that a few years ago, before his murderous spree in Derbyshire, he was classified by a probation officer as posing only a low to medium risk of reoffending – and was recommended for a non-custodial community order.

The catastrophic miscalculation of Bendall’s risk serves as a reminder of the underlying flaws within England and Wales’s probation service when it comes to public safety, and the apparent aversion to imprisonment.

A series of damning inspections has highlighted weaknesses in the advice given by probation officers to the courts when offenders are sentenced, in documents known as pre-sentence reports (PSRs). Public safety is often the greatest casualty under a probation system that is now facing acute additional pressures due to the early release from prison of thousands of offenders.

In 2024-25, a record 872 criminals under probation supervision were charged with a serious further offence (SFO), including murder, manslaughter and rape. The number of these repeat offences has climbed by an extraordinary 75 per cent in four years, adding to a sense that the service has become too soft on offenders.

Ministry of Justice (MoJ) figures show that non-custodial community sentences – often involving unpaid work – are 10 times more likely to be suggested by probation officers than imprisonment in the reports they write for the courts, with 85,376 recommended in the 12 months to September 2025, accounting for 88 per cent of the total number of probation reports. Custody was proposed in 7,571 cases (eight per cent).

Tellingly, in just over half of the cases where probation staff called for community penalties, judges ignored their advice, instead imposing a jail term, a suspended sentence or a fine. MoJ statistics also show that, over the past 13 years, judges have become more likely to jail offenders when a community punishment has been proposed.

According to some barristers, the frequency with which probation staff advocate against prison sentences has made judges dismissive of their recommendations.

“Every criminal practitioner will have had cases where probation has recommended a sentence which is wholly inappropriate,” says Thom Dyke, a leading criminal barrister. “The effect of that is that the PSR effectively loses credibility with the judge. So where there may actually be useful information in a report, if the overall conclusion is hopelessly unrealistic, the judge is going to pay less attention to the contents of the report overall.”

PSRs, which are typically up to 12 pages long, contain information about an offender’s background and criminal record, as well as a risk assessment and a proposed sentence. But the quality of the reports has been a source of deep concern for many years.

In 2018, defence lawyers at Forrest Williams noted a “worrying trend of completely unrealistic pre-sentence reports in cases where immediate custody is inevitable and yet the PSR recommends a community order”. The lawyers cited one case where sentencing guidelines had suggested a “realistic and fair” prison sentence of eight to 10 years, but where the PSR had recommended a community order.

It was described by the judge as “not worth the paper it’s written on”, the firm said. Although the reports are undoubtedly “written with the best of intentions by kind-hearted people who genuinely hope the decent individuals sitting before them are given a community order... they are dangerous”, they added.

An inspection of pre-sentencing probation reports in 2024 found “considerable gaps”, with fewer than half of those examined judged to be “sufficiently analytical and personalised to the individual”. The standard of the reports has deteriorated further since then, with a grading of “inadequate” in the six areas of England and Wales that were inspected, accounting for almost half the country.

Some of the problems are believed to be due to the greater use of “fast delivery” PSRs, which take less than a week to put together. But Dyke, who is based at Deka Chambers in London, believes magistrates are also to blame for giving probation staff instructions before they write the reports that are too “vague”.

In Bendall’s case, when he was sentenced for committing arson in June 2021, a probation officer did not recommend imprisonment, even though he already had an appalling record of violence, but instead suggested he carry out unpaid work in the community, undergo treatment for an alcohol problem, and be tagged and subject to a curfew.

Three months later, Bendall murdered Terri Harris, 35, who was pregnant with his child; her son, John Bennett, 13; and her daughter, Lacey Bennett, 11, whom he raped as she lay dying. Bendall also murdered Lacey’s 11-year-old friend, Connie Gent. A review of the case said the probation service’s assessment and management of the former cage fighter were “unacceptable” and “far below what was required”.

There are few signs, however, that the lessons from the tragedy have been learnt, with fears that probation staff are still too often prepared to give offenders the benefit of the doubt.

David Ford, national chair of the Magistrates’ Association, says probation officers get it right “most of the time”, but he acknowledges that calculating the risk posed by defendants is far from an exact science. “You are taking a leap of faith with risk – it’s a real worry,” says Ford, a magistrate for 32 years.

Risk assessment has long been the Achilles heel of probation, not only at the point of sentence, but also when offenders are managed in the community. Among the most egregious cases was that of the career criminal, Jordan McSweeney, who raped and murdered 35-year-old Zara Aleena as she walked home from a night out in east London in 2022.

A review concluded that McSweeney, who had 28 previous convictions for 69 crimes, should have been categorised by probation as a high-risk offender when he was released from prison nine days before the murder. Had he been, he would have been more closely monitored by senior staff under more stringent licence conditions.

The chief inspector of probation, Martin Jones, has been so alarmed by the service’s failure to gauge risk and keep people safe from the 240,000 offenders under its supervision that he has launched a series of “dynamic” inspections to bring about improvements.

