For me, the recent discussion thread has basically confirmed that sadly there's no way out of our 'doom loop' because Andy Burnham has fallen for the accepted mantra that there's too much political risk associated with being seen to be 'soft' on crime. This seemingly accepted view has obviously been a huge success with significantly higher prison numbers year on year, massive recall figures, increased re-offending rates and vast public expenditure on prison building programmes. All while every part of the criminal justice system is in crisis and virtually every probation area rated as unsatisfactory, or worse. But amazingly, while levels of crime have fallen dramatically over recent decades! So, lets remind ourselves of a few things. This paper from 2020:-
Evidence versus politics in British probation
Highlights
To understand what went wrong, and what might be done about it, we need to look a bit further back, and my starting point is the development of the Welfare State in Britain after the second World War. Probation services in Britain were well established by then, and like other welfare services, they had good prospects for further development. Max Grünhut, a German lawyer and criminologist who escaped from the Nazi regime and established the teaching of criminology at Oxford, wrote ‘Probation is the great contribution of Britain and the USA to the treatment of offenders. Its strength is due to a combination of two things, conditional suspension of punishment, and personal care and supervision by a court welfare officer. With the growing use of probation, social case work has been introduced into the administration of criminal justice … ’ (Grünhut, 1952, p. 168). A few years later Leon Radzinowicz, another refugee from Nazi domination of Europe who founded the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, wrote ‘If I were asked what was the most significant contribution made by this country [i.e. England] to the new penological theory and practice which struck root in the twentieth century … my answer would be probation’ (Radzinowicz, 1958: x). In addition to such expert endorsements, probation services were well respected and an integral part of both the developing social work profession and the criminal justice system. They were run by County-level committees which consisted mainly of magistrates, giving the main users of probation a stake in its success and a good understanding of how it worked. Chief Probation Officers played a significant role in social work's professional organisations, and expansion and development continued fairly smoothly until the 1970s. Even the proliferation of negative or discouraging research findings about the capacity of different sentences to reduce offending (for example, Martinson, 1974) did not significantly undermine probation in Britain, as it developed a new and useful mission as the provider of alternatives to custodial sentences. Governments were keen to encourage this for financial reasons. In this way the Service largely avoided the cuts in public services which were imposed by a Conservative government during the 1980s.
1. Populist punitiveness versus ‘What Works’
The tide began to turn in 1993. A Conservative Minister, hoping to achieve popularity through a display of toughness, declared to his party's annual conference that ‘prison works’, signalling an end to ‘alternatives to custody’. The Probation Service, under considerable political attack, needed a new way to present its role, and in due course its leaders (particularly the Chief Inspector of Probation, Graham Smith) launched the ‘What Works’ initiative to develop the Service's effectiveness in reducing reoffending (Underdown, 1998). By this time the ‘nothing works’ consensus of the 1970s was being replaced by new research which showed that some ways of working could have a positive impact on offenders' behaviour. Probation leaders and researchers were strongly influenced particularly by Canadian studies of effective rehabilitation (for example Andrews et al., 1990) and by British psychologists who disseminated similar ideas (such as McGuire, 1995). Money from a new Government of a different political colour enabled the establishment of ‘Pathfinder’ projects to develop and evaluate new methods, with a particular (though not exclusive) emphasis on cognitive-behavioural group programmes, and for a while at the end of the last century and the beginning of this, England and Wales were seen as global leaders in a very ambitious and comprehensive ‘What Works’ exercise. Gerhard Ploeg, a leading figure in Scandinavian probation, told the Confederation of European Probation that ‘The Probation service in England and Wales has always been in the vanguard in these developments, and many other European countries are watching it like a hawk, ready to accept that which seems to be working and to criticise that which isn't’ (Ploeg, 2003, p. 8).
