Rehabilitating and Resettling Offenders in the Community. By Anthony Goodman (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 250pp. 32.99 pb)

Abstract

Probation in England and Wales is moving, under the impact of the Coalition government’s privatization programme, into what many would consider terminal crisis. From a relatively calm backwater, the agency has been thrust into the front line of neo-liberal political and social engineering. Any text on probation published today is required to help understand what has led to this situation. The book under review was published before the privatization programme was fully articulated and contains little directly on the subject apart from a few ruminations on the shape of things to come. But its value lies in the meticulous documentation, supplemented by interviews with practitioners conducted over a considerable period, of the changes introduced by successive governments particularly from the beginning of the 1980s. If we wish to fully understand the current turmoil, some consideration of this history is vital. Goodman deftly navigates the maze of Home Office documents and the mountain of reports, reorganizations and political injunctions to show how English probation, over a longer period than many might imagine, has metamorphosed from a relatively autonomous agency primarily focused on the rehabilitation of offenders to a tightly controlled and bureaucratized arm of the criminal justice system geared to public protection, control, surveillance and risk management—its own ‘punitive turn’. As Paul Boateng, Minister for Prisons and Probation during the first Blair administration, proudly announced: ‘We are a law enforcement agency: It’s what we are. It’s what we do’ (p. 100).