Delivering McJustice? The probation factory at the Magistrates’ court

Introduction

Since its inception in the late 19th century, probation work in England & Wales has included the provision of a service to the criminal courts, centred on offering information about defendants between conviction and sentence to inform the courts’ decisions, and assessing suitability for non-custodial options (Vanstone, 2004). As several commentators have observed, probation work in the juridical field is the frontline of practice as far as both sentencers and defendants are concerned: it is here that sentencers have access to information about what probation services can provide and that many defendants encounter probation staff for the first time. Yet, in England & Wales, very little is known about how probation work in the courts has developed. Although there have been several studies of the main artefacts of that work (i.e. pre-sentence reports) over the years, researchers have otherwise neglected this key area of probation work. The only empirical study to provide a direct insight into probation’s role in the courts, Pat Carlen’s (1976; Carlen and Powell, 1979) Magistrates’ Justice, is now over 40 years old. Given the considerable structural and cultural changes that have impacted probation services since then, we clearly cannot rely on this to inform our understanding of probation’s contemporary role in court.

By far the most significant of these changes has been the bifurcation of probation services under the coalition government’s Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms (Ministry of Justice, 2013; Robinson, 2016). With their emphasis on creating a market for probation services, the TR reforms dissolved the former 35 public sector Probation Trusts and replaced them with a new architecture for the delivery of probation services: namely, a new (public sector) National Probation Service (NPS), and 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) which in early 2015 were contracted to a range of (predominantly private sector) providers. In this reconfiguration, the provision of probation services in the criminal courts fell to the new NPS, while CRCs were excluded from all such work, with a view to avoiding conflicts of (commercial) interest. The new NPS thus took on all pre-sentence work, including the provision of court liaison staff and the preparation of all pre-sentence reports, as well as the prosecution of offenders in breach cases.

Meanwhile, a parallel policy programme, latterly known as Transforming Justice (TJ), was being implemented in the wider juridical field (e.g. Ministry of Justice, 2012a, 2012b). ¹ Primarily directed at the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts, Transforming Justice represents a range of initiatives associated with the ‘modernization’ of the criminal process that have been traced back to the 1980s (Raine, 2000). Prominent among its themes has been the construction of delay as a problem in criminal proceedings, and a concomitant emphasis on speeding up justice (e.g. DCA, 2006; Ministry of Justice, 2012a; Ward, 2015). Despite being a key actor in respect of the disposal of a significant proportion of criminal cases, and playing an active role in the preparation of reports in the space between conviction and sentence, ² the probation service is hardly mentioned in the raft of documents associated with TJ. Nonetheless, in the last few years TJ has been a significant driver of a move towards faster delivery pre-sentence reports (PSRs) and a concomitant drop in the proportion of ‘traditional’ written reports prepared during a typical adjournment of three weeks (known as Standard Delivery Reports). In the year that the TR reforms were implemented (2014), just 21 per cent of pre-sentence reports prepared by probation workers were Standard Delivery Reports; the remaining 79 per cent were either delivered orally on the day of request, or were ‘Fast Delivery Reports’ prepared in writing within five days of request (Ministry of Justice, 2015). By early 2017 the proportion of Standard Delivery Reports had dropped further to just 4 per cent (Ministry of Justice, 2017a; see also Robinson, 2017).

This article seeks to shed much needed light on the hitherto neglected arena of pre-sentence probation work in the Magistrates’ courts. It presents findings from an exploratory ethnographic study of probation work in two such courts which was conducted in 2017. The research was prompted by a specific interest in the intersection/interaction of these two significant sets of reforms in the probation offices embedded within the lower criminal courts, as well as a more general interest in both how practice in the reconfigured probation service is evolving, and in broader processes of marketization in criminal justice contexts. The findings of this study suggest that probation work in the Magistrates’ courts is being squeezed into an operating model which bears all the hallmarks of a process of ‘McDonaldization’, as initially described by George Ritzer (2015 [1993]).

The article begins by outlining the empirical study and proceeds to explain the approach to data analysis and the theoretical framework of the McDonaldization thesis. It goes on to present the findings in respect of each of the four main characteristics of McDonaldization: namely, efficiency; calculability; predictability; and control. The article concludes with a discussion of what the study tells us about the evolving culture of probation work in the Magistrates’ courts and suggests some avenues for future research about how key stakeholders are experiencing this ongoing transformation.