Unfortunately the results of the ‘Pathfinders’ were not as good as probation's leaders hoped (Raynor, 2004). Over-rapid and top-down centralised implementation did not give probation staff time to understand and adapt: many of the new methods eventually became established, but this took at least twice as long as the three-year period allowed for the Pathfinders to prove themselves. In addition, political changes were reinforcing central Government control over probation, so that probation policy became more politicized and local influence and control, particularly by the Courts, was diminished. A new Criminal Justice Act in 1991 had redefined probation as a punishment in its own right (no longer Grünhut's ‘conditional suspension of punishment’) and in 2001 the Service became the National Probation Service, run from London. This also meant it was very visible to London-based politicians, and vulnerable to politicians of both major parties who wanted to be seen as ‘tough on crime’. In 2004 the Probation Service was merged with the larger and wealthier Prison Service to form the National Offender Management Service, which in theory might have led to better integration of offender management across the criminal justice system but in practice meant that the central administration of probation was dominated by officials who understood the needs and practices of prisons better than they understood probation.
2. Evidence versus delusion
Practice in the meantime had become dominated by risk assessment and risk management, with some officers having to spend more time on their computers than with the people they were supervising, and with a new official focus on enforcement as a priority. The evidence-base of practice remained primarily psychological, and there was less time to address social circumstances and social needs or to link people into the other services from which they could benefit. Probation officer training had been disconnected from social work training. However, the biggest changes were yet to come, as a new Conservative-led Government looked for opportunities to reduce social spending and to marketize public services by moving them into the private for-profit sector. A new Government Minister, Justice Secretary Christopher Grayling, was a particular enthusiast for privatisation and saw this as a way forward for probation. There was, in fact, no evidence to suggest that this was a good way to run community corrections in Britain, or that this might be profitable for the private companies jostling for a slice of the criminal justice pie. The Minister was encouraged to pilot the proposed arrangements but stated that there was no need to do so. This egregious example of evidence refusal was motivated by blind faith in markets and a right-wing Conservative tradition of scepticism about State-funded public services, and in 2014 seventy per cent of the Probation Service's work was handed to private companies, some with little criminal justice experience (Raynor, 2020).
After implementation in 2015, it quite quickly became clear that the private companies (known as Community Rehabilitation Companies) were in difficulty, and a series of inspections by the independent Inspectorate of Probation consistently showed them to be performing considerably worse than that part of the Service which had remained public. The companies had exaggerated what they could offer, and only a high degree of magical thinking by politicians could explain their confidence that the new arrangements would work. Before long the companies were trying to maintain profitability by making about a third of their staff redundant, leading to over-large caseloads handled by often inexperienced people. In short, although some innovations were interesting, overall the private companies damaged the services they claimed to be able to improve, leaving them in ‘a worse position than they were in before the Ministry embarked on its reforms’ (Public Accounts Committee, 2019 summary: 1). Eventually, after four years of bad results, politicians had to recognise their mistake. The decision has now been taken, by a new Justice Secretary, to terminate the contracts of the private companies and to re-unify probation as a public service. This is already happening in Wales, and England is following.
It is, of course, encouraging to see a bad policy decision reversed by considering the evidence; this does not always happen. However, the new Probation Service faces a considerable task of reconstruction and recovery, and discussions are still continuing about exactly how it should be organised and managed. Many commentators favour a greater degree of local involvement in governance with the restoration of some judicial input, not just central control by civil servants in London. In addition, practitioners and their managers need to be able to focus on the development and use of evidence-based skills, informed by what we already know about how to promote rehabilitation and desistance from offending. The coronavirus pandemic has shown that Government spending on public services is necessary and unavoidable, and there is less political clamour to shrink the State and hand over services to private enterprise. However, the post-Covid world will be short of money, and criminal justice will have to compete with other strongly justified demands for public expenditure. Perhaps the most important lesson learned from the rise and fall of British probation is that there is no magic bullet to bring about a step-change in the effectiveness of probation services: development needs to be gradual and incremental, and informed at every step by evidence and evaluation rather than ideology.
Peter Raynor
- Twenty years ago, the Probation Service in England and Wales was widely regarded as world-leading.
- Since then it has been weakened by a series of politically driven and poorly evidenced changes.
- A badly flawed and ideologically driven privatisation programme implemented in 2015 has done serious damage.
- The recent decision to end this failed programme is an opportunity to redesign better.