“What we see across all of our inspections is that public protection work is the lowest-rated area that we’ve assessed, and that’s driven, I think, by significant staffing deficits and the level of inexperience... the majority of staff have less than five years’ experience in the job, some only one or two,” Jones tells The Telegraph.

A probation recruitment campaign is underway, but the service is still 1,700 officers short of its target staffing figure, while most of those taken on tend to be young graduates. More than 10,000 staff are in their twenties and thirties – 46 per cent of the total.

“Quite often, it’s more experienced probation officers who spot those small warning signs that something may be going wrong in somebody’s life, and actually then act upon them, following their nose,” says Jones. “It’s the professional curiosity to say, ‘I need to pick up the telephone, talk to the probation service, talk to the police service, talk to social services about what may be going on, because my alarm bells are going off, given the history that this individual has.’ And there’s not enough of that happening at the frontline.”

The chief probation officer of England and Wales, Kim Thornden-Edwards, has said the service needs to employ more older people and those with different life experiences, and increase the number of male staff. Three-quarters of probation staff are women, despite recent attempts to recruit more male officers, including through advertisements on Sky Sports and gaming channels.

“It might be really good for a woman to be leading on a domestic abuse case, but it might also be good for a man to be challenging those kinds of issues around masculinity and power from a male perspective,” Thornden-Edwards said.

“The majority of frontline probation officers at the moment are young women... and they’re managing a complex group of men in the community, quite often much older,” says Jones. “And I think that makes part of the job challenging.”

There is no proven link between a female-dominated, largely inexperienced probation workforce and a service that underplays risk, and leans towards community-based punishments. But Jake Phillips, associate professor at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, says inexperience could make probation staff more risk-averse, as well as leading to “naivety”, which makes them less inclined to recommend prison.

However, Phillips, who edits the academic publication Probation Journal, believes there is also an ideological issue at play. For most of the 20th century, the service was regarded as a form of social work, helping criminals tackle their underlying problems. Although there was a greater emphasis on controlling and monitoring offenders after a moral panic about crime in the mid-1990s, the tendency of probation officers to favour alternatives to imprisonment still lingers to this day.

There has always been a fairly strong anti-custodial sentiment in the probation profession,” says Phillips. “Although I suspect that has shifted in the last couple of decades, it is probably still there strongly enough to dissuade some probation officers from recommending custody, or at least to make them think twice about doing so.”

Tipping Point Already Passed?

Once again we thank regular contributor 'Getafix for pointing us un the direction of this important contribution to the probation debate from Professor Mike Nellis and posted by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies:-  

Do We Want a High-Tech Future for the Probation Service?

The Independent Sentencing Review, chaired by David Gauke, was published in May 2025, and brought into the open – more or less – an alarming vision of the Probation Service’s future.

Implementation, under the rubric of ‘Plan for Change’, began apace, including, in May itself, the first roundtable discussion with the corporate tech sector about their expected contributions to justice innovation.

In June the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) announced £700m “new money” to support the Probation Service up to the 2028-29, although without any initial clarity as to how exactly it would be spent. Precise priorities had not then been set: The ‘Our Future Probation Service’ project, established in February 2025 to improve performance and reduce workloads by 25 per cent by 2027, was still working on them.

In his July McWilliam’s lecture, Lord Timpson, the Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending Minister, extolled the rehabilitative virtues of the old Probation Service, but was singularly unclear – no less that Gauke himself – as to how these would survive and thrive in a future Service focussed so explicitly on punishment and surveillance technology.

The MoJ made no official response to the Gauke Review, but published a Sentencing Bill in September 2025 to take forward what was, in effect, their joint agenda. A month afterwards the MoJ launched ‘Justice Transcribe’ into the Probation Service, a time-saving AI tool for speedily summarising and transcribing conversations with supervisees, in which massive hopes were being invested as a contribution towards resolving the crises of capacity, staffing and performance in the Service.

Keeping a close eye

The Sentencing Bill itself concentrated on more directly punitive technologies, which on the face of it contribute nothing towards resolving probation’s crises. It promised 30 per cent increase in the use of electronic monitoring (EM) – “the biggest expansion of tagging since the adoption of curfew tags in 1999”.

Numbers on EM were growing – 28,000 people were tagged at the end of 2025 – but achieving the MoJ’s target of 22,000 more (by an unspecified date) was a tall order. One contribution towards it was “a presumption that all individuals leaving custody will be electronically monitored for the period they would otherwise have been in custody... This will ensure probation can keep a close eye on thousands more individuals”.