Researching Probation Work in the Criminal Courts

The best way to understand the job is to watch it because it’s quite ‘bitty’ and hard to explain. (PSO4, City)

The study which informs this article was conducted by the author in the first seven months of 2017, in two English Magistrates’ court centres. The research took a broadly ethnographic approach and deployed two principal methods of data collection: overt observations of the everyday activities of the frontline practitioners, and semi-structured interviews with probation staff in a range of roles at the two courts. Notwithstanding Carlen’s (1976) seminal work, ethnographic research in the probation field is rare (Robinson and Svensson, 2013), and in respect of probation work in court, there are only a handful of recent studies deploying this methodology in the adult arena internationally. These include studies of criminal justice social workers in Scotland (Halliday et al., 2008, 2009); of social enquiry and sentencing in Belgium (Beyens and Scheirs, 2010) and Denmark (Wandall, 2010); and, most recently, of ‘community practitioners’ in the lower courts in Canada (Quirouette, 2017).

In England & Wales, Mawby and Worrall’s (2013) important study of probation occupational culture did attend to probation work with other agencies (including courts), but it pre-dates TR and relied on interviews with former and current practitioners, only some of whom had had significant experience of working in courts, across a number of decades. Thus, while this study offers some interesting perspectives from individuals, it does not offer a robust benchmark against which contemporary practice can be compared. ³

Efficiency through Specialization: The Creation of Dedicated Court Teams

In his discussion of efficiency as the first key feature of McDonaldized workplaces, Ritzer (1998, 2015 [1993]) draws explicitly on the ideas of FW Taylor and ‘scientific management’ popularized in the early 20th century, as well as Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line, both of which emphasized the rationalization of production. Transposing these ideas to the fast-food industry, Ritzer (2015 [1993]: 36) notes that hamburger chains, for example, ‘strive to discover and implement the “one best way” to grill hamburgers, cook French fries, prepare shakes [and] process consumers’. When the fieldwork commenced in January 2017, all probation court teams throughout England & Wales were in the process of moving towards what the new National Probation Service had identified as the ‘one best way’ to organize its work in the criminal courts: namely, via a fully specialized model, with all court duties – including PSR preparation and enforcement work – brought ‘in house’ to court teams. This was one of a number of proposals that had been set out by the NPS in a strategy document called E3 blueprint: Effective. Efficient. Excellent (NPS, 2015). Colloquially known as E3, this document emphasized the efficient allocation of resources across the different areas of responsibility of the new NPS and the promotion of consistent practices across its seven regions. It was followed in July 2016 by the publication of an NPS operating model (NPS, 2016) which confirmed the establishment of dedicated court teams, with responsibility for preparing all PSRs and conducting all enforcement work.

In the two research sites, the former Probation Trusts had (prior to the split created by Transforming Rehabilitation) been working with a semi-specialized model of provision to the courts, such that they had long-established teams based in the court building, but adjourned PSRs were regularly allocated to colleagues based in field probation teams. Both teams were thus in the midst of a transition towards a fully specialized model, and had each undergone a process of review, prompted by E3, to determine their resourcing needs, taking into account the different skills and responsibilities of fully qualified practitioners (Probation Officers) and those with lesser qualifications (Probation Service Officers). In light of this review, both teams were anticipating the arrival of new team members to compensate for the lost resource of field teams who had previously been allocated a good proportion of (written) Standard Delivery PSRs. Having formerly been composed almost exclusively of PSO grade staff, both teams were deemed to require additional PO resources to prepare reports in respect of more serious types of offending, such as domestic violence and sexual offences. As one team manager put it, the E3 review sought to ensure that ‘we have the right staff to do the right work’. The optimization of efficiency, and in particular the team’s ability to meet the needs of the courts was therefore a top priority (NPS, 2016).

When the research commenced with the City team, I struggled initially to make sense of who was doing what, and how the work was organized. During my early days, it was not at all clear why the main open-plan office was sometimes fully occupied and at other times virtually empty; nor was it always clear what individuals were so busily doing at their workstations. But as the research progressed, it became apparent that there was an invisible choreography underpinning each day’s activities: both teams had put in place rota systems to manage their work and to ensure that, when the courts were in session, individuals knew what their particular responsibilities were. In both sites there were monthly and daily rotas which took into account the known variations in court schedules (e.g. the running of breach courts on specific days of the week), the availability of team members and the different skills and role specifications of POs and PSOs. Thus, for example, only PSOs were allocated to court duty and the prosecution of breaches, freeing POs up to focus on the preparation of PSRs in the more serious and complex cases. ‘Runner’ was another PSO role, and this could involve a range of activities, from relaying information to and from colleagues on court duty, to making calls to other agencies to check for domestic violence callouts or child protection queries for colleagues preparing PSRs.

