Justice Transcribe Special

"I never cease to be amazed at how intelligent, resourceful, educated and aware probation staff are. They demonstrate ability, curiosity, flexibility, problem solving and emotional maturity every day on this blog and yet the powers that be have nothing to say. No answers, no evidence, no willingness to engage, nothing. Silence is golden, but power is strength and authority overcomes all resistance. They intend to simply bulldozer through their vision of the future and the plebs can either trail along behind or be crushed by their juggernaut." Anon

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Justice Transcribe in Probation

AI-powered transcription and summarisation helping probation staff spend less time on admin and more time on meaningful engagement.

Justice Transcribe uses speech recognition to transcribe, summarise, and structure records from probation supervision sessions and case interactions. What began as a pilot across Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Wales is now being scaled, with over a thousand probation officers equipped to use the tool following an expansion announced by the Deputy Prime Minister.

Validated in real-world frontline settings, Justice Transcribe is reducing administrative burden, improving the quality and consistency of case records, and freeing up time for deeper engagement with people on probation.

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https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/justice-transcribe/justice-transcribe-data-7-october-2025-to-14-september-2026

"The statistics are derived from internal product analytics collected for service monitoring and improvement purposes. Data was extracted on 14th September 2026. Coverage period: 7th October 2025 to 14th September 2026.

Between 7 October 2025 and 14 September 2026, over 1,600,000 meetings were summarised using Justice Transcribe... Justice Transcribe may save around 10 minutes per meeting... Applying this assumption to 1.6 million meetings gives an indicative total of approximately 266,667 hours."

The artificial brain inside my machine says:

Justice Transcribe Overview

• Purpose: An in-house AI tool developed to automatically record, transcribe, and structure case notes from probation supervision sessions.
• Rollout: Piloted in late 2025 and scaled nationally by March 2026, equipping over a thousand probation officers.
• Impact: Surpassed 1 million uses by mid-2026, saving staff upwards of 160,000 hours and cutting administrative note-taking time by roughly 50%.
• Efficiency: Estimated to save an average of about 10 minutes per qualifying supervision meeting."

Miraculous! By 14.9.2026 the jt wunderkind has saved the work of 138 full-time equivalent staff.

"the exact multi-million pound development and contract costs remain a classified internal operational budget"

So we'll never know how much of the oft quoted £700million has been spaffed up the wall on this system... I'd suggest it will be considerably more than the £5million or so allegedly 'saved' in those assumed 260,000+ hours.

The govt has acknowledged that "The UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) are investing up to £10 million to roll out AI-powered tools and digitize manual systems to prevent accidental prisoner releases and improve operational efficiency." But that's just the cost of "rolling it out". They also say "A broader investment of £20 million for 2026/27 targets the digitisation of paper-based prison processes".

Here's the cobbler's 2025 announcement:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-action-plan-for-justice/ai-action-plan-for-justice

In 2021 over £100million was poured down the drain:

https://www.civilserviceworld.com/news/article/prison-and-probation-service-spent-almost-100m-on-case-management-system-only-to-scrap-it

"The case-management system was part of HMPPS’ Electronic Monitoring Programme, which sought to overhaul the electronic tagging system used to monitor curfews and conditions of court or prison orders."

And here's a 2025 article about govt AI spending:

https://www.thinkdigitalpartners.com/news/2025/09/04/uk-public-sectors-3-45-billion-ai-spend-but-its-still-only-a-fraction-of-all-it-contracts/

"UK public sector’s £3.45 billion AI spend – but it’s still only a fraction of all IT contracts"

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Most of the assertions you make are inaccurate and misleading. Justice Transcribe was a tool developed in-house and adapted by MoJ at what would be no appreciable cost to HMPPS. Its rollout is slow and steady with minimal disruption or fuss as far as I can tell. No waste etc. Other AI projects build upon ongoing modernisation projects so again something we might welcome. Use is careful responsible and proportionate. This type of scaremongering helps no one. There is a small friendly team in charge of this in HMPPS that you can probably contact if you need accurate details. Ive seen them present at various events. They seemed quite sensible to me and sensitive to the needs of practitioners.

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Since we seem to have attracted one of the team I point out. Yes, Justice Transcribe saves a lot of hours, but if the aim is simply to do less rather than improve probation practice, create more time in the room with clients, and bring a better probation system then all the IT development in the world isn’t going to make a difference. If pay, training, conditions remain low then what’s the point.

It’s only a matter of time before the current static response of “Justice transcribe was developed with an £8m initial investment” is put under scrutiny.

The key question to be put to MoJ is:

Please provide the original approved business case, investment case or equivalent financial assessment for Justice Transcribe, including the estimated development cost, implementation cost, annual operating/maintenance cost and total forecast cost over the life of the product.

Then separately:

Please provide actual expenditure incurred to date, including internal staff costs, external contractors/consultants, software and cloud services, AI/model/API usage, infrastructure, security/assurance, testing, implementation, training, maintenance and support.

And critically:

If expenditure relating to Justice Transcribe is recorded within the Justice AI Unit, wider digital/AI programme, or another cost centre and cannot be separately identified, please provide the expenditure for that programme/cost centre and explain how Justice Transcribe’s costs are accounted for within it.

We all know what happened the last time they “developed” IT.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8339084.stm

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Seems like the basis of an FOI. Go for it and report back the response.

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"Justice Transcribe was a tool developed in-house and adapted by MoJ at what would be no appreciable cost to HMPPS."

So why do enquiries lead to statements such as "the exact multi-million pound development and contract costs remain a classified internal operational budget"? MoJ/NOMS/HMPPS have no track record of success whatsoever:

See also:

https://modulardata.co.uk/insights/ai-in-probation-and-the-future-of-public-service-reform/

"Against the backdrop of budget constraints, rising demand and system strain, the Chancellor’s announcement of a new £3.25bn transformation fund marked a significant moment in the direction of reform. The first tranche of this fund includes investment in AI tools for the probation service—an area under growing pressure as the justice system teeters near gridlock."

That doesn't sound like homemade AI; more like the sticking plaster ego-driven heath-robinson nightmare that is oasys, or the massive wastes of public funds with c-nomis etc etc etc.

• 2004-2007: C-NOMIS was officially abandoned as a single, combined database concept in 2007 after its projected lifetime costs more than tripled from £234 million to £690 million... it was eventually scaled back into a revised NOMIS programme costing £513 million

• 2012-2021: HM Prison and Probation Service spent £98.2m on a new case-management system, only to scrap it before it was finished, the Ministry of Justice's annual report and accounts have revealed... It would have cost £30m to finish the project, on top of the £98.2m already spent, the MoJ said...

