Reimagining Probation Practice: Re-forming Rehabilitation in an Age of Penal Excess. By BurkeL.,CarrN., CluleyE., CollettS. and McNeillF. (eds) (Routledge, 2022, 247pp. £34.99 pbk)

Abstract

Twenty authors have contributed to this collection of 13 essays. They are drawn from every branch of the ‘probation’ community—practitioners, inspectors, academic analysts and teachers. So, unsurprisingly, the quality of the expositions varies a good deal and, somewhat surprisingly, one voice is almost completely absent: that of offenders. Apart from a short quote from a bemused participant in a group work programme—a participant who clearly cannot see how he’s going to escape the traps surrounding him (p. 59)—the offender voice is absent. A bit of ‘lived experience’ would have leavened this sometimes ritualistically worthy loaf. The core message, around which all the contributors have mustered, is a plea, clearly set out in the editors’ introductory manifesto, that probation practitioners strive to retain and develop a commitment to the serious ambition of encouraging offender desistance. This objective is easier said than done given the context within which probation services are now delivered. Indeed, a mood of scarcely concealed desperation occasionally surfaces in the editors’ account. For the backcloth to probation work, be it the preparation of court reports, the supervision of community orders, the delivery of offender programmes or the resettlement of prisoners, is a scarred landscape of: gross and worsening social and economic inequality; increasing and deepening poverty; a housing rental market geared to ownership and inheritance of wealth rather than public utility; employment practices increasingly characterized by zero hour contracts and insecurity of tenure; and the partial collapse of major national and local authority public services whose remit includes the redress of the multiple trauma—childhood, familial, medical and military—which lies behind most serious offending.