Thus, a high degree of structure was evident in both teams, and there was clear evidence of heightened attention to efficiency and its enhancement – both at a policy level and on the ground, in the teams’ organization and division of labour, and in the breakdown of tasks relevant to PSR preparation.

Calculability: Probation by Numbers

We’re very competitive and we’re very performance focused. We’re very keen on our data and we run the data every day to make sure we’re on top of our targets. (Manager, City)

In his discussion of calculability in the workplace, Ritzer (2015 [1993]: 105–114) stresses a ‘zeal for speed’ and an overriding emphasis on numbers in both the production of goods and the delivery of services. In the context of the fast-food industry, he notes that the performance of workers is assessed quantitatively, not qualitatively: hamburgers must be served within a specified number of minutes; French fries may stand under the heat lamp for even fewer minutes; and managers are only permitted to throw away a tiny percentage of the food produced on any given day. Similarly, central management assesses the performance of each restaurant ‘by numbers’: sales per worker; profit margins; staff turnover; cleanliness ratings.

Targets and performance indicators are by no means new to probation practice (see, for example, Robinson et al., 2014). However, the combined influence of Transforming Justice and Transforming Rehabilitation reform programmes has put even greater emphasis on the quantitative aspects of court work, and in particular the time spent on particular tasks (Nellis, 2002; Robinson, 2017). For example, the TR reforms ushered in a new performance framework for the NPS which features two ‘service levels’ (Key Performance Indicators) for court work. Both of these concern the timeliness of specific processes: specifically, the percentage of PSRs completed within the timescale set by the court and the proportion of cases allocated by the end of the second full business day following the day of sentence (Ministry of Justice, 2017b: 14). More recently, recognizing the changing nature of demand for reports under TJ, the NPS operating model introduced a new national target specifying that, by April 2017, 90 per cent of PSRs should be completed and delivered on the day of request, and the vast majority of these should be delivered orally (NPS, 2016). Meanwhile, in the City – where sentencers had embraced TJ earlier and more enthusiastically than in the Town – the court team had also, prior to the start of the research, reached an agreement with the courts that they would produce same-day, oral reports within an hour of request.

In both research sites, team members were acutely aware of the targets relevant to their labour, and regularly received feedback from their managers in respect of their quantitative performance. For example, at a team meeting I observed in the City, staff were highly praised for exceeding the new 90 per cent target for on-the-day reports in the previous month, and I was regularly told that the team’s performance in respect of this target was admired throughout the region. Meanwhile, however – and consistent with Ritzer’s discussion of calculability – the quality of the work was not subject to explicit monitoring, and managers and team members alike were conscious of this. The managers of both teams told me that quality control systems had yet to catch up with the changed landscape of court work: they were still only required to audit the quality of full written PSRs, which were all but extinct in the Magistrates’ court context. Relatedly, the growing dominance of oral reports was presenting novel challenges for quality control: while reports delivered orally are required to be written up and scanned for the future reference of the supervising officer (in the event of a community order) or other probation colleagues, there is no guarantee that the oral and written versions will be the same. As one interviewee told me, ‘what you say in court isn’t the same as what you write up [afterwards]’ (PSO8, Town).

Predictability: Event, Result, Repeat

It’s different every day, but the same. (PSO6, City)

Ritzer’s discussion of predictability in the McDonaldized workplace centres on the routinization of labour, including the scripting of interactions and the breakdown of processes into a sequence of discrete steps. There are, for example, ‘seven steps to window service: greet the customer, take the order, assemble the order, present the order, receive payment, thank the customer, and ask for repeat business’ (2015 [1993]: 115).

It is long established that the juridical field is characterized by a degree of variation in respect of the cultures of individual courts and the populations of offenders and victims that they serve (e.g. Tarling, 2006). But with its emphasis on consistency across England & Wales, the NPS operating model can be understood as an attempt to enhance the predictability of probation court work (NPS, 2016). According to this model, courts and offenders should receive the same service wherever they happen to be located. For example, I observed that new recording and assessment processes introduced after the splitting of probation services served to ensure a consistent approach to the collection and recording of information by court staff, in that the same steps were followed each time between the request for a PSR and the conclusion and recording of the outcome of that case. Thus, during the research I observed that a request for a PSR inevitably started a process which began with the creation of an electronic record (an ‘event’) by an administrator, and then prompted a series of actions including the rapid reading of documentation provided by the Crown Prosecution Service (typically the police account of the offence and a list of previous convictions). Next came an interview with the defendant, and then the completion of risk assessment and other mandatory electronic records, often supplemented by calls to other agencies involved in public protection (typically police and/or social services) to verify information. After presenting the report orally in court, the task of recording the result on the national database and of case allocation (in the event that a community order was made) would pass back to administrative staff, who would ‘result’ the case. The analogy with a production line in a factory, with each worker contributing his or her labour in a predefined sequence, was striking.