• and then there was the shameful vainglorious tr experiment which fleeced the public purse; maybe you heard about it?

Financial Breakdown of the Failure

• Additional Taxpayer Cost £467 million ; extra money spent by the MoJ to stabilize and prematurely end the contracts.
• Early Termination Fees - At least £171 million;
• the direct cost to taxpayers for scrapping the private contracts early.
• Fines Waived / Adjusted - £110 million; shortfalls owed by private Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) to the MoJ for missing targets, which the government effectively allowed them to retain to prevent complete collapse.
• Through the Gate Services - £46million; extra stabilization funding injected to help support offenders leaving custody.

Total Contract Value Paid - Up to £2.3 billion; the final amount the MoJ paid to these companies under the failed framework.

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Justice Transcribe is estimated to save probation approximately 450,000 hours a year.
That seems an awful lot of hours, but with a quarter of a million people currently on probation, that figure equates too just under 2hours extra available per person per annum. That dosent seem so much. What niggles me, is that it dosent really matter how much time can be made available to the probation officer for each client if it can't be used to advance progress.

From May.

https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/do-we-want-high-tech-future-probation-service

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“Doing less” can be either a genuine improvement or a serious mistake. If technology removes administration and gives practitioners more time with clients, that could be transformational. If it simply allows them to carry another 30 cases, it hasn’t improved probation practice; it has increased the productivity of an overstretched system.

A better model would mean fewer cases, time focused where it is needed most, and technology used to support, not replace the probation officer. Success should be measured by the quality of supervision and where the client is at in a few years time, not simply its completion or compliance.

Probation cannot do this without accessible housing, employment, finance, health and community services, without it what can supervision realistically achieve? Perhaps then recall wont become the answer to every obstacle, and probation can become a system of credible supervision and support, rather than simply enforcement. For those that don’t need the supervision, then make it voluntary from the outset.

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In a nutshell, in a nutshell!

"Probation cannot do this without accessible housing, employment, finance, health and community services, without it what can supervision realistically achieve? Perhaps then recall wont become the answer to every obstacle, and probation can become a system of credible supervision and support, rather than simply enforcement. For those that don’t need the supervision, then make it voluntary from the outset."

And just on recall here's something to ponder on. Why is it that so few people breach their licence conditions on ROTL, when they have to return to custody anyway, whilst licence breaches on probation is astronomical?

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Because the probation officer is not included in the equation. We know this, and many have called to change, renew, rehabilitate what probation is to something it could be. The irony is they think those at the top are listening, and Justice Transcribe is progress. But when low- to medium-risk cases check in with a robot probation officer, when 18–25-year-olds transfer to youth justice services, and probation becomes a UK Corrections Agency focused on high-risk cases, restrictions of liberty and recalls — while the current wave of PQiPs, POs and SPOs are conditioned for that model — we’ll all sit there saying: we didn’t see it coming.

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I use Justice Transcribe and genuinely see the benefits, but I think there’s a much more difficult issue here than how many hours it saves. Quality of the generated case note does not necessarily equal quality of the interaction it records. That’s incredibly difficult to measure.

Justice Transcribe can turn a fairly ordinary ten-minute check-in into a beautifully structured record that reads as though a substantial piece of probation work has taken place. That’s not necessarily because anything in it is false; it’s because summarisation inevitably interprets, organises and gives prominence to things that may have occupied seconds in the actual conversation.

There’s also a potential accountability problem here. What happens if there’s subsequently an SFO and that polished record is examined months later? If the generated note suggests something was meaningfully explored when in reality it was mentioned briefly, who owns that record? Presumably the practitioner does, because they approved it. We therefore need to be very careful that saving ten minutes doesn’t inadvertently create a documentary version of an appointment that is stronger than the appointment itself.

Before Justice Transcribe, writing the record also created a natural period of reflection. You thought about what had just happened, what concerned you, what didn’t quite add up and what you needed to do next. Some of that time wasn’t “administration” at all. It was professional thinking. If AI removes the writing, we need to make sure it doesn’t remove the thinking with it.

Which brings me back to workload. Technology can remove unnecessary administration and I’m all for that. But I don’t believe technology can manufacture the thing probation is desperately short of: time. Time to know somebody, time to think about them, time to follow something up, time to speak to another agency, time to notice change and time to build the sort of relationship in which somebody might actually tell you what is happening in their life.

Ultimately, fewer cases per practitioner is what creates that space. If every ten minutes Justice Transcribe saves is subsequently converted into additional workload, we’ve gained efficiency without gaining quality.

The difficulty, of course, is the staffing crisis. You cannot simply reduce caseloads when there aren’t enough experienced people to carry the work. But that doesn’t make the underlying equation disappear.

If we want better probation work, somebody somewhere has to create the time in which better probation work can actually happen. AI can help protect that time. It cannot substitute for it.

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You have it in a nutshell with “Before Justice Transcribe, writing the record also created a natural period of reflection. You thought about what had just happened, what concerned you, what didn’t quite add up and what you needed to do next. Some of that time wasn’t “administration” at all. It was professional thinking. If AI removes the writing, we need to make sure it doesn’t remove the thinking with it.” It’s the nuance that is so vitally important that only the practitioner is aware of. The practitioner knows and understands the client and will pick up on those fine, subtle differences in meaning, tone and feeling which is often realised after the session during the period of reflection. It’s about not what is said, but how it is said which machines just cannot pick up on. Cue in body language here as well. AI and machines cannot recognise this.

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You do not appreciate it replicates the work and is a reliable assesment tool. It's consistent It's cheap and it doesn't argue . See what's coming.

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Oh I appreciate exactly what you’re getting at. That’s actually what concerns me more than Justice Transcribe itself.

I like Justice Transcribe as an administrative tool. I use it and can genuinely see the benefit. I become considerably less comfortable when “it saves me time writing my record” quietly becomes “it can interpret the interaction”, then “it can identify what matters”, then “it can support assessment”, and eventually “why does the practitioner need to make all of these decisions at all?”

Consistency sounds attractive until we remember that human beings aren’t consistent. Neither is risk, motivation, trauma, relationships or desistance. Sometimes the most important thing a probation officer brings to an assessment is precisely the bit that doesn’t fit neatly into the model.

And yes, “it doesn’t argue” may be the most important part of your comment. A machine won’t say, “I know what the framework says, but something doesn’t feel right here.” It won’t push back because it knows this person. It won’t tell an SPO that the proposed plan makes no sense. And it certainly won’t tell HMPPS that its latest model is wrong.

So yes, I see what’s coming. And I think plenty of practitioners see it too. The question is whether those with the power to change direction can see it, or whether they are simply too pleased to have found another plaster to stick over a haemorrhaging Probation Service.