To understand what went wrong, and what might be done about it, we need to look a bit further back, and my starting point is the development of the Welfare State in Britain after the second World War. Probation services in Britain were well established by then, and like other welfare services, they had good prospects for further development. Max Grünhut, a German lawyer and criminologist who escaped from the Nazi regime and established the teaching of criminology at Oxford, wrote ‘Probation is the great contribution of Britain and the USA to the treatment of offenders. Its strength is due to a combination of two things, conditional suspension of punishment, and personal care and supervision by a court welfare officer. With the growing use of probation, social case work has been introduced into the administration of criminal justice … ’ (Grünhut, 1952, p. 168). A few years later Leon Radzinowicz, another refugee from Nazi domination of Europe who founded the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, wrote ‘If I were asked what was the most significant contribution made by this country [i.e. England] to the new penological theory and practice which struck root in the twentieth century … my answer would be probation’ (Radzinowicz, 1958: x). In addition to such expert endorsements, probation services were well respected and an integral part of both the developing social work profession and the criminal justice system. They were run by County-level committees which consisted mainly of magistrates, giving the main users of probation a stake in its success and a good understanding of how it worked. Chief Probation Officers played a significant role in social work's professional organisations, and expansion and development continued fairly smoothly until the 1970s. Even the proliferation of negative or discouraging research findings about the capacity of different sentences to reduce offending (for example, Martinson, 1974) did not significantly undermine probation in Britain, as it developed a new and useful mission as the provider of alternatives to custodial sentences. Governments were keen to encourage this for financial reasons. In this way the Service largely avoided the cuts in public services which were imposed by a Conservative government during the 1980s.
1. Populist punitiveness versus ‘What Works’
The tide began to turn in 1993. A Conservative Minister, hoping to achieve popularity through a display of toughness, declared to his party's annual conference that ‘prison works’, signalling an end to ‘alternatives to custody’. The Probation Service, under considerable political attack, needed a new way to present its role, and in due course its leaders (particularly the Chief Inspector of Probation, Graham Smith) launched the ‘What Works’ initiative to develop the Service's effectiveness in reducing reoffending (Underdown, 1998). By this time the ‘nothing works’ consensus of the 1970s was being replaced by new research which showed that some ways of working could have a positive impact on offenders' behaviour. Probation leaders and researchers were strongly influenced particularly by Canadian studies of effective rehabilitation (for example Andrews et al., 1990) and by British psychologists who disseminated similar ideas (such as McGuire, 1995). Money from a new Government of a different political colour enabled the establishment of ‘Pathfinder’ projects to develop and evaluate new methods, with a particular (though not exclusive) emphasis on cognitive-behavioural group programmes, and for a while at the end of the last century and the beginning of this, England and Wales were seen as global leaders in a very ambitious and comprehensive ‘What Works’ exercise. Gerhard Ploeg, a leading figure in Scandinavian probation, told the Confederation of European Probation that ‘The Probation service in England and Wales has always been in the vanguard in these developments, and many other European countries are watching it like a hawk, ready to accept that which seems to be working and to criticise that which isn't’ (Ploeg, 2003, p. 8).
Unfortunately the results of the ‘Pathfinders’ were not as good as probation's leaders hoped (Raynor, 2004). Over-rapid and top-down centralised implementation did not give probation staff time to understand and adapt: many of the new methods eventually became established, but this took at least twice as long as the three-year period allowed for the Pathfinders to prove themselves. In addition, political changes were reinforcing central Government control over probation, so that probation policy became more politicized and local influence and control, particularly by the Courts, was diminished. A new Criminal Justice Act in 1991 had redefined probation as a punishment in its own right (no longer Grünhut's ‘conditional suspension of punishment’) and in 2001 the Service became the National Probation Service, run from London. This also meant it was very visible to London-based politicians, and vulnerable to politicians of both major parties who wanted to be seen as ‘tough on crime’. In 2004 the Probation Service was merged with the larger and wealthier Prison Service to form the National Offender Management Service, which in theory might have led to better integration of offender management across the criminal justice system but in practice meant that the central administration of probation was dominated by officials who understood the needs and practices of prisons better than they understood probation.
