Jake Phillips

‘It’s relentless’: The impact of working primarily with high-risk offenders

This article uses empirical data to consider the impact that Transforming Rehabilitation has had on National Probation Service (NPS) probation officers in terms of the increased numbers of high-risk offenders on the caseload. It was hypothesised by the researchers that the expectation that NPS probation officers would deal with more high-risk offenders would result in additional pressure on them. While this is certainly the case for some probation officers who work in the newly created NPS, the data show nuance in terms of the effect this dramatic change has had on probation officers. The article shows that there are both benefits and disadvantages to having a caseload comprised primarily of high-risk cases. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the findings in terms of the training and resourcing needs required by those NPS probation officers who are struggling with the shift to primarily high-risk offender management.

Target, Audit and Risk Assessment Cultures in the Probation Service

This article traces the rise of managerialism in the probation service in England and Wales before exploring the impact of these changes through reference to in-depth observation and interviews in probation. The article considers how national standards affect practice; how audits feature and their impact on accountability; and how the use of risk assessment tools are perceived and resisted in two probation teams in England Wales. The article then turns to changes implemented by the Coalition Government and highlights some tensions between managerialist occupational cultures in probation and what might occur in the near future.

Spillover and work-family conflict in probation practice: Managing the boundary between work and home life

Based on the close relationship between social work and probation practice, this article uses and develops Greenhaus and Beutell’s (1985) work–family conflict model to understand the spillover from probation work to practitioners’ family lives. We examine the ways spillover affects practitioners’ family lives and show that these conflicts stem from desensitisation and the work being community based. They also arise in more imagined ways, which we describe as altruistic imaginings and darker imaginings. The article concludes by highlighting the need for organisations to acknowledge spillover and its effects and makes suggestions around the provision of organisational policies. We conclude by considering what probation providers, as employers, might do to improve the situation as well as some reflective tools that practitioners might use to consider their own work–life balance with a view to improving staff wellbeing as well as effective service provision.

Myopia and misrecognition: The impact of managerialism on the management of compliance

This article explores the construction of a particular form of compliance in probation practice during a period in which policy shifted from enforcement towards compliance. The article uses four concepts from Bourdieu’s field theory (habitus, field, misrecognition and symbolic violence) to highlight the way in which the shift in policy was attuned to the subjective structure of probation practitioners’ habitus but resulted in a form of compliance which was myopic in nature and thus did not adhere to what we know about habitus in probation from other research. The article explores this phenomenon through Bourdieu’s notion of misrecognition, suggesting that whilst the policy change was regarded generally positively, it is an example of ‘symbolic violence’. In turn, this tells us about practitioners’ position in the field, which is useful in terms of future analyses of how changes to the delivery of community sanctions will manifest in the coming years.

Probation practice in the information age

This article analyses the implications of the greater use of technology and information in probation practice. Using data generated via an ethnography of probation, the article firstly argues that probation in England and Wales now exists in what scholars would identify as ‘the information age’ (i.e. that computers and other technologies work to define and create probation practice as we know it). The article goes on to use actor-network theory to analyse two ‘heterogeneous networks’ to explore the way in which probation practitioners and the technologies they use interact to create particular forms of practice. The article argues that unless we understand the technology that underpins practice we cannot fully understand practice. Finally, the article considers the implications of this analysis for probation post-Transforming Rehabilitation (TR).

Non-custodial deaths: Missing, ignored or unimportant?

This article presents the findings from two separate pieces of research that were conducted by the authors on deaths that occur within the criminal justice system, but outside custodial settings. The article begins with a review of the literature on deaths both within and outside custody before going through the research findings which inform the article. The overarching argument is that deaths outside custodial settings are less understood, and receive much less scrutiny and public attention than equivalent deaths that occur in custody. We explore the reasons for this neglect, drawing attention to policy, methodological and sociological factors. We conclude by reflecting on possible ways of overcoming this neglect by drawing on a body of work which argues in favour of an ethic of care.