Justice Transcribe may save time. AI may eventually save considerably more. Some of it may genuinely make our working lives easier and I welcome that. But none of it changes the fundamental problem if every hour saved is simply swallowed by impossible caseloads, insufficient staffing and ever greater demands.

People are already on their knees. No amount of AI can change that. Technology might make an overstretched service more efficient, but it cannot give practitioners the time to build quality relationships if every efficiency is immediately converted into capacity to carry more work.

AI might help stop some of the bleeding. It isn’t going to cure the wound.

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So on the one hand we have the "official" definition that justice transcribe is there to "transcribe, summarise and structure case records" contrasted with the reality that it "can turn a fairly ordinary ten-minute check-in into a beautifully structured record that reads as though a substantial piece of probation work has taken place."

Is this not disingenuous and dishonest? If justice transcribe is there to analyse and make things "look good" then poor probation practice, where it exists and for whatever the reasons that casuse this, gets turned into something it isn't. Surely this opens the floodgates to" deliver a fairly meaningless 10 minute check in is ok provided this is made to sound more than it actually was?"

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Justice Transcribe looks great from a writing point of view but it’s terrible if your job involves reading previous contacts which mine does. It’s added bloody hours of reading unnecessary shite to my day. I really don’t need every entry to start with an explanation that ‘the PP used a pro social manner throughout the interview’. Contacts are repetitive, overlong and rarely tell you what actually happened. The first SFO with Justice Transcribe is going to be interesting indeed.

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This is so worrying and depressing at the same time! I can see it now: in the not so distant future HMIP will pick this up with recommendations for "practitioners to complete e learning on using justice transcribe" when from the very start we identified this problem!

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Just got home tonight to a job offer which I will be accepting. Notice will go in tomorrow, apologies to some my colleagues picking up my caseload, to the others you made your bed siding with the junior managers expecting them to maintain your lower caseload, no child protection, no pd, no marac, no neurodiversity, drugs or sex offenders, no seeds with trainee SPOs who are scared of their own shadows and spend half the time at home and sending constant puerile emails with checklists and name and shame, What a fantastic learning curve you will be on!

Attention the Other Place!

Today is the day that the House of Lords are due to debate the Probation Service. Wouldn't it be great if one or two of them might get to read the following distilled from contributions made yesterday:-

The probation service’s crisis stems from chronic policy churn, de-professionalisation, and leadership failures, leaving the profession vulnerable both to political whim and internal inertia. Grounding this critique in official watchdog findings, structural reforms, and workforce data transforms it into a compelling, evidence-backed argument:

• Disastrous Political Reorganization: The ideological push behind the 2014 Transforming Rehabilitation agenda split the service into the National Probation Service and 21 private Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). By 2019, HM Inspectorate of Probation (HMIP) condemned the model as "irretrievably flawed," citing dangerous systemic risks and commercial failures that forced the government to renationalize delivery in 2021 at an estimated public cost of nearly £500 million.

• Dilution of Training & Identity: The transition from university-accredited social work qualifications (such as the DipPS) to accelerated vocational frameworks—notably the Professional Qualification in Probation (PQiP)—shortened foundational pedagogy to plug staffing gaps. While reducing upfront training costs, this shift dismantled probation’s identity as an autonomous, values-driven profession, absorbing practitioners into a standardised HMPPS civil service bureaucracy dominated by prison-centric metrics.

• Workforce Exhaustion and Brain Drain: HMIP annual reports repeatedly highlight unmanageable workloads, with some officers holding caseloads exceeding 130–150% of capacity. Experienced practitioners are exiting at record rates, leaving probation dominated by inexperienced staff without the institutional memory required to challenge Whitehall directives or advocate for genuine rehabilitation.

• Internal Fragmentation and Nostalgia: The workforce remains divided between legacy practitioners clinging to a mythologized pre-1990s "advise, assist, and befriend" era - which itself lacked robust empirical evidence of reconviction reduction - and newer cohorts accustomed to tick-box risk management. This division has weakened professional bodies like Napo and allowed executive roles to be filled by generalist Whitehall managers rather than reform-minded probation leaders.

Ultimately, lamenting an imagined golden age changes nothing. Reclaiming professional credibility requires probation professionals to organize around clinical autonomy, evidence-based risk assessment, and active leadership rather than passive compliance with bureaucratic mandates.

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There is something rather telling about police leaders apparently calling for a Royal Commission because reforming one part of criminal justice in isolation doesn’t work. Quite! Perhaps somebody could send that message down Whitehall.

For years we have behaved as though prisons, probation, police, courts, housing, mental health, substance misuse services and social care are separate machines which can each be “transformed”, made more “efficient” and given their own performance measures without considering what happens to the others.

• Prisons run out of space? Release people earlier.
• Earlier release increases community supervision? Probation absorbs it.
• Probation hasn’t enough capacity? Reduce the amount of activity through OFPS.
• Need additional reassurance in the community? Add electronic monitoring, restrictions and more conditions.
• More people breach conditions or are recalled? Prisons absorb them again.

And round we go. Meanwhile each individual reform can be presented as perfectly rational because somebody has drawn the boundary around that bit of the system for which they’re responsible.

HMIP's description of probation is hardly nostalgic: too few staff, too little experience, too many cases, with systemic pressures contributing to reactive and compliance-focused practice. So perhaps the question isn’t whether probation was once a “noble career”, it's whether we still understand that probation performs a function which cannot be separated from the health of the rest of the criminal justice and social system.

You can't compensate indefinitely for inadequate prisons, inaccessible mental health provision, unstable housing, court backlogs and insufficient community services by making the probation officer more “efficient”. Eventually there is nothing left to optimise except the amount of time spent with the human being. And judging by what I’m currently learning about supervision packages, home visits, remote check-ins and “released capacity”, we appear to have reached that stage.

Perhaps a Royal Commission should start with one remarkably unfashionable question - what do we actually want probation to achieve, and what resources does achieving it require? Then you design the system around the answer, rather than deciding what resources are available and continually redesigning probation until it fits.

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I don't at all disagree with your points here, that's not my intention...but "there's nothing left to optimise except time spent with the human being" is not a position I accept...it's the position we've been forced fed to believe by OFPS training and I see no evidence shown about what other attempts were made to optimise other areas of practice. 

As others have noted elsewhere, the mountain of policy dictats and unreasonable expectations, the huge amount of time filling out a so called "assessment system" which is flawed and sucks out vast amount of resource to little benefit...the huge resource that goes into targets and monitoring meaningless data and compliance...all of this left untouched. I do think there's a case to argue that too many people are sentenced to probation and it's seen as the catch all service to respond to all crimes...lower level first or second time offenders shouldn't really be getting probation supervision without justified reasons as an exception.

