Enforcement and compliance

Abstract

Efforts to secure compliance have always been a core element of probation practice, although compliance has been constructed in diverse ways and promoted through different means throughout its history. This article takes a brief historical perspective and reviews recent research on enforcement practices and developing understandings of compliance. These guide a critical discussion of the practices that might develop as responsibilities for enforcement are divided between the new National Probation Service (NPS) and Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) under the Transforming Rehabilitation agenda, highlighting inevitable tensions and challenges, and anticipating how inter-agency practices might shape the ongoing construction of compliance. Charging more than one agency with responsibilities in relation to enforcement is tricky and creates risks in terms of legitimacy, credibility and justice. On the whole, future prospects seem difficult, but not hopeless and, in particular, there are examples of positive practices in probation and youth justice for the NPS and CRCs to draw upon as they develop their inter-agency structures and processes. Elsewhere, initiatives in problem-solving courts, focused, for example, on drug users, may also give indicators of constructive ways forward.