Abstract
For those in the United Kingdom hoping for a change in political direction the outcome of the May 2015 election will no doubt have come as a bitter disappointment with the prospect of a further five years of austerity-based policies, framed by neo-liberal ideology, disproportionately impacting on the poorest and those most in need in society. During the past five years, as part of the project to create a new settlement between the state and its citizens, the protection of capital has been aggressively promoted at the expense of workers’ rights, equality legislation and the proliferation of ‘zero-hour’ contracts. Allied to this has been what Newman and Clarke term ‘the economisation of the social realm’ (Newman and Clarke, 2013: 3). Thereby; ‘turning citizens into consumers, enmeshing civic and not-for-profit organisations in a web of contractual relationships, and establishing economic calculations as the ultimate measure of value’ (Newman and Clarke, 2013: 3). In criminal justice terms this has meant ‘ever-increasing prison populations, increased criminalization and the blurring of the boundaries between penal and welfarist measures’ (Bell, 2014: 490).
The absence of law and order issues in the election debates was therefore somewhat surprising, especially given the extent of the Coalition Government’s attempts to redesign and re-engineer the criminal justice system within its broader project to commodify, marketize and managerialize state provision in England and Wales. In a fascinating commentary on the coalition years, Richard Garside and Matt Ford summarize them as being a ‘very dynamic, often unpredictable, sometimes confusing and at times bemusing time of change’ (Garside and Ford, 2015: 30). This is particularly apt in relation to probation, which of all the criminal justice agencies has perhaps most felt the brunt of the government’s obsession with placing market forces at the centre of criminal justice policy. What began with a promise to reduce the prison population and break the cycle of reoffending ended with the break-up of probation as an integrated public service. As Garside and Ford note; ‘having first sought to adapt the market to existing probation structures, the government found the solution in adapting probation to suit the market’ (Garside and Ford, 2015: 23). In a similar vein, Steve Collett and myself have argued that the move towards the privatization of probation has in turn exposed the centre’s lack of understanding amongst other things, the complex world of local provision and accountability, partnership work, perverse commissioning incentives, the volatile nature of offender risk and ultimately the cultural strengths of probation as an organization and the professionalism of its staff (Burke and Collett, 2015).
As a supporter of capital punishment, the appointment of Michael Gove as the new Justice Secretary would not immediately suggest that the prospects of a more progressive turn in law and order policies will be enhanced under the newly-elected Conservative administration. As Secretary of State for Education he displayed the same ideological zeal as Chris Grayling, his predecessor at the Ministry of Justice. His approach to reform, including attempts to foist his own personal world view on the national curriculum and his enthusiastic promotion of ‘free’ schools, alienated many of those within the teaching profession. However, he is likely to be a more pragmatic Justice Secretary than his predecessor, who often appeared unable to see beyond his own personal political ambitions. The decision to abandon plans to build a super-size ‘secure college’ for teenage prisoners could perhaps be seen as indicative of a different approach, albeit no doubt mainly driven by financial considerations. His first major speech as Justice Secretary also suggests a subtle change in direction. His acknowledgement that there is a ‘two nation justice system’ (quoted in Bowcott, 2015) that favours the wealthy could be perceived as a brave attempt to open up debates regarding whose interests the justice system serves.
There is no doubt that that the new Justice Secretary faces many challenges over the next five years. Foremost amongst these is the need to restore confidence among criminal justice professionals. The previous administration was marked by a series of confrontations with criminal justice professionals, whether it was with the police over pay and conditions following the Winsor Review (Winsor, 2011), or the judiciary over cuts to legal aid. All too often it seemed that the government tended to place more trust in highly paid external consultants, and its own political instincts and opportunism, rather than seeking the views of those professionals working within the criminal justice system. Recent research (Robinson et al., 2015) found that many of the staff in the Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC) studied were struggling to cope with the new arrangements and expressed feelings of separation and loss, status anxiety, being caught between the old and the new, the public and the private. Whilst it seems unlikely that in the short-term there will be a reversal of the disaggregation of offender management that occurred as a result of Transforming Rehabilitation, the concerns raised by HM Probation Inspectorate into its early implementation should warrant a systematic review of the new arrangements at the earliest opportunity. One way forward might be the creation of a new public body to hold providers to account (Maiden, 2015) with a focus on ensuring that the new arrangements are implementing safe operating models that protect the public, staff and service users alike. This would go some way to separate service delivery from policy making and could reduce potential conflicts of interest as well as leading to greater transparency.
As two of the foremost criminologists in the United Kingdom have noted, crime control policies have become increasing sensationalized and politicalized rather than evidentially based (Loader and Sparks 2010). This means that it will take political will to address many of the deep-seated problems in the criminal justice system. The media has an obvious role to play in this respect. In the first article in this edition Carol Hedderman and Alex Murphy present the authors’ findings from their analysis of Transforming Rehabilitation in the printed media. As the authors point out in Bad news for Probation? Analysing the newspaper coverage of ‘Transforming Rehabilitation, probation has never really garnered much interest within the media except for those rare occasions when serious further offences are committed by individuals under supervision. In their analysis of samples of all national newspapers published in England and Wales they found that the issues surrounding the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms also received little coverage despite the profound radical nature of the changes and the high level of opposition from within the profession. Key elements of the proposals, such as the extension of supervision to short-term prisoners and the introduction of commissioning on a payment by results basis were generally presented in ways that supported the government’s agenda to increase the role of the private sector without a principled defence of public probation provision to counterbalance this. The authors consider the implications of these findings and argue that the combined effects of a lack of media interest and selective reporting underplayed the risks involved in Transforming Rehabilitation and did little to enhance public understanding of the complex work of the probation service.
