‘Shine like a jewel’: Kantian ethics, probation duty and criminal justice

Abstract

Since the 1980s, the criminal justice system in England and Wales has been recalibrated by the ideological and material forces of marketisation and competition. Specifically, the probation duty to advise, assist and befriend has been eroded by the instrumental functions of punishment and prison. These profound transformations have undermined the ethico-cultural foundations of criminal justice, indexed clearly in the privatisation of probation services between 2010 and 2015. The original contribution of this article draws upon Kantian deontological ethics to critique these events and to re-energise the moral coordinates of government policies and organisational practices. It confronts the current orthodoxy with the unconditional moral demand of duty and moral obligation.