OFPS and the sentencing reforms have done nothing to address any of this...all left intact...and it makes me so angry.

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[This] comment has made me reconsider something. Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question when we talk about probation capacity. OFPS seems largely to ask: given the practitioner capacity we have, how do we make the work fit inside it? Hence supervision packages, fewer routine contacts, targeted home visits, remote reporting, progression and early termination. But there is another perfectly legitimate question:

Why does so much existing practitioner capacity disappear into activity which isn’t direct probation work in the first place?

Before rationing contact with people, I’d like to see a serious audit of the bureaucracy surrounding them.

• How many practitioner hours nationally are spent completing and updating assessments?
• How many recording information which exists elsewhere?
• How many satisfying performance measures and data-quality requirements?
• How many reading policy changes, completing mandatory learning, feeding dashboards, correcting administrative errors and demonstrating that something has been done rather than actually doing it?

Put a monetary value on those hours. Then tell us which activities have demonstrable value for rehabilitation or public protection and which primarily satisfy the organisation’s need for assurance. Because if OFPS can calculate that changing supervision will “release” 25% practitioner capacity, presumably somebody can calculate how much capacity the organisation itself consumes.

And the commenter raises an even more awkward question: why is probation expected to supervise such an enormous range of people in the first place? Perhaps genuinely low-risk first or second-time offenders with no identified rehabilitative need don’t require a diluted version of probation. Perhaps they require a proportionate sentence which doesn’t involve ongoing probation supervision at all. That isn’t being soft on offending. It’s asking what probation is actually for.

There is something backwards about extending community supervision as the solution to prison overcrowding and then reducing the substance of supervision because probation cannot absorb the resulting numbers. Reduce unnecessary bureaucracy. Decide who actually requires probation intervention. Resource properly the supervision of those who do.

Only after doing those things would I be persuaded that the remaining efficiency has to come from reducing human contact. Otherwise “efficiency” risks meaning something much simpler - everything surrounding the practitioner remains intact; the practitioner simply gets less time to practise.

Once a Noble Career

We are trying to fix the unfixable here. Probation is an impossible job and people who have been here years are looking through rose tinted glasses. It's always been a tainted career, most people don't even know we exist. And the biggest question, why are more people committing crime, why are more people up in court? Nobody wants to dig deep into corrupt governments, cost of living, decline in mental health provisions. Rather we wallow in a world of blame game, poor training, poor managers, never any questions on the individuals who cause this initial harm. Very naive and limited thinking.

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No, I think the naive and limited thinking is with you and those like you. The organisation itself uses the blame game, we see that with SFO and performance approaches. It is no secret that there is poor training, even the universities providing PQIP training cannot criticise the Ministry. The problem of inexperienced and poor managers is widely documented by HMIP. Probation historically was a noble career, not a tainted career. And the focus was actually not on stopping people committing crime, but stopping THE SAME people committing crime. Speak to anyone in probation that understands this differentiation and they’ll tell you the impact of cost of living, decline in mental health provisions, problems with access to social provision, and whatever else.

So there are no rose tinted glasses, and that term is used by managers to dismiss the opinions of those with experience and length of service. It’s an excuse to ignore the past and the embrace the current state of affairs without question.

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“Most of the staff like the above now.” 

Perhaps some do. But I think there’s a more uncomfortable question: how would you know you’ve lost professional autonomy if you’ve never experienced it? f your entire probation career has taken place within OASys, performance measures, prescribed processes, centrally designed practice models, mandatory e-learning and increasingly structured supervision, that isn’t managerialism intruding into probation practice. To you, that is probation practice. And I don’t mean that as criticism of newer staff. Quite the opposite. People cannot miss a professional culture they were never given the opportunity to inherit. That’s why the loss of experienced practitioners matters beyond simple staffing numbers. When they leave, we don’t merely lose somebody capable of carrying a caseload. We lose memory of how the job can be done differently.

Perhaps the greatest success of managerialism isn’t persuading practitioners to accept less autonomy. It’s eventually producing generations of practitioners who don’t recognise autonomy as something they’re supposed to possess. That also makes all the current talk about “professionalisation” rather interesting.

You can create registers, standards, CPD requirements and eventually statutory regulation. But a profession isn’t simply a workforce whose members are individually regulated. A profession also possesses a body of knowledge, an ethical identity and some meaningful authority over its own practice. Otherwise we’re in danger of creating something rather peculiar:

professionally accountable individuals working in a profession that no longer controls its profession.

And perhaps that’s why the argument about probation’s purpose matters more than nostalgia for “advise, assist and befriend”. If we can’t collectively articulate what good probation is, beyond completing the required processes, managing the allocated contacts, satisfying the assessment framework and demonstrating compliance, then somebody at the centre will continue defining it for us. They have plenty of modules available to explain it afterwards.

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Probation celebrated its centenary in 2007 and at that time from memory every service was a gold standard…….then Chris Grayling, the split, the CRC's managing medium risk cases that were high risk but which they were not allowed to increase to high, every CPO offered three years protected salary to push the split, the reunification, the abandonment of critical thinking, the Mickey Mouse training (sorry Disney), the new breed of duplicitous CPOs kowtowing to ministers…….from gold standard to the brink of collapse in a generation………makes you think what will come next……

Remote Check-in

News of this coupled with rapid advances in AI means we can cut out the human element completely rather quicker than previously thought! 

MoJ: Check-In with your probation officer (E-Supervision)

AWS Rekognition is used within the Check-In with your probation officer service to support identity verification by performing facial comparison between user-submitted video and a photo held on file.

2.1 - Detailed description

"The Check-In with your probation officer (E-Supervision) service uses AWS Rekognition to support identity verification for individuals on probation completing remote check-ins. The tool is integrated into a digital service that allows users to submit a short video as part of their check-in process.

From this submission, a still image is captured and compared against a reference image held on record. AWS Rekognition performs facial comparison and generates a similarity score indicating the likelihood that the images belong to the same individual. This output is used to support practitioners in assessing whether the correct person is completing the check-in.

The tool is intended for use by probation practitioners and service staff responsible for managing and monitoring compliance with supervision requirements. It is designed to operate as a decision-support tool and does not make autonomous decisions. Practitioners review the output alongside other available information and retain responsibility for the final determination.

The scope of the tool is limited to identity verification within the Check-In with your probation officer service. It is not used for broader surveillance, profiling, or automated enforcement decisions.

The performance of the tool may be affected by factors such as image quality, lighting conditions, and camera positioning. As with many facial recognition technologies, there may be variations in accuracy across different demographic groups. Where results are uncertain or confidence scores are low, additional checks or manual review are required."

