Community Justice and a Model of Rehabilitation
| Author | Maurice Vanstone |
| Pages | 63-72 |
Community Justice and a Model of Rehabilitation
63
COMMUNITY JUSTICE AND A MODEL
OF REHABILITATION
Maurice Vanstone, Reader in Criminal Justice and Criminology,
Swansea University; and Philip Priestley
Abstract
In the past twenty five years or so, the pluralist tradition in the criminal justice system has
been undermined by a political obsession with punishment, and one of the consequences
of this has been the marginalisation of probation values and practice and a misguided re-
shaping of the probation model. Recent policy developments have, we argue, been based
on lack of understanding of both the traditions and potential of probation. Against the
background of the different forms probation models have taken we put forward a model for
the future which we believe restores it as an important part of a plural response to crime,
decouples it from punishment, and fits with the values that Brian Williams so consistently
espoused.
Key Words: probation, neo-punitivism, community justice, alternatives to punishment,
rehabilitation
Introduction
The neo-punitive putsch of the 1980s and 1990s (Tonry 2004, Worral & Hoy 2005)
effectively dismantled the pluralist tradition in the criminal justice system of England and
Wales, a tradition that between 1878 when probation was placed on the statute book in
Massachusetts and 1907 when the United Kingdom followed suit, stimulated a confidence
in, and a commitment to probation (in some form or another) throughout the world, for
example, New Zealand and Queensland in 1886, Belgium in 1888, Ceylon in 1891, France
1893, Bulgaria and Italy in 1904, and Chile and Sweden in 1906 (Timasheff 1943;
Trought 1927; Harris 1995; Hamai and Villé 1995). It was a confidence aptly illustrated by
the assertion of Signor Pessina, Professor of Law in the University of Naples, at the Fifth
International Prison Congress held in Paris in 1895 that ‘[it] is only a question of time for
it to find a permanent place in the judicial system of all civilized countries’ (Barrows 1896:
31).
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