“Keeping a close eye” was becoming a common trope in MoJ discourse on the future of the Service. Speaking of a new, four-site pilot scheme announced in September 2025, which would use remote check-in technology on offenders’ phones, and AI to confirm their identity, possibly in conjunction with GPS tracking, Lord Timpson said:

"This new pilot keeps the watchful eye of our probation officers on these offenders wherever they are, helping catapult our analogue justice system into a new digital age"

The emerging sense that the old Probation Service was being reconfigured as a punitive-surveillance agency was strongly affirmed when former Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood, looking back, declared her real intentions (£):

"When I was in Justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times."

Concerns over direction of travel

Over the twelve months following publication of the Gauke Review, the Probation Inspectorate (April 2025); the National Audit Office; the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee (PDF); and the House of Commons Committee on Public Accounts all published reports concerned about the state of the Probation Service and the direction of travel in which the MoJ was taking it.

The Inspectorate lamented continuing failings in leadership, staffing and services, inadequate material infrastructure (poor quality buildings) and outdated ICT systems. It noted cryptically that “there will need to be significant change to ensure sufficient capacity within the Probation Service to meet operational demand and improve the quality of services” without indicating what that change would be.

The recent HM Prison and Probation Service response (HMPPS) to the Inspectorate’s criticisms stated explicitly that the time-saving digital tools being introduced into the Service were indeed that change, the key to how capacity and quality of service was to be improved. It becomes increasingly difficult to resist the thought that the MoJ is using a human crisis in the Probation Service – one it has no interest in solving on its own terms – to accelerate its transformation into a punitive-surveillant agency.

The House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee “short enquiry” into EM was concerned with making EM a presumptive post-release measure, and – in an as yet unspecified way – “integrating” it into the Probation Service. The “blanket approach to tagging most prison leavers, regardless of crime and circumstances” troubled the Lords because it seemingly “diminishes the role of effective, targeted Probation interventions, and risks creating an unethical system that is overly punitive and disproportionate”.

Just because the MoJ had a legal justification for doing this, said the Lords, did not mean they should. EM had a place, they agreed, but it should not “become a proxy for effective probation work”, and they worried that some of the £700m notionally earmarked for probation would be spent in part on EM.

Wanting to forestall the MoJ’s perceived over-investment in EM, and restore confidence in rehabilitation, the Lords asked the MoJ to revise its most recent EM Strategy (2022), believing that any balanced and evidence-based assessment of EM and the Probation Service’s respective merits would favour the latter. The Lords were somewhat “retrotopian” here, not realising that within the new tech-driven paradigm in which policy on probation is now being taken forward, the MoJ regarded the evidence-base on which the old Probation Service’s authority had once rested, as a little passé.

The Lords’ concerns about EM were sadly not matched in their stance on AI. They did not demur when the MoJ spoke of “the potential for AI to revolutionise our approach” or of “maximising data use” to improve EM. They fell for the simple efficiency argument, that AI would lift “some of the burdens from probation practitioners’ shoulders so they can concentrate their time where it is most valuable.

They seem to have taken some cues from the Confederation of European Probation’s optimism optimism about AI tools, and accepted that any challenges they might pose for Probation would be risen to. Equally, the Lords may have been seeking a trade-off: go for AI, step back on EM.

The Committee for Public Accounts were more sanguine. Echoing the National Audit Office, which had mostly concentrated on the high-risk tech strategy which ‘Our Future Probation Service’ was pursuing, it too was unconvinced that reckless investment in digitalisation was adequate to resolving the staffing and standards challenges facing the Service.

They feared that the pace at which the HMPPS was planning to introduce them could be counterproductive, and was highly likely to “disrupt services, contribute to poor outcomes and staff stress... the short time-frame carries a high level of risk and the MoJ does not have a strong history of implementing digital change programmes well”.

Tipping point

The four post-Gauke reports on the multiple crises facing the Probation Service – and the way those crises are being used by the MoJ to drive fundamental changes in its character and ethos – have yet to be properly synthesised and discussed. There is as yet no organised resistance to the move towards a punitive-surveillant agency, which is not helped by a clear statement from the MoJ on how far it actually wants it to go.

Reassuring talk about only using AI for efficiency measures like transcription is misleading: even Gauke expected it to go further, writing of using “advanced AI” and expecting this to encompass “AI agents” for planning supervision schedules and, possibly, chatbot-driven dialogue with supervisees. The MoJ’s tight relation with the tech industry – particularly its own contract with OpenAI – bodes ill in this respect. It is in the nature of the AI industry to promote continuous innovation, and to hook users with the self-deprecating guarantee that ‘this is the worst AI you will ever have’.

A tipping point may already have been passed, such that resistance to AI-driven public services is already impossible. The emerging ‘digital rehabilitation and desistance’ movement offers slender hope, because while it is expressly not aligned with a punitive-surveillance agenda, it presupposes that digitalisation will be constrained by the culture and values of the ‘old’ Probation Service, and go so far and no further than these values allow.

Quite apart from the manifest threat to these values, a culture of continuous AI innovation makes ‘so far and no further’ a rather pious hope.

Mike Nellis