2.2 - Benefits

The use of AWS Rekognition within the Check-In with your probation officer service supports the Ministry of Justice’s ambition to deliver more flexible, digital-first public services. It enables individuals on probation to complete check-ins remotely, providing greater accessibility and convenience while maintaining appropriate safeguards.

The tool supports practitioners by providing an additional source of information to help verify identity, contributing to more efficient and consistent decision-making. It also reduces reliance on in-person appointments, helping to optimise resource use and support service scalability.

2.3 - Previous process

Prior to the introduction of this tool, identity verification was conducted through in-person appointments or manual checks carried out by practitioners.

2.4 - Alternatives considered

A non-algorithmic alternative was considered to continue relying on in-person, face-to-face appointments for identity verification, without introducing the Check-In with your probation officer service. While this approach reduces reliance on automated tools, it is more resource-intensive, less flexible for service users, and limits the ability to deliver check-ins remotely at scale.

Algorithmic alternatives included other facial recognition and identity verification providers. These tools offer capabilities such as liveness detection and spoofing protection. AWS Rekognition was selected as it provides facial comparison capabilities, alongside features such as liveness detection and spoofing protection, and integrates effectively with existing infrastructure. It also allows similarity scoring to support human decision-making.

The chosen approach balances operational efficiency, scalability, and system integration, while maintaining practitioner oversight in final decisions.

Corporate Moral Nihilism

As the clock ticks on my probation career (not a social worker qualified probation officer) I grow ever more despondent about what legacy I will leave those following me. I look at the quality of PSR’s, parole reports, OAsys, sentence plans (by the way the new ones are a complete joke) and realise that the professional standards that we previously adhered to are sinking fast. 

There is a lack of industry and focus on the work and I am sick of colleagues who will not go try their best to speak with a punter before they recall him. Recall bingo seems to be the new game now closely followed by enforcement bagatelle. Why? Because we are not allowed to develop our own profession it is all done by external people, some of the academics have made a meal ticket out of probation theories, the four pillars for instance! Academics sitting in their universities away from the real world dreaming up projects to get funding and then sell it to those at the top with no knowledge and then it is made mandatory learning so that if something goes wrong you can be hung out to dry. 

An SFO occurs and watch everyone from SPO up retreat into their offices and leave the officer to deal with the SFO team those with largely limited experience of punters because they did not really want an active career in offender management. It is always the PO’s fault, not the lack of management oversight because they do not have the professional knowledge and experience to provide it, just to bully weaker staff and then try to manage those who stand up to them out of the team or service. 

In a few years everyone will be in Serco uniforms, with welcome to probation badges on, ‘Hi, my name is Bruce’ and the punter issued with yellow and red cards to display during sessions prescribed by AI. You can only really effectively assess someone’s risk by sitting with them discussing their behaviour and linking in with other organisations. Tick box probation does not deliver. Last one out switch the lights out.

Anon

*****
It astounds me that, despite the knowledge, talent, experience and expertise that exists within probation, the profession and its practices are so consistently designed and shaped by people who have very little to do with the actual practice of probation.

Imagine law, social work or even the police accepting this as normal. Imagine people who had never qualified as lawyers or social workers, or who had never walked the beat, routinely telling those professions how they should practice and introducing the latest “new” ways of doing their jobs.

Yet probation seems to lap it up. We have become remarkably accepting of being told how to do our own job by people who have never actually done it. This isn’t simply a consequence of the modern Civil Service structure or the Civil Service Code. It was happening long before either existed in their current form. The deeper problem is that probation has repeatedly surrendered professional authority over its own practice.

For a profession with a 100 year history and such a wealth of frontline knowledge and expertise, that should be a far more uncomfortable truth than it appears to be.

Anon

*****
Can anyone think of another 'profession' which, having spent decades developing an ethos & core strategy to successfully "advise, assist & befriend" the most reviled in our communities, meekly & naiively surrendered itself to the whims of corporate moral nihilism?

And so here we are; stripped of any & all capacity to achieve meaningful outcomes, slaves to the unrealistic diktats of 'the centre', pawns to be sacrificed for the benefit of the kings & queens who hide in the shadows.

Once we've set aside our bruised egos & broken hearts, we need to accept that there are real people who have truly lost something vital as a result of this shameful, farcical dismantling of the only organisation that addressed the unspoken distaste for the criminal classes.

Who? Have we forgotten already?

Those sent by the courts to be assisted by the probation service. Yep, the punters, clients, cases, pops, old lags, crims, offenders, etc etc.

I'm certain the courts (for the most part) really believe that sentencing someone to be supervised by the probation service will involve them receiving assistance in addressing the reasons for the behaviour/s leading to an appearance in court.

I'm equally certain that the courts are complicit in being gravely misled. For decades successive governments of this country have shown no inclination to facilitate true 'rehabilitation';, despite a vague nod in the .gov.uk declaration:

"The Probation Service is a statutory criminal justice service that supervises offenders serving community sentences or released into the community from prison.... it protects the public, assesses risks, works to reduce reoffending & offers help and information to victims of crime."

Anon

--oo00oo--

Despite dire current warnings that AI will almost certainly supplant human life, but whilst we're still at the 'party trick' stage, I thought I'd ask it about 'corporate moral nihilism', and this is what it produced:- 

The concept of corporate moral nihilism within the criminal justice system refers to an organizational ethos where intrinsic values—such as justice, human dignity, and rehabilitation—are discarded in favor of efficiency, market metrics, and profitability. In probation services, particularly highlighted by the UK’s experimental privatization era, this creates what criminologists call a "moral void." Instead of treating rehabilitation as a human enterprise, the system treats it as a series of risk-managed transactions. 

Evidence of this phenomenon in probation manifests across three primary dimensions:

1. The Marketization of Human Transformation

The most explicit evidence of moral nihilism occurred during the UK's "Transforming Rehabilitation" (TR) reforms introduced in 2014. This policy split the probation service, handing 70% of low-to-medium risk cases over to private Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) operating on a "payment-by-results" model. 

Values as Liabilities: The traditional, relationship-based ethos of probation—historically defined as to "advise, assist, and befriend"—was structurally incompatible with commercial targets.

Perverse Financial Incentives: Private providers were incentivized to maximize profit margins, leading to systemic corner-cutting. The National Audit Office and Chief Inspector of Probation eventually labeled the experiment "irredeemably flawed," noting that business imperatives routinely trumped public safety and genuine care.

2. The Rise of "Tick-Box" Managerialism

Corporate moral nihilism shifts the focus from substantive ethics (doing what is right for the individual and community) to formal compliance (doing what protects the institution on paper). 