There was also evidence of predictability at the level of individual workers: the pressure of time in the report preparation process meant that staff had developed their own routines, shortcuts and elements of scripted behaviour to get everything done. This was evident both from observing the conduct of PSR interviews with defendants and from the interview data: everyone had their own way of doing things and while this varied between workers, there was an observable consistency at the individual level. For example, one PO said: ‘You always have in the back of your head a template of what you’re going to ask, and you have stock phrases as well that you use to speed things up’ (PO2, City). Another PO in the same team described different practices in respect of how the limited PSR preparation time was used by different POs:

Well we’re all different. I’ve noticed [PO1] does it different to [PO2] and I do it different to them both. [PO1] does a lot of prep beforehand but he can just go into court and talk without a script, whereas I can’t do that, I need a structure I can rely on. So I do less checking – I do some – spend a short period of time with the person, then think about what I’m going to say. So in that hour I probably spend about 15–20 minutes checking [information], then about 20 minutes with the person, and 20 minutes writing it up. (PO3, City)

A further element of predictability concerned the types of cases POs and PSOs were typically dealing with, such that PSRs were allocated between POs and PSOs according to the seriousness of the offence. Thus for example requests for PSRs in cases of domestic violence and sexual offending were automatically allocated to a PO, and with large numbers of the former in particular coming through Magistrates’ courts, this type of work dominated the POs’ days. More than once, POs I shadowed told me that they sometimes had days made up entirely of preparing oral reports (up to five in a day) on solely domestic violence cases, which could be difficult to mentally manage in terms of differentiating between cases.

Finally, although the research did not focus on sentencing outcomes per se, it was noted that the convergence of TR and TJ did appear to be producing quite a high degree of predictability in regard to proposals for community sentences. Despite the availability of a menu of 13 different requirements from which to select when proposing a community order, ⁸ in most of the cases I observed in which a need for probation intervention had been identified, the recommendation was for a standardized number of days undertaking ‘rehabilitation activities’ (known as ‘RAR days’). Introduced by the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014 post-TR, the Rehabilitation Activity Requirement (RAR) ⁹ was designed as a ‘shell’ for supervision which could be proposed by report writers in PSRs but developed in detail post-sentence by the supervising officer, whether in the NPS or a CRC. The RAR was thus intended to be ‘flexible’ enough to match the particular resources available in that area, and to meet the needs of the individual under supervision (see HMIP, 2017b). In most cases the recommendation for RAR days was accompanied by a curfew, unpaid work hours or a fine: a so-called ‘punitive requirement’ deemed a necessary component of the vast majority of community orders by the Crime and Courts Act 2013. Meanwhile, other requirements were rarely recommended. Sometimes this was because the local provider (CRC) had set out specific suitability criteria (e.g. Offender Group Reconviction Scale (OGRS) scores for particular offending behaviour programmes) which defendants did not meet, or because report writers lacked the information required to make a ‘less flexible’ recommendation on the part of an independent organization. It is also possible, however, that the compression of time to conduct pre-sentence enquiries produced a more standardized approach to the design of proposals for community orders in general. The idea of a ‘pick ‘n’ mix’ menu thus did not fit with a McDonaldized process: in the majority of cases, it seemed, the ‘burger and fries’ option was selected, and it was simply a case of deciding on the size of the portion(s). ¹⁰

Control: Technology and Time Configuring the User

For the moment, the office is quiet and all I can hear is the clicking of mice at five separate workstations. (Field notes, Town, day 2)

Ritzer (1998) observes that in McDonaldized occupations, the role played by management in the control of workers tends to be limited, because control tends to be exercised by cultural and structural factors. For example, in the context of the fast-food restaurant, the drive-through window structures the experience and behaviour of both worker and customer, placing restrictions on what is possible in their brief interaction. In both of the court teams I observed, management was indeed very light-touch, and was not obviously deployed for the purposes of controlling the workers. Rather, the behaviour of workers was controlled by the expectations of the courts, and by targets set by their own organizational structure and by NOMS, ¹¹ reinforced by the technological scaffolding around their practice.

