Abstract
This edited volume draws its inspiration from a range of acknowledged international experts on probation and criminal justice and has as its ambitious aim to answer the question ‘what do we know about probation so far?’, arising from an academic conference in 2009 held under the auspices of the Confederation of European Probation.
Canton’s opening salvo offers the reader an authoritative and accessible analysis, by way of some well-honed insights into the dominant sociological and psychological perspectives on why people offend, drawing particularly on some of the main findings derived from control theory and desistance literature which apply to current probation practice. The conjunction of motives, opportunities, agency and structural considerations that constrain and support personal change are flagged up. Kazemian develops and refines the relevance of desistance research in her invigorating foray into the multiple criminological and developmental factors that underpin social and cognitive identity change and how these have pertinent implications for assessing the wider findings of desistance over criminal careers. Mair offers a well-documented, if familiar, historical overview in his chapter on the impact of probation in advising sentencing and promoting community sanctions, in particular the shifting significance of the pre-sentence report and the possible implications of its more recent condensed formats. He makes the salient point that we still know little about how magistrates and judges usually read and understand reports.
The theme of probation and its impact in terms of reparation to victims and communities is given a slightly different inflection in Van Garsse’s chapter. Drawn as it is from the author’s experience in restorative justice in Belgium, it offers a refreshing continental perspective on the, often contested, concept of reparation and some of the implications of judicial management of mediation alongside local probation supervisory practices. I was much taken by the concept of ‘praetorian probation’ (p. 98), which is the conditional dismissal of minor offences if good conduct can be sustained. McIvor ably charts the penal history of community service in the following chapter, providing a useful range of comparative evaluative to frame what is arguably the best known community sanction, with unpaid work for the benefit of the community still offering reparative payback alongside penal sanction.
Vanstone provides another valuable historical perspective in his contribution, which examines probation’s role in successful social integration – in particular its role in the success or promise of resettlement to those leaving prison – outlining many of the familiar obstacles and the wider role of voluntary agencies in aiding such efforts. He notes in his well evidenced overview that successful re-entry depends on the prison experience approximating life outside and thus encouraging self-responsibility and preparedness for release.
Allen’s chapter reviews the thorny issue of how probation might satisfy the public’s desire for justice or punishment with the well-rehearsed trope that seems to bedevil probation’s attempts at self-promotion. How might one overcome in part this ambivalence to probation? His plaintive conclusion that probation needs champions, opinion formers who will stand up for the values probation espouses, will no doubt elicit mixed responses from readers! Taxman and Maass offer a comparative analysis of both the fiscal and human costs and benefits of probation, whilst acknowledging the tremendous range in how probation is practiced. In summary, the costs of probation are as diverse as the benefits – with a chapter that critically engages the impact of the physical and human costs of probation, still it is refreshing to read that promoting citizenship and social justice as part of community supervision is more likely to yield greater benefits over time. This theme is further developed in Durnescu’s chapter on the lived experience of supervision, which is larded with numerous findings from research literature on the processes of effective supervisory engagement, which – distilled – might evince the observation that the core value of the enduring relational component, when shaped by empathic understanding, continues to offer the prospect of positive outcomes.
Nellis’s chapter on electronic monitoring (EM) offers with admirable clarity a scholarly overview of the recent ambivalent relationship between probation services and this innovation. He bemoans at times the short-sightedness of probation services in not fully appreciating that in the main EM should support probation interventions by better engaging with the development of EM in ways that are consistent with probation ideals, not least at a time when the political survival of probation was under threat and as a way to forestall a drift towards more surveillance and less humanistic forms of control. In the penultimate chapter, McNeill and Robinson provide an interesting departure by introducing in summary fashion an attempt to develop a more grounded sociological account of probation’s evolution in policy and practice, citing three significant contributors to the sociology of punishment: Foucault, Durkheim and Marx.
The concluding chapter draws together in a most helpful review summary the complex threads of argument that shape the book and offers a brief resume of the questions posed in each of the preceding chapters. The book does not shy away from confronting the inevitable harms as well as the putative benefits of probation, the former sentiment expressed in memorable form by the late Barbara Hudson, that we must always punish in ‘bad conscience’ (p. 274). This book is a welcome contribution to probation scholarship.