Abstracting the Individual: People on probation are reduced to risk algorithms and data points. Criminological research shows that a pervasive "tick-box" culture forces practitioners to focus on technical compliance over meaningful engagement. 

Automated Surveillance: Under corporate structures, meaningful face-to-face intervention was frequently replaced by rapid, automated telephone check-ins. This reduced the deeply complex process of desistance from crime to a mere administrative reporting requirement.

Meaningless Labour: Punitive community service under outsourced contracts often degenerated into tasks devoid of rehabilitative value, such as moving mud back and forth in graveyards purely to satisfy contract hours.

3. Moral Injury and Staff Burnout

When an organization operates in a moral vacuum, the burden of that emptiness falls heavily onto the frontline staff.

Compromised Professionalism: Studies on the privatization era revealed that over a third of probation officers admitted to regularly cutting corners and lowering professional standards just to meet corporate targets. 

The Care vs. Control Conflict: Forcing vocationally driven staff to act as low-cost monitors rather than agents of change creates systemic moral injury. Practitioners report extreme psychological distress because the systemic pressure to process high volumes of cases prevents them from providing the safe, ethical care required to actually reduce reoffending.

The corporate nihilist framework views these failures not as ethical disasters, but as mismanaged logistical parameters. While the UK fully reunified and returned probation to public control in 2021 to correct this "shambles," the lingering legacy of understaffing, target-driven strain, and administrative detachment remains a central critique of modern penal bureaucracy. (my emphasis)

Duck and Cover

Oh deary deary me, what a pickle we're all in.

In prehistoric times probation officer training entry criteria in England and Wales were strictly governed under a social work framework. To qualify as a probation officer, applicants had to gain entry into a higher education program recognized by the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW) to obtain the Certificate of Qualification in Social Work (CQSW), which included a specialised probation option. Undergraduate applicants needed standard university matriculation requirements (typically 2 to 3 A-Levels or equivalent) to enter a 3- or 4-year undergraduate degree combining a social science discipline with the CQSW. Graduates holding a relevant first degree (such as Sociology, Psychology, or Law) could apply for an accelerated 2-year postgraduate CQSW program. Mature applicants without a degree could apply for a 2-year non-graduate CQSW diploma if they could demonstrate the academic capacity to cope with higher education.

But... Academic qualifications alone were insufficient. Candidates were strictly vetted on their practical experience in social care, voluntary work, or the criminal justice sector.

While applicants were generally required to be at least 20 or 21 years old at the start of training, the Home Office actively encouraged mature applicants, frequently recruiting individuals in their late 20s or 30s who brought broader life experience to the role.

Tuition was funded and candidates would receive a salary/stipend while training. Candidates had to pass a competitive selection process managed by the Home Office, who funded the sponsorship. To this end selection panels evaluated candidates for specific core character traits, including personal resilience, strong communication skills, emotional maturity, and a core belief in rehabilitation. Background checks were also mandatory to ensure suitability for working within the court system.

The artifical thing inside my machine provided the following analysis of that old dinosaur shit:

Training Structure and Context

• Social Work Foundation: Training was firmly rooted in social work discipline and casework models rather than standalone criminal justice curricula.
• Core Philosophy: Officers were trained under the rehabilitative tradition to "advise, assist, and befriend," focusing on personal relationships and domestic/community context.
• Court Preparation: Trainees learned how to interview offenders and compile social background reports (pre-sentence assessments) to guide judicial sentencing.

Sounds to me like them dinosaurs were pretty smart in many ways; but sadly not smart enough to stop the psychobullies in Whitehall nuking the lot & issuing the new Duck & Cover series of online training.

For the uninitiated, "Duck and Cover" is the official method of personal protection against the effects of pretty much, including a nuclear explosion:

"A log, a large rock, or any depression in the earth's surface provides some protection. Close eyes. Remain facedown until the blast wave passes and debris stops falling. Stay calm, check for injury, check for equipment damage, and prepare to continue the mission."

Anon 

*****

So when I started in probation over 10 years ago sitting in on two extremely rudimentary supervision appointments with 2 different officers and 2 different cases was sufficient training for me to go and manage a caseload of 30 cases of all different personalities and offences, ages etc etc. 

In my 15 month training whilst managing 30 cases I had 2 day motivational interviewing training, 3 day DV training, 4 day sex offender training and that's it and then could manage the most complex cases. Now all these years later they are finally telling staff how they should talk to offenders, how they should respond,.. Its just a joke, an absolute joke!!! 

I had imagined when I started my training I would be sitting in watching a qualified officer do intensive work with offenders with a range of personality types, learning styles and that I wouldn't even be allowed to speak to an offender for at least a year. Nope. 2 basic 15 minute supervision appts then off you go.. Basically you're qualified..no one gave a shit! No one gives a shit now - this training is all legal back covering whilst they destroy what's left of the smoking turd that is the probation Service in the uk.

Anon

That New Training

OFPS online training knowledge check question.
Q. What does EM stand for?
A. Electronic Monitoring!

I sh*t you not, how condescending are the ‘experts’ compiling this training for POs with Bachelor’s Degrees, MSc’s and other post graduate qualifications. Has it come to this because the probation qualifications have lost credibility, training reduced to 15 months, struggling to recruit educated individuals with lived experience? Then again it might be just so those further up the management chain can pass the online modules after all they have had their crayons removed. 

Let’s see what things look like in October, I have enough in my pension pots to retire and leave all this behind but I still want to get a few through their licenses and settled because I still have the positive probation skill set developed over several years, online training cannot teach you experience.

Anon

*****

I’m currently working my way through the OFPS mandatory learning and can confirm that the promised 25% increase in practitioner capacity is going extremely well. So far I have learned that home visits help us understand people’s circumstances, that we should consider risk when deciding whether to see someone, and that if somebody stops engaging we should apparently continue trying to engage them.

I’ve now completed the Supervision Packages module. I still have several more to go. At this rate I’m expecting the final module to explain that offending is generally discouraged.

The humour wears rather thin though, because underneath the painfully simplistic presentation are significant changes to how probation supervision actually operates: capped contacts, restricted home visits, contingency arrangements, new rules about when additional contact can take place and systems for monitoring how practitioners use them.

Those changes deserve proper professional discussion. What happens when the person in front of you doesn’t fit neatly into the model? When risk is changing but not sufficiently to satisfy a prescribed threshold? When professional judgement tells you more contact is necessary? And, inevitably, when something subsequently goes seriously wrong, whose judgement will be examined?

Apparently qualified practitioners can be trusted to manage serious risk, safeguarding, domestic abuse, complex offending and decisions which may have enormous consequences for the public — but first we must click through several screens explaining the purpose of a home visit.