2. Evidence versus delusion
Practice in the meantime had become dominated by risk assessment and risk management, with some officers having to spend more time on their computers than with the people they were supervising, and with a new official focus on enforcement as a priority. The evidence-base of practice remained primarily psychological, and there was less time to address social circumstances and social needs or to link people into the other services from which they could benefit. Probation officer training had been disconnected from social work training. However, the biggest changes were yet to come, as a new Conservative-led Government looked for opportunities to reduce social spending and to marketize public services by moving them into the private for-profit sector. A new Government Minister, Justice Secretary Christopher Grayling, was a particular enthusiast for privatisation and saw this as a way forward for probation. There was, in fact, no evidence to suggest that this was a good way to run community corrections in Britain, or that this might be profitable for the private companies jostling for a slice of the criminal justice pie. The Minister was encouraged to pilot the proposed arrangements but stated that there was no need to do so. This egregious example of evidence refusal was motivated by blind faith in markets and a right-wing Conservative tradition of scepticism about State-funded public services, and in 2014 seventy per cent of the Probation Service's work was handed to private companies, some with little criminal justice experience (Raynor, 2020).
After implementation in 2015, it quite quickly became clear that the private companies (known as Community Rehabilitation Companies) were in difficulty, and a series of inspections by the independent Inspectorate of Probation consistently showed them to be performing considerably worse than that part of the Service which had remained public. The companies had exaggerated what they could offer, and only a high degree of magical thinking by politicians could explain their confidence that the new arrangements would work. Before long the companies were trying to maintain profitability by making about a third of their staff redundant, leading to over-large caseloads handled by often inexperienced people. In short, although some innovations were interesting, overall the private companies damaged the services they claimed to be able to improve, leaving them in ‘a worse position than they were in before the Ministry embarked on its reforms’ (Public Accounts Committee, 2019 summary: 1). Eventually, after four years of bad results, politicians had to recognise their mistake. The decision has now been taken, by a new Justice Secretary, to terminate the contracts of the private companies and to re-unify probation as a public service. This is already happening in Wales, and England is following.
It is, of course, encouraging to see a bad policy decision reversed by considering the evidence; this does not always happen. However, the new Probation Service faces a considerable task of reconstruction and recovery, and discussions are still continuing about exactly how it should be organised and managed. Many commentators favour a greater degree of local involvement in governance with the restoration of some judicial input, not just central control by civil servants in London. In addition, practitioners and their managers need to be able to focus on the development and use of evidence-based skills, informed by what we already know about how to promote rehabilitation and desistance from offending. The coronavirus pandemic has shown that Government spending on public services is necessary and unavoidable, and there is less political clamour to shrink the State and hand over services to private enterprise. However, the post-Covid world will be short of money, and criminal justice will have to compete with other strongly justified demands for public expenditure. Perhaps the most important lesson learned from the rise and fall of British probation is that there is no magic bullet to bring about a step-change in the effectiveness of probation services: development needs to be gradual and incremental, and informed at every step by evidence and evaluation rather than ideology.
Peter Raynor
Swansea University 2020
So…..localism works…….local probation boards having oversight in their particular area……….time for the Civil service to say goodbye to probation and return us to our local roots…….i have to add for local people !
ReplyDeleteBurnham speaks constantly about the huge benefits of decentralisation and devolution, giving local authorities the autonomy and independence to focus on localised issues.
DeleteIf he really is of that mindset he cannot not see how returning probation services to a more locally specific, locally developed agency.
'Getafix
Steve Gillan nails it here. It's prison specific but the argument can be applied universally across the CJS.
Delete" Staff spend so much time managing risk, they are unable to make any positive change"
https://www.poauk.org.uk/news-events/news-room/posts/2026/september/the-sentencing-act-2026/
'Getafix
Political failure cannot be solved by emptying our prisons, argues General Secretary Steve Gillan
DeleteThe Sentencing Act 2026 has been presented as a solution to the prison capacity crisis, but those of us who have spent our working lives inside prisons know the truth. This legislation is not a strategy for justice. It is an emergency response to a crisis that has been years in the making; a crisis created not by frontline staff or by prisoners themselves, but by successive governments that have treated the prison service as a soft target for cuts, underinvestment and short-term political decision-making.
EARLY RELEASE SCHEME
The early release provisions contained within the act represent an admission of failure. Rather than ensuring there are sufficient prison places for those the courts have determined should be in custody, ministers have instead chosen to reduce the amount of time many offenders spend behind bars. That may ease population pressures in the short term, but it does nothing to address the structural problems that have brought the system to breaking point.
