Alice in Wonderland: Voluntary sector organisations’ experiences of Transforming Rehabilitation
| DOI | 10.1177/0264550518820118 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Mike Maguire,Kate Williams,Mary S. Corcoran |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Alice in Wonderland:
Voluntary sector
organisations’
experiences of
Transforming
Rehabilitation
Mary S. Corcoran
Keele University, UK
Mike Maguire and Kate Williams
South Wales University, UK
Abstract
This article explores the experience of voluntary sector organisations (VSOs) in the
Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) experiment. It identifies the motivations, expec-
tations, rationalities and experiences of voluntary sector participants, drawing on
interviews conducted with charity directors and community rehabilitation company
executives between 2015 and 2017. It concludes by reflecting on the losses and
gains that accrued to different parts of the voluntary sector, as well as critically
examining the conditions by which ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ were structured within
the TR framework.
Keywords
voluntary sector, privatisation, probation, organisational culture, offender
management
Corresponding Author:
Mary S. Corcoran, Keele University, Staffordshire, Keele, ST5 5BG, UK.
Email: m.corcoran@keele.ac.uk
The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
2019, Vol. 66(1) 96–112
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0264550518820118
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Introduction
In common with other countries which are reconstructing their public services along
neoliberal lines, the UK is heavily committed to promoting collaborations across civil
society, private capital and public prison and probation services (Meade, 2011;
Muehlebach, 2012: Annison et al., 2014: Herzog-Evans, 2014). However, few
jurisdictions have been as systematic or experimental as the UK government in their
programmatic approach to agenda-setting and the use of funding, regulatory and
legislative mechanisms to consolidate those relationships into ‘mixed markets’
composed of for-profits and public and voluntary sectors (Corcoran, 2014: Hodge,
2016: Tomczak, 2016). Despite its longstanding contribution to the work of pris-
ons, probation and resettlement more broadly, the voluntary sector has tended to
occupy a subsidiary and often unacknowledged standing in the field of criminal
justice. Beginning with the New Labour government (1997–2010), relationships
between the statutory criminal justice agencies and voluntary organisations took a
distinctively formalised turn which brought the sector even ‘closer to the apparatus
of the state’ (Dacombe and Morrow, 2016: 73). Nevertheless, during this period,
the initial impact of contestability and the marketisation of offender management
and rehabilitation initially progressed slowly and ‘the overall impact of these
developments on the voluntary sector was quite limited’ (Maguire, 2016: 63).
After the election in 2010 of a coalition government which favoured state
downsizing and fiscal austerity, the language of partnership, state-voluntary
sector ‘compacts’ and parity of esteem gave way to an emphatically marketised,
competitive and target-led approach. The contemporary landscape in which the
voluntary, private and public sectors operate is now dominated by the interests of
large-scale providers working within hierarchical commissioning structures. Whilst
much of this was in evolution over many years, the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR)
experiment epitomises an era of trickle-down economic thinking hitched to a cum-
bersome apparatus for monitoring and managing supply chains in human services.
The ‘mixed market’ of resettlement and probation, as with several other areas which
have been handed to the market, has been captured by large vested interests and
rent-seeking behaviours.
1
This framework permits only a small number of large
charities and social enterprises to position themselves most advantageously to these
conditions.
As a succession of policy reviews has documented, the much-vaunted intention to
enrol medium-sized and small voluntary organisations to deliver Through the Gate
services to support prisoners into resettlement under the TR framework largely failed
to materialise (National Audit Office, 2016: HC Public Accounts Committee, 2016:
HC Justice Committee, 2018). Indeed, the voluntary sector was found to be ‘less
involved in probation than they were before the TR reforms were implemented’ (HC
Justice Committee, 2018: 4). The failure to fulfil early ambitions to substantially
involve the voluntary sector is by now public knowledge, while there is growing
evidence that those that did engage lost out financially (Clinks, 2018), and some
suffered in terms of their reputations, as well as interference in their established
practices and the integrity of their methods, programmes and relationships with
Corcoran et al. 97
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