I’m exhausted by it, frankly. Not because professional development is unnecessary, but because this isn’t professional development. It is information transfer dressed up as training, consuming the very practitioner capacity OFPS is supposedly designed to release.

Perhaps when I finally reach the end there’ll be a certificate confirming that I am now competent to press “Continue”. I’ll treasure it.

Anon

*****
Where has the real probation uplift training gone? Do you remember sitting in a room with 12 other people, catching up about what was going on in the area and then having knowledgeable colleagues delivering proper training, ice breakers, break out rooms, role play meaningful discussion and feedback. 

Now it is online training for dummies, that is exactly what the hierarchy think of us, let’s belittle them and not only give them massive caseloads, stress and anxiety for many, but give them the Peppa Pig Production of OFPS, you know the one that teaches experienced practitioners how to suck eggs but also at the same time ‘develop’ the ‘new’ workforce, automatons who do everything by the book, tick all the boxes, have never used professional curiosity, identified disguised compliance or exercised professional judgement without permission of their SPO and spend hours on RMP’s fearing the contact with offenders but talk a good plan and then go off and leave it to the old heads with resilience in abundance and the ability to develop professional meaningful relationships that actually matter.

The probation service that I knew is dead, the new one will not be able to cope with our communities which are declining into serious unlawfulness where the balaclava and [Surron?] rule!

Anon

Ownership

Having worked as a probation officer for over 25 years, the most significant change I've witnessed isn't just in caseload volume — it's in ownership. Case management used to mean exactly that: we held the case, from initial contact through to the end of licence or order, coordinating referrals and services but retaining responsibility for the plan and the outcome. That model has eroded. Several structural shifts help explain why:

Fragmentation of the system. Since the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms and the subsequent 2021 reunification of the National Probation Service, practitioners have had to work across a patchwork of prison, community, and third-party interfaces that were never fully reintegrated. A case now passes through multiple institutional hand-offs — prison offender management units, community rehabilitation partners, housing, substance misuse services — each with their own reporting lines and none with clear overall accountability for the case as a whole.

Audit and compliance culture. The rise of centralised risk-management frameworks (MAPPA, OASys, structured risk assessments) has embedded a compliance layer over practice. HM Inspectorate of Probation reports have repeatedly flagged that administrative and recording burdens are consuming time that should be spent on direct engagement with people on probation. The result is that "doing the job well" is increasingly measured by paperwork completion and timeliness rather than by engagement quality or risk reduction outcomes.

Digital case management systems. Tools like nDelius were intended to streamline processes, but in practice they've generated their own compliance metrics — character counts in case notes, mandatory field completion, appointment-loading deadlines — that function as a parallel workload independent of the actual casework. Bloody Dashboards!

Asymmetric accountability. Perhaps most tellingly, the escalation culture runs one direction. A probation officer who is late on a task/Kpi faces automatic escalation to their line manager, then upward through the hierarchy. But there is no equivalent mechanism for probation to hold external agencies — EMS,housing, drug and alcohol services, prisons, police, social services etc — to the same standard when they fail to respond. This structural imbalance means us Officers absorb delay and dysfunction from across the system without the authority to push back.

Staff attrition figures — the Probation Service has struggled for years with vacancy rates and retention, according to its own workforce data and repeated union reporting — are, I'd argue, a direct consequence of this shift. It's not that the job became harder in a clinical sense; it's that practitioners lost ownership of the thing that made the job meaningful, while absorbing all of the accountability for a system they don't control.

******
This really resonates, particularly the point about ownership. Perhaps that’s why I reacted so strongly to the OFPS training in the first place. Taken in isolation, patronising e-learning is merely irritating. Put it alongside everything else that has happened to probation and it starts to look symptomatic of something much bigger.

• We increasingly don’t do things. We refer.
• We increasingly don’t own the intervention. Somebody else delivers it.
• We increasingly don’t determine the structure of supervision. A framework does.
• We increasingly don’t decide what constitutes sufficient work. A package, process, dashboard or target tells us.

Yet somehow, when the whole fragmented arrangement fails, responsibility has an extraordinary ability to travel back through all those interfaces and land on the desk of one probation officer. That’s the bit I find increasingly absurd.

If I’m going to carry professional accountability for complex risk, then treat me as a professional capable of exercising judgement about it. Don’t simultaneously remove ownership, prescribe practice, outsource interventions, give me Playschool-level mandatory training and then expect PhD-level foresight when something goes catastrophically wrong.

And the point above about the knowledge already sitting within probation is important too. We have practitioners with decades of operational experience, postgraduate qualifications and enormous accumulated knowledge of risk, rehabilitation and multi-agency working.

Were they meaningfully involved in designing OFPS? Were frontline practitioners presented with the evidence, invited to challenge the assumptions and allowed to shape the model? Were experienced POs asked what actually helps them manage complex cases? Because professional development could look completely different.

Give experienced practitioners difficult anonymised cases. Put six POs in a room. Give them incomplete and conflicting information. Ask them what they would do. Let them disagree. Introduce new information halfway through. Challenge their decisions. Bring in research. Bring in an experienced SPO. Debate recall versus continued management. Examine what happened afterwards without pretending hindsight was foresight. 

That is training for professional judgement. Clicking through cartoons until the system records “complete” isn’t. And perhaps we’ve arrived at the strangest contradiction of all:

Probation officers appear to have progressively less ownership of the work, while retaining potentially enormous personal accountability for its outcome.

If Registered Probation Officer status is going to mean anything, that imbalance needs addressing. Otherwise we’re not professionalising probation. We’re professionalising the blame.

Playschool Probation

Some critics and commentators have referred to the Our Future Probation Service (OFPS) programme as "Our Futile Probation Service."

*****
Our Future Probation Service training materials and online learning is academically demeaning. I have never been so embarrassed by the training they are pushing out, it is BBC bite size for probation. The sentence plans have no professionalism about them and I have had enough. It is Playschool Probation.Tomorrow my papers are going in, don’t need to be treated so abysmally as we are currently, registered probation officer status is a joke, remuneration package poor and there are less stressful options out there.

*****
I took a look at the OFPS training, came across the first question and demeaning doesn’t do it. I completely understand the anger and desire to leave. If you can -run for the hills. My motivation is so low I think I am going to have to get a sharp spade and dig down for a long time to find it. How on earth did I arrive at this soulless place after 30+years, I am embarrassed to be a Probation Officer. No energy or interest to work at all.