The use of computerized case recording systems and risk assessment technologies is not new to probation (see, for example, Phillips, 2017; Raynor et al., 2000; Robinson, 2002). Nor are such systems a recent innovation in the context of court work: for example, the national Offender Assessment System (OASys) developed by the Home Office and introduced to probation areas in 2001 was intended to inform assessments in PSRs, and within a few years an electronic version of OASys made it possible to pull text into a PSR template electronically (Gelsthorpe et al., 2010; NPS, 2004). The actuarial OGRS has an even longer pedigree in probation, and has been utilized over a number of years, including to inform decisions about the suitability of offenders for accredited offending behaviour programmes (Howard et al., 2009).

I learned that the teams had been liberated from completing time-consuming OASys assessments except in conjunction with written PSRs prepared during a typical adjournment of three weeks (which were extremely rare), the expectation being that where a community-based order was made, a full OASys assessment would be completed by the supervising officer inheriting the case. However, the splitting of probation services under Transforming Rehabilitation had ushered in new mandatory tools to be completed as part of the PSR production process. For court teams, the reconfiguration of probation services initiated by TR had meant the creation of new ‘customers’ in the form of CRCs, to which the majority of new community-based orders made by the courts would henceforth be referred. This new reality had seen the introduction of new frameworks and decision tools to help workers distinguish between cases suitable for the two different providers of probation services (CRCs and the NPS). New mandatory steps had thus been added to the PSR production process: a new Case Allocation System (CAS), risk assessment tool (RSR) and Risk of Serious Harm screening all now needed to be completed prior to the allocation of the case to the appropriate provider (NOMS, 2014). Practitioners were also still required to calculate OGRS scores as part of the PSR production process, and in the seven months during which the research was conducted, two further tools were introduced, which PSR authors were expected to complete. ¹² Much of the working day was spent completing these tasks, and while some practitioners questioned the utility of all these steps in the process – and the ‘trickle of increasing the amount of work we have to do’ (PO1, City) – they understood that their compliance was necessary to meeting the key performance target for the timely allocation of the case to the appropriate provider. These technologies thus exerted control over workers by imposing structure in their daily activities, essentially ‘configuring the user’ to behave in pre-defined ways without recourse to ‘management’ (Gillingham, 2016). This largely explains why a strong management presence was not found in either office. Indeed, managers and practitioners in both sites described the teams as ‘self-sufficient’ or ‘self-regulating’.

Another way in which workers were controlled was by means of standardized formats for PSRs of different kinds. The vast majority of reports prepared by the two teams were delivered orally in the first instance and written up subsequently, while a much smaller proportion of Fast Delivery Reports (FDRs) continued to be prepared in writing within a few days. For both types of report, a template was available. In hard copy this document consisted of four pages, highly structured with 14 sub-headings, and report authors could use this form to write up oral reports by hand. If they preferred to type their report (or were required to, as when preparing an FDR) an electronic version had to be used, but this restricted the content of the report with pre-defined character limits, designed to encourage brevity and focus.

However, arguably of greater importance in the control of court workers was the one-hour window for PSR preparation, which was already established in the City, and was fast approaching in the Town as the fieldwork was coming to an end in mid-2017. ¹³ Rather like the drive-through window at the fast-food restaurant, the ‘PSR window’ compressed time and pre-structured what workers could and could not do, including their interactions with the subjects of reports:

You lack the ability to have those more thorough, in-depth interviews […] you’re putting officers on the spot as to which avenues they can explore in the time period. As professionals we have to believe that we’re exploring the right ones, and we might very well be, but there may be occasions when we’re not. (PSO2, City)

In the City site I observed seven PSR interviews conducted by four different practitioners, which lasted between 15 and 30 minutes, with an average of 24 minutes. All of the interviews were tightly focused, with a view to eliciting only information deemed relevant to the delivery of the report and a recommendation for sentencing. As one interviewee put it, ‘you don’t want to open a can of worms, but hopefully [any complex issues] could be looked into post-sentence’ (PO2, City). In contrast, in the Town the five PSR interviews I observed (by three different practitioners) lasted between 15 and 90 minutes, with an average of 56 minutes. It was only towards the end of the fieldwork there that the Town team was coming under pressure to produce more same-day reports and to a shorter timescale, and I was able to observe their efforts to adjust to these new expectations. Workers in the two different teams were, then, at different stages in the same process of McDonaldization in respect of the introduction of tightly controlled time limits for the production of PSRs, but their direction of travel and their destinations were very clearly the same.