POA WARNINGS
For years, the POA has warned that the estate was operating beyond safe capacity. Those warnings were ignored. We have seen prisons deteriorate through a lack of investment, maintenance deferred year after year, experienced staff lost, and recruitment struggles become a permanent feature of the service. At the same time, governments continue to introduce tougher sentencing policies without delivering the prison places, staffing levels and infrastructure needed to support them. The result has been entirely predictable. Overcrowded prisons struggle to provide purposeful activity, education, training or rehabilitation. Staff spend more time managing risk and less time supporting positive change. Violence, self-harm and instability become harder to control in establishments operating under relentless pressure. None of this benefits victims, prison staff or the wider public.
WHAT IS THE ANSWER?
The solution to decades of underinvestment cannot simply be to release prisoners earlier, because there is nowhere left to house them. Justice should not be dictated by available bed spaces. Sentencing decisions should reflect the seriousness of offending, The protection of the public and the interests of justice – not the government’s inability to provide sufficient prison capacity. This situation is the consequence of years of what can fairly be described as financial vandalism against the prison service. Capital investment has too often been delayed or cancelled, maintenance budgets squeezed and the service expected to deliver more with fewer resources. Frontline staff have repeatedly been asked to shoulder increasing responsibilities while working in ageing buildings that are frequently no longer fit for the demands placed upon them.
The prison estate cannot continue to function on emergency measures. Every time capacity reaches its limit, another temporary scheme is introduced to buy time. Yet buying time is not the same as solving the problem. Without sustained investment in modern prisons, maintenance of existing establishments, staff recruitment, retention and rehabilitation programmes, the same crisis will return repeatedly.
The POA has never argued that imprisonment alone solves crime. Effective rehabilitation remains a vital part of reducing reoffending and protecting communities. However, rehabilitation requires stability, resources and time. It cannot flourish in overcrowded prisons operating under constant crisis management, nor can it succeed if policy is driven by the immediate need to free up cells.
VICTIMS OF CRIME DESERVE HONESTY
DeleteThe public also deserves honesty. The prison population has grown for complex reasons, including changes in sentencing, and the nature of offending and demographic pressures. If governments choose policies that increase the demand for prison places, they must also accept responsibility for providing the capacity required to implement those policies safely and effectively. It is neither credible nor sustainable to legislate for longer or more custodial sentences while simultaneously failing to invest in the estate needed to accommodate those sentenced by the courts.
The POA remains committed to maintaining safe, secure and decent prisons. Every day our members manage some of the most complex and challenging individuals in society, often under considerable pressure and personal risk. They deserve more than political promises made during moments of crisis. They deserve long-term planning, adequate staffing, modern facilities and resources necessary to carry out their duties professionally.
POPULATION CRISIS MUST SERVE AS A WARNING
The Sentencing Act 2026 should serve as a warning rather than a template for future policy. Emergency early release schemes may relieve immediate pressures, but they should never become a substitute for sound prison policy. The justice system requires confidence from victims, communities, staff and the judiciary alike. That confidence is weakened whenever operational necessity appears to override sentencing decisions made in open court.
If ministers are serious about restoring confidence in the criminal justice system, they must move beyond short-term fixes. They must invest properly in the prison estate, rebuild staffing resilience, maintain existing prisons to an acceptable standard and ensure future sentencing policy is matched by realistic operational planning. That requires political courage and sustained financial commitment, not simply another emergency measure whenever prisons approach capacity.
PRISON OFFICER GRADES AND OSG RESILIENCE
POA members have shown remarkable resilience despite years of financial pressure. But resilience has its limits. Staff cannot continue to compensate indefinitely for systemic underinvestment. Nor should public protection depend upon emergency release schemes introduced because governments have failed to plan adequately for the consequences of their own policies.
The country deserves a prison system that is properly resourced, professionally staffed and capable of carrying out the sentences imposed by the courts. Anything less risks undermining public confidence in justice itself. The solution is not to manage decline through ever more creative release mechanisms. The solution is to rebuild the prison service through sustained investment, strategic planning and a genuine commitment to the frontline professionals who keep our prisons and, ultimately, our communities safe.
What I find particularly striking about Peter Raynor’s paper is that even the evidence-informed What Works initiatives encountered difficulties because of the speed and centralised nature of their implementation. In other words, it wasn’t necessarily the underlying evidence that was deficient, but the assumption that a centrally designed approach could be translated into effective practice simply by requiring people to deliver it.