******
Mandatory training! Mandatory this, mandatory that, the probation service are a purveyor of online training aimed at the lower end of the market. I heard the moans and groans in the office today as we were directed to take an hour out to start it! I was so embarrassed to be expected to complete this. The cartoon character with a blue shirt and Captain Custer beard, the dieversity pictures, the condoning attitude of the presenter. The directorate for training, the directorate for this, that and the other, there is only one directorate and that is the one for the buffoons sanctioning this training, just shows the lack of respect for operational staff, Bob the Probation Officer, can he fix it? can he boll**ks. RIP probation. I think I will be moving on now this organisation is a joke.

*****

It is a bit much to call this new training……’training’ ….more like an insurance policy for the centre……they know it will be despised yet they will persist with it as it will be used against you in a future SFO……..as in ‘ did you complete your mandatory training’?

Petitions Decide Government Policy

Well, it hasn't taken long for a new PM that knows nothing about criminal justice to decide the best way to proceed is to let the media, victims and public petitions decide policy rather than Parliament:-

Prime Minister blocks hundreds more criminals from sentencing changes  

Unlawful killing and historic child sex offences will be blocked from upcoming changes to prison sentences after the Prime Minister ordered more serious offenders to be kept behind bars for longer.  

•  Prime Minister blocks manslaughter, death by drunk or dangerous driving and historic child sex offences from sentencing changes  
• Builds on action to keep those in prison for rape, child sex or grooming offences behind bars
• Victims of domestic violence will be better protected from perpetrators, with record numbers of offenders set to leave prison tagged and the new restriction zones put in place, some as little as a few miles wide, for some sexual and violent offenders
• The government will deport thousands of foreign criminals and bring the injustice of IPP sentences to an end during this Parliament 

Unlawful killing and historic child sex offences will be blocked from upcoming changes to prison sentences after the Prime Minister ordered more serious offenders to be kept behind bars for longer. 

The Prime Minister’s intervention will mean offenders in prison for killing an emergency worker in the line of duty will not be released any earlier. Historic grooming offences, all forms of manslaughter, death by dangerous driving and causing or allowing the death of a child will also be barred from the changes to the prison sentences.

This builds on the action already taken by the Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor to stop anyone in prison for rape, serious child sexual offences and grooming from being released earlier. Murderers or anyone deemed the most dangerous by a court and handed a life or extended sentence were already blocked from seeing any reduction to their sentence and will stay locked up until they go before a Parole Board.

As a result of these changes today, hundreds more victims will no longer face the anxiety of seeing their offender coming out sooner than they were expecting.

Since coming into office, the Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor have made significant changes to the plans they inherited. They want to go even further, but cannot do so without risking the entire justice system collapsing. This would mean the police would be unable to make arrests, the courts would stop sending criminals to jail and criminals would be left unchecked on our streets.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said:  

I know how strongly people feel about this issue. I understand the concern and anger because I share it. That’s why I took action during my first weeks as Prime Minister to block some of the very worst in society being released before they should. We moved quickly to block vile criminals who commit rape, sexually abuse children and groom vulnerable young people.

But I always said I wanted to do more. We will now not only be keeping offenders serving time for indecent assault locked up, but also those in prison for manslaughter and death by dangerous driving. This means that the awful criminals responsible for the killing of PC Andrew Harper will not have their sentence shortened.

The truth is I wanted to go even further. But I’ve pushed the system to the very limits of what’s possible without risking the prison system collapsing within months, putting the public at enormous risk. To protect victims, we will be introducing the toughest ever supervision measures for offenders, which effectively mean that someone’s sentence will not end when they leave prison. This includes tagging offenders and, for the very first time ever, putting restriction zones in place to stop offenders getting anywhere near their victims.

The Prime Minister has also announced that he will end the injustice of Imprisonment for Public Protection sentences this Parliament, meaning people will no longer be trapped indefinitely under a sentence abolished more than a decade ago.

This decision recognises how deeply unjust it is that some offenders who have been locked up for nearly twenty years remain in prison, despite serving their sentence many times over, whereas many serious criminals convicted in recent years could have their jail time cut. While work on this will begin immediately, and on a cross-party basis, it will take time to get this right and balance fairness with public safety.

This is just one part of the government’s plan for a fairer justice system, looking at how some people can be punished more effectively outside prison – freeing up cells for those who pose the greatest risk to the public.  

This will include considering how to safely reduce the number of and young offenders and women in custody, in particular those who are pregnant or have young children.

Powers will also be implemented early next year to deport some foreign criminals immediately after sentencing, blocking them from ever returning to the country, while keeping those in prison for the most serious crimes locked up for a substantial period before they are removed.

Justice Secretary Alex Norris said:  

The Prime Minister and I have rightly looked again at these reforms and we are clear that people responsible for taking a life, or for appalling crimes against children, should be kept behind bars for longer.    

But protecting the public also means fixing the prison system for good. We will build the cells we need, put offenders under much tougher controls when they leave prison and end the historic injustice of IPP sentences.   

This is a government running towards problems and not shying away from the tough decisions needed to build a justice system that is firm, fair and protects the public.

The Prime Minister and Lord Chancellor have also insisted that victims must remain at the centre of the justice system, with survivors of domestic abuse seeing offenders put under some of the toughest restrictions to date.

This includes a presumption that all prison leavers will be tagged and imposing possible bans on pubs and public events.

Perpetrators could also be confined to a specific area – some just a few miles wide – giving victims greater freedom to live their lives. In a world first, new ‘restriction zones’, which have been directly shaped by the experiences and campaigning of victims, will limit the movement of some sexual and violent offenders, with victims having a say in how zones are drawn up.

Victims advocates Hetti Barkworth-Nanton CBE, chair of Refuge, Frank Mullane MBE, CEO of Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse, and Jo Early, chief executive of Support after Murder and Manslaughter, said:

We welcome the Prime Minister’s decision to exclude all manslaughter cases from the early release scheme.

The original sentence lengths for these offences were, in part, intended to protect the public. The problem of prison capacity does not alter that underlying need for public protection. Therefore, making manslaughter offenders eligible for early release would risk undermining a key purpose of their sentences and could represent a significant compromise to public protection. This also re-assures families bereaved by homicide that they are not being asked to trade justice so prison overcrowding can be resolved.

The government inherited a prison system on the brink of collapse with fewer than 100 spaces left in the summer of 2024. 

A lack of investment in the prison estate with just 500 net places added for over a decade has led to a situation where adult male prisons are now at 98% capacity. That is why this government is taking decisive action to fix the broken prison system for good.  

Under this government, more than 3,200 prison places have already been built, with 14,000 expected by 2031 under the largest prison build expansion since the Victorian era.

The Sentencing Act will restore order to the prison system and make sure we have cells available for dangerous criminals. Alongside record prison building, the reforms will put prisons on a sustainable footing and end the cycle of emergency release measures used before July 2024 when prisons repeatedly came close to running out of space.