‘If the cap fits’? Probation staff and the changing nature of supervision in a Community Rehabilitation Company

Matt Tidmarsh

doi:10.1177/0264550520911982

Abstract

This article explores the changing nature of supervision in a Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC) following the Transforming Rehabilitation ( TR) reforms to probation services in England and Wales. Based on an ethnographic study of an office within a privately owned CRC, it argues that TR has entrenched long-term trends towards ‘Taylorised’ probation practice. This is to say that qualitative and quantitative changes to the complexion of practitioners’ caseloads since TR reflect a decades-long devaluation of the probation service and its staff. The decision to allocate most qualified practitioners to the National Probation Service means that Case Managers (i.e. probation service officers) now supervise offenders who would historically have been supervised by Senior Case Managers (i.e. probation officers). This loss of expertise has been exacerbated by administrative staff redundancies at the office. The result is an increasingly standardised and fragmented mode of working within the CRC in which the majority of services are now delivered by the voluntary sector.

Highlights

Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) fundamentally restructured the delivery of probation services in England and Wales
In June 2014, TR split probation into two organisations: the publicly owned National Probation Service (NPS) works only with offenders who pose a high risk of harm, while 21 privately led Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) supervise low-to-medium risk offenders
Since the 1980s, the value of the social work trained, autonomous probation officer encouraged to pursue offender rehabilitation through relationships has been adjudged to be obsolete by successive governments

Summary

Introduction

Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) fundamentally restructured the delivery of probation services in England and Wales. This article, explores the changing nature of probation supervision in a CRC through the lens of ‘Taylorisation’ – that is, the process by which management assumes control of a labour process, ‘ in a formal sense but [] by the control and dictation of each step of the process, including its mode of performance’ (Braverman, 1974: 69). The second part highlights changes to the complexion of practitioners’ caseloads following TR, in which unqualified practitioners manage offenders previously supervised by qualified officers. This is not to devalue the work performed by those without formal qualifications; rather, to emphasise how TR presents a continuation of a decades-long period in which probation’s knowledge and modes of working have been diminished and degraded. The article demonstrates that an administrative mode of working is becoming normalised at the CRC through analysis of Samuel, a practitioner who joined the probation service in 2016

Methodology

Findings

Conclusions