Conclusion

In recent years, probation work in the juridical field has been heavily implicated in two significant programmes of criminal justice reform – Transforming Rehabilitation and Transforming Justice – which have sought to radically alter both the organizational structure and delivery of probation services and to speed up criminal justice processes, particularly in the court arena. Yet almost no attention has been paid (by researchers or policy-makers) to the intersection of these programmes of reform in the probation suites at the Magistrates’ courts. The rapid evolution of probation work in the juridical field has thus gone almost completely unnoticed and undocumented. This article has set out to explore that process of evolution, and its central claim is that the organization and conduct of probation work in the Magistrates’ courts is, under the parallel influence of TJ and TR, being re-shaped along the lines of Ritzer’s McDonaldizaton thesis. In the previous sections I have outlined the ways and means through which the labour of probation workers in Magistrates’ court teams has come to emphasize efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. Contemporary probation work in the lower courts emphasizes the speedy production, classification and disposal of offending subjects. Although it has been shown that progress towards McDonaldization is not occurring at the same speed for different teams, the analysis nonetheless suggests a shared direction of travel, with none escaping the pervasive effects of McDonaldization in the workplace.

As noted at the beginning of the article, Ritzer’s thesis has been criticized for its relative inattention to the causes and spread of McDonaldization in different settings. To the extent that Ritzer does attend to explanatory factors, his approach is a functionalist one, summarized in just seven words: ‘It pays, we value it, it fits’ (Ritzer, 2015 [1993]: 46). This article has endeavoured to show precisely how the characteristics of McDonaldization ‘fit’ the requirements of TR, with its emphasis on the marketization of probation services (principally, the new bifurcation of probation services into public and private spheres) and of TJ (with its emphasis on speedy justice and the fast delivery of pre-sentence information). It has not touched directly on the issue of whether (or how) it ‘pays’, but there are some observations that can be made at this juncture. First, while neither the courts nor the NPS are profit-making enterprises, both have been and continue to be subject to economic pressures imposed by austerity and reduced budgets for public services, and this is a reality which underlies both TJ and TR (Allen, 2013; Morgan and Smith, 2017). Second, in respect of TR, the CRCs to which the majority of new community-based court orders are allocation are run for profit, and do potentially benefit from the timely allocation of cases from the court team, which enables them to meet contractual targets of their own (pertaining to initial contact with the offender and the completion of sentence plans) (Ministry of Justice, 2017b).

The question of ‘value’ is also an interesting one. On one hand, it could be argued (and it was certainly suggested by some of my interviewees) that the changing speed and responsiveness of probation practice in the court arena has served a legitimating function, such that probation in general (and court teams in particular) may be more highly valued by the courts than in the past. As the City team manager put it, ‘I like to think they’ve realized the value of what we can contribute to the process, and so […] we are interdependent and they realize that yes we can help and yes we can help now’. This is however a hypothesis that requires new research on the attitudes of sentencers. Similarly, we might ask whether and to what extent defendants value the contemporary arrangement of probation court work. The TJ reforms tend to construct defendants as grateful consumers of speedy justice; but, again, we do not currently have evidence to support this construction. In my observations of probation workers’ encounters with defendants, I certainly saw expressions of gratitude, some explicitly linked to the speed with which their case was being dealt. However, I also saw expressions of disappointment from defendants on learning that the PSR author would not become their supervising officer, and that they would have to await contact from the appropriate agency to set up an induction to their community order. Again, further research is needed to explore defendants’ experiences of the service they receive at court and in the gap between court and the start of their order.

That said, an important issue to which the study discussed in this article did attend, but which is beyond the scope of the present article, is the subjective experience of McDonaldization among probation workers in specialist court teams. In Ritzer’s discussion of McJobs, themes of deprofessionalization, disenchantment and dehumanization are prominent, just as they are in Marxian scholarship on the labour process. However, in Ritzer’s work they are not taken for granted or regarded as inevitable: instead, he argues, their salience must be established empirically. With reference to Weber’s metaphor ¹⁴ of an ‘iron cage of rationality’, Ritzer (2015 [1993]: 159–160) suggests that McDonaldized workplaces may be experienced in a variety of ways: as an oppressive ‘iron cage’ from which there is no escape; as a ‘rubber cage’, the bars of which can be stretched to allow for a degree of escape; or even as a ‘velvet cage’ which offers comfort through its predictability and ritualized procedures. These possible ways of experiencing McDonaldization in the workplace will be explored in a subsequent article.