ReplyDeleteThat seems an extraordinarily important lesson, particularly given the current direction of probation.
There may be a perfectly reasonable evidence base for allocating supervision proportionately according to risk and need. But that doesn’t automatically validate the operating model through which those decisions are implemented.
Take OFPS. Practitioners are expected to recognise changes in circumstances, reassess risk, update the relevant information and, where appropriate, reconsider supervision packages. There are also contingency arrangements for additional contact. So professional judgement hasn’t disappeared, and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise.
But the process raises some fundamental questions.
Risk assessments are only as reliable as the information available and recorded. Predictors cannot account for everything, and practitioners frequently recognise concerns that have not yet translated into a measurable change in risk classification.
Recognising those concerns requires contact, knowledge of the individual, information from other agencies and time to exercise professional curiosity.
Yet the amount of contact available is itself influenced by the assessments that practitioners must keep updated.
There is a potential circularity here. We depend upon professional contact to obtain the information necessary for accurate risk assessment, while increasingly using those assessments to determine how much professional contact is allocated.
And when circumstances change, how much additional practitioner time is spent reassessing, recording and demonstrating the need for supervision rather than actually delivering it?
That brings me to Steve Gillan’s observation about staff spending so much time managing risk that they cannot make positive changes.
Surely helping somebody make positive changes is part of managing risk? Perhaps the real problem is that we have increasingly confused administering risk-management processes with managing risk itself.
On the question of localism, I would certainly welcome greater local accountability. But transferring management from Whitehall to local boards would achieve little if practitioners remained bound by the same centrally prescribed operating arrangements, resource constraints and performance expectations.
The issue is not simply where probation is managed, but where meaningful professional decisions can be made, and whether the organisation has sufficient confidence in those decisions to support them.
Raynor’s account of Transforming Rehabilitation should also remind us that implementing a reform is not evidence of its effectiveness. Nor should the ability of practitioners to keep an imperfect system functioning be mistaken for proof that the system is sound.
What I would really like to know is how OFPS will be evaluated beyond its intended capacity savings and compliance with the new arrangements.
Will we measure whether practitioners have sufficient time to recognise and respond to changing risk? Whether supervision is helping people make meaningful changes? Whether the model supports timely preventative intervention? And whether the administrative demands of reassessment are proportionate to the professional benefits?
Because if we are serious about evidence rather than politics, surely those are the outcomes that should determine whether the model succeeds, needs modifying or should be reconsidered altogether.
Please add OFPS to the Blog Glossary. I. presume it is unrelated to PVAC.
ReplyDeleteOur Future Probation Service - yes a bit naff isn't it?
DeleteThanks anyway - I always liked the identification of Prison Voluntary After Care Clients and my relief that the take up was low as it meant it was slightly easier to get the Social Inquiry Reports done without asking the courts for more time.
DeleteI missed this as reported by InsideTime:-
ReplyDeleteJustice Secretary Alex Norris has once again committed the Government to cut the numbers left homeless on release from prison by half. He made the latest promise in his speech to the Labour Party conference last week.
He told the conference: “We have already committed to halve the number of offenders who are homeless on their first night out of prison. Those early days are crucial to getting them back on the track to become law-abiding members of society. We know that offenders leaving prison homeless go on to reoffend at almost twice the rate of those with somewhere to live.”
He continued: “So today I can announce that we’re modernising the methods prison and probation services use to identify and secure accommodation with the creation of a single digital service that finds the right accommodation and support for people leaving prison.
“And we know, and we are talking about this week at this conference, our Prime Minister’s ambition to end rough sleeping for good is the right one, a noble one, a Labour one. And we and my department will do our bit to make it a reality.”
https://youtu.be/cOgdFbwmZXs?si=wGXd3EPnac9sAUEu
DeleteOh please please not yet another digital tool...this £700 million is fast disappearing into a black hole of digitisation, while probation at its core suffers, is dismantled and reduced to shreds of its former self.
DeleteThis means that someone released from a northern prison is offered a bedsit in Penzance !
ReplyDeleteNo room immigrants having kebab wars down here. Machete on the main high road broad daylight. Housing problems social cohesion and now immigration battles.
Delete