Another major challenge facing the Justice Secretary is the state of the prison system in England and Wales. As the Chief Inspector of Prisons notes in his latest report we are still waiting for the rehabilitation revolution, with some parts of the prison estate being described as places of violence, squalor and idleness. Much of the deterioration in prison conditions can be attributed to decisions made by the Coalition Government, including; ‘scaling back the prison regime, reforming the incentives and privileges scheme, cutting staff by almost a third’ (BBC, 2015). It is hardly surprising therefore that resettlement outcomes are at their lowest levels since records began, and in only 45 per cent of men’s prisons were outcomes reasonably good or good. Two hundred and thirty nine prisoners died in custody last year which was 29 per cent higher than in 2010 (HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2015: 13). The Harris Review into self-inflicted deaths in custody amongst 18−24 year olds found a ‘disconnect between what those in charge think should be happening and what is actually happening’ (Harris, 2015: 10). The lives of the 87 young people examined in the review were linked by a range of common vulnerabilities and complex needs that had not been addressed early enough and for whom a non-custodial option would have been far more appropriate. Their situations were then compounded by the harsh custodial environments they encountered, widespread bullying and a lack of access to purposeful activity and treatment services because of staff shortages. In Sweden there has been a concerted effort to expand drug treatment facilities within the prison estate. In Drug treatment in a Swedish women’s prison: Relations and identities among prison officers and prisoners, Per Åke Nylander describes the findings from an ethnographic study of a drug treatment wing (therapeutic community) in a women’s prison to explore how the welfare orientation promoted in Swedish penal policy is put into practice. Through observations of the treatment programme and interviews with prison staff and inmates, the author also explored relations and identities within the prison and how these are shaped by the working environment within the treatment based regime. The author found that nature of the interactions within the treatment wing challenged established traditional identities and tended to significantly change the nature of relationships between both staff and prisoners alike, leading to a more positive climate within the prison.
During the election campaign Michael Gove called for those to the right on the political spectrum to be ‘warriors for the dispossessed’ (quoted in Birrell, 2015), apparently oblivious to the impact of his own party’s policies in increasing inequality. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has warned that one in four children in Britain (approximately 3.4 million) will be living in relative poverty by 2020 and that almost all of the projected increases in child poverty over the next few years will be the result of tax and benefit reforms introduced since 2010 (Ramesh, 2013). A further challenge then will be to embrace this aspiration as Justice Secretary, and to look beyond the criminal justice system to address broader structural problems in society. Offenders are known to experience disproportionate levels of deprivation which are often exacerbated by the difficulties they experience in accessing services in the community. It has been estimated that in any given year some 58,000 individuals in England and Wales face all three problems of homelessness, substance misuse and offending (LankellyChase Foundation, 2015). An estimated 1.6 million people have some degree of alcohol dependence, and of those some 250,000 are believed to be moderately or severely dependent and require intensive treatment (National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse, 2013). According to the 2011/12 British Crime Survey there were 917,000 violent incidents where the victim believed the perpetrator to be under the influence of alcohol, accounting for 47 per cent of violent offences committed that year (Institute of Alcohol Studies, 2015). Understandably, reducing alcohol-fuelled violent crime was a priority in the Coalition Government’s alcohol strategy (HM Government, 2012). In Policy and practice tensions in tackling alcohol abuse and violence in probation, Rose Broad and Carly Lightowlers provide an overview of trends in alcohol and violence and the contemporary policies and interventions to address them. As the authors note, alcohol-related violence only appears briefly in the Transforming Rehabilitation agenda and primarily within the context of domestic abuse and sexual violence. The authors’ analysis highlights the contradictions inherent in the Coalition Government’s alcohol policy with a combination of neo-liberal business and market imperatives governing licenced alcohol consumption leading to the normative social positing of alcohol in society which is in sharp contrast to the criminalization and coercive control of alcohol-related offences that disproportionately targets the young and the poor.
In the final contribution to this edition, Healthcare and probation: The impact of government reforms, Charlie Brooker argues that recent reforms of the NHS and of probation will further adversely impact on the services offered to offenders in the community. Using Freedom of Information, the author sent requests to all 213 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to ascertain how well the recent reforms were working. The author found that some six months after the healthcare reforms were implemented, most CCGs were unaware that they were responsible for the provision of healthcare to probation. The author concludes by suggesting how healthcare in probation might be improved, drawing on a model from the United States where specialist mental health probation staff have been trained to provide case management to those with a specified mental illness.
As always the journal welcomes letters, comments or articles in response to any of the issues raised in this edition.