After-care, resettlement and social inclusion: The role of probation
| Author | Rob Canton |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02645505221095061 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
After-care, resettlement
and social inclusion:
The role of probation
Rob Canton
Professor in Community and Criminal Justice, De Montfort
University, Leicester UK
Abstract
The priority of public protection has moved probation away from its historical con-
cerns with providing after-care, now emphasising risk management as well as the
continuation of the sentence in the community. Yet people released from prison notori-
ously face many difficulties in accessing the social resources they need for desistance
and meet with mistrust associated with their criminal records. This paper looks at the
responsibilities of the Probation Service in their supervision of people leaving prison,
considering the role of probation in promoting social inclusion and supporting
desistance.
Keywords
probation, prison, after-care, resettlement, desistance
Leaving prison
Leaving prison, especially after a long sentence, is an acute existential shock.
There is a surfeit of new sensations; daily habits and routines are starkly
changed; the world must be negotiated in altogether different ways. The transac-
tions and etiquette of the street and the shop are very different from those of the
landing or the wing. The very possibility of independent action, the reasons to
behave in particular ways, the costs and benefits of certain courses of action are
radically altered.
Bare subsistence, the need for housing and income are the first challenges for
many. In almost all countries, financial support on release is woefully insufficient
Corresponding Author:
Rob Canton, De Montfort University, Hawthorn Building, Leceister, LE19BH, United Kingdom.
Email: rcanton@dmu.ac.uk
Article The Journal of Communit
y
and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
2022, Vol. 69(3) 373–390
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02645505221095061
journals.sagepub.com/home/prb
and it can be complicated to access welfare provision. Some are fortunate enough to
have families to help them, although this can impose further financial burdens on
hard-pressed households (Western 2018). There are likely to be difficulties in obtain-
ing work, including suspicion from employers (Henley 2019). These material chal-
lenges, often aggravated by problems of substance use, and / or poor physical
and mental health (Cumming 2020), would overwhelm almost all of us and have
to be confronted at one of the toughest times in anyone’s life. Resources are at
their lowest –not just minimal social capital, but rusty problem-solving skills and
ways of negotiating relationships that are altogether different in the community
from those that have to be deployed in prison. For women especially, re-establishing
relationships damaged by custody is no less an imperative (Baldwin 2021; Western
2018). Often made homeless by the custodial sentence, nearly 60% of women
leaving prison have nowhere safe to go (Safe Homes for Women Leaving Prison
Initiative 2020).
The many problems people face interact viciously, and welfare support is not up
to the challenge, with any number of distressing consequences –including not only
recall or reoffending, but even death (for example, Binswanger et al. 2007). In
England and Wales, between 2019–2020 and 2020–2021, there was a
marked and shocking increase of 59% in the numbers of people who died while
under probation supervision after release from custody (Webster 2021).
1
Rates of
suicide by those under post-release supervision have also increased alarmingly
(Phillips et al., 2019)
2
. The failure to address the neglect of such a vulnerable
group has been denounced as ‘state abandonment’(Phillips and Roberts 2019).
Some studies have found that most offenders want to desist (Bottoms and
Shapland and Bottoms 2017), but for many the prospect is daunting, and confi-
dence may waver (Nugent and Schinkel 2016). Even when individual motivation
is at its most resolute, desistance will depend not only on the individual’s attitudes
and behaviour, but also on an acknowledgement by others of their predicament
with active attempts to help. More usually, they encounter a range of structural impe-
diments to accessing essential resources –notably accommodation and employment
- on the basis of their criminal record. While there are many better experiences to
report, the observation of Mary Douglas still holds in so many cases:
‘The man who has spent any time “inside”is put permanently “outside”the ordinary
social system. With no right of aggregation which can definitively assign him to a
new position he remains in the margins, with other people who are similarly credited
with unreliability, unteachability, and all the wrong social attitudes.’(Douglas 1966/
2003: 97).
This exclusion, persistent suspicion, and the sense of precariousness that all this
induces in people leaving prison are reflected, reproduced and reinforced by crim-
inal records. The extent to which these obstacles to desistance are made better,
worse or untouched by the involvement of the probation service is the subject of
this paper. A short historical sketch is a useful beginning to understanding how pro-
bation has come to think and go about its work here.
374 Probation Journal 69(3)
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