How was your day? : exploring a day in the life of probation workers across Europe using practice diaries

This article presents a reflection upon the preliminary analysis of diary research conducted during the period 2014–2015 in five European countries (England, France, Norway, Romania and Slovakia). The authors gathered and analysed data from a pilot project that used semi-structured diaries to generate data on probation workers’ daily lives with a view to understanding ‘a day in the life’ of probation officers across jurisdictions. The findings open up questions in relation to diary research in probation practice (diary format, follow-up interview, etc.) and we use this article to discuss the relative advantages and benefits of using diary research in this area. We conclude with the argument that diaries as a method of social research hold considerable potential for conducting research in the context of probation but acknowledge that the method we employed requires some development and greater clarification in terms of the aims of the research.

Suicide and community justice

BackgroundThere has long been concern about the number of people who die in custody in England and Wales, particularly in prisons or police stations. The concern is obviously heightened when people die either at their own hand, or at the hands of others. Yet there has been selective critical gaze, and people who die whilst under probation or community supervision have been neglected (Phillips, J, Gelsthorpe, L, Padfield, N., Criminology & Criminal Justice, https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895817745939, 2017). Given that there is evidence to suggest that contact with the criminal justice system in non-custodial settings is associated with higher mortality rates than those found in the general population, such neglect is concerning.MethodsThis article explores data which has been published since 2016 by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) on the deaths of offenders whilst under supervision. We draw on data which is collected by probation providers and collated by HMPPS to present original analyses, with particular focus on deaths by suicide. We calculate rates of self-inflicted deaths and rate ratios with the general population and the prison population.ResultsThe suicide rates for all groups within the sample are higher than the general population.ConclusionsWe explore the utility of the data in helping us to understand the trends regarding people dying whilst under probation supervision with a particular focus on suicide, and highlight areas where the dataset is deficient. We conclude that whilst the dataset can be used to calculate headline rates of suicide it raises many questions in terms of the extant risks that people on probation face, and we explore ways in which the data can be used more fully to understand this important social and public health issue. We consider ways in which the dataset could be matched with other datasets in future research so that health issues might be brought into the analysis, and reflect on other research methodologies which would add depth to our understanding of why the mortality rate amongst people in contact with the criminal justice system is higher than in the general population.

Complexity, realism and morality: consultations on probation reform

In March 2012 the Ministry of Justice published two consultations: Punishment and reform: effective probation services and Punishment and reform: effective community sentences. Taken together, the two documents have the potential to impose wholesale reform on the work of Probation Trusts in England and Wales, primarily through the privatisation of considerable sections of Trusts’ work.

Review: Risks, Identities and the Everyday: Julie Scott Jones and Jayne Raisborough (eds) Ashgate, 2007; pp. 148; £50, hbk ISBN 978—0—75464—861—1

This volume of essays focuses on ‘risk’ in the context of everyday life. The chapters look at how people use risk to create identities for themselves, how they disregard risk when there are other possibilities at stake, and how an initial awareness of a risk can result in a future avoidance of risk awareness, rather than avoidance of the extant risk itself. Most of the chapters effectively use a poststructuralist analysis of ‘risk in the everyday’ to place concepts such as agency, identity formation and a Foucauldian focus on refl exivity in opposition to the potentially disempowering thesis behind Beck’s Risk Society (1992). It is this combination of social theory and empirical research which makes this volume both appealing and useful when thinking about the effect of ‘risk’, a concept which has become ever prevalent in the probation service, in the context of wider society and individual agency. The mainly theoretical introductory chapter concentrates on, and then deconstructs, Beck’s thesis, thus providing the impetus behind the creation of a volume of essays which aims to explore how ‘socio-cultural contexts matter in relation to how risks are interpreted, and utilised by individuals’ (p. 4). Drawing on Lupton and Tulloch’s work on how voluntary risk taking can be used to create identities for oneself, the editors argue that although risk has been used as a tool for analysing society there has been insuffi cient consideration of how risk is an ‘embedded discourse’ and that the matter of ‘choice’ has not been fully explored. The most relevant chapters in terms of probation work are Merryweather’s chapter on how young men create identities for themselves through ‘risk-talk’ and Laverick’s chapter on how people with a history of violence approach the decision to commit a violent act. Merryweather’s analysis of focus group data demonstrates that starting a fi ght, for example, may not be an indication of the most violent offender, but that other discourses (never walking away from a fi ght once it has started, for example) may Reviews