Delivering McJustice? The probation factory at the Magistrates’ court
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| Author | Gwen Robinson |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895818786997 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895818786997
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2019, Vol. 19(5) 605 –621
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895818786997
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Delivering McJustice? The
probation factory at the
Magistrates’ court
Gwen Robinson
University of Sheffield, UK
Abstract
Despite playing a pivotal role in thousands of defendants’ experiences of criminal justice every year,
the role of probation workers in the English and Welsh Magistrates’ courts has been neglected by
researchers for several decades. This article presents the findings of an ethnographic study of the
work of probation staff in two such courts. The study suggests that probation work in this context
is being squeezed into an operating model which bears all the hallmarks of a process described by
Ritzer as ‘McDonaldization’. It is argued that the proximate causes of McDonaldization in this sub-
field of probation work lie at the intersection of parallel Government-led reform programmes –
Transforming Rehabilitation and Transforming Justice – which have respectively focused on creating a
market for probation services and enhancing the administrative efficiency of criminal proceedings.
Until now, almost no attention has been paid, either by researchers or policy-makers, to the
intersection of these programmes of reform in the probation suites at the Magistrates’ courts.
Keywords
McDonaldization, Magistrates’ courts, pre-sentence reports, probation, Transforming Justice,
Transforming Rehabilitation
Introduction
Since its inception in the late 19th century, probation work in England & Wales has included
the provision of a service to the criminal courts, centred on offering information about
defendants between conviction and sentence to inform the courts’ decisions, and assessing
suitability for non-custodial options (Vanstone, 2004). As several commentators have
observed, probation work in the juridical field is the frontline of practice as far as both
Corresponding author:
Gwen Robinson, School of Law, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield, S3 7ND.
Email: g.j.robinson@sheffield.ac.uk
786997CRJ0010.1177/1748895818786997Criminology & Criminal JusticeRobinson
research-article2018
Article
606 Criminology & Criminal Justice 19(5)
sentencers and defendants are concerned: it is here that sentencers have access to informa-
tion about what probation services can provide and that many defendants encounter proba-
tion staff for the first time. Yet, in England & Wales, very little is known about how
probation work in the courts has developed. Although there have been several studies of the
main artefacts of that work (i.e. pre-sentence reports) over the years, researchers have oth-
erwise neglected this key area of probation work. The only empirical study to provide a
direct insight into probation’s role in the courts, Pat Carlen’s (1976; Carlen and Powell,
1979) Magistrates’ Justice, is now over 40 years old. Given the considerable structural and
cultural changes that have impacted probation services since then, we clearly cannot rely
on this to inform our understanding of probation’s contemporary role in court.
By far the most significant of these changes has been the bifurcation of probation ser-
vices under the coalition government’s Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms (Ministry
of Justice, 2013; Robinson, 2016). With their emphasis on creating a market for probation
services, the TR reforms dissolved the former 35 public sector Probation Trusts and replaced
them with a new architecture for the delivery of probation services: namely, a new (public
sector) National Probation Service (NPS), and 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies
(CRCs) which in early 2015 were contracted to a range of (predominantly private sector)
providers. In this reconfiguration, the provision of probation services in the criminal courts
fell to the new NPS, while CRCs were excluded from all such work, with a view to avoiding
conflicts of (commercial) interest. The new NPS thus took on all pre-sentence work, includ-
ing the provision of court liaison staff and the preparation of all pre-sentence reports, as well
as the prosecution of offenders in breach cases.
Meanwhile, a parallel policy programme, latterly known as Transforming Justice
(TJ), was being implemented in the wider juridical field (e.g. Ministry of Justice, 2012a,
2012b).1 Primarily directed at the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts,
Transforming Justice represents a range of initiatives associated with the ‘moderniza-
tion’ of the criminal process that have been traced back to the 1980s (Raine, 2000).
Prominent among its themes has been the construction of delay as a problem in criminal
proceedings, and a concomitant emphasis on speeding up justice (e.g. DCA, 2006;
Ministry of Justice, 2012a; Ward, 2015). Despite being a key actor in respect of the dis-
posal of a significant proportion of criminal cases, and playing an active role in the
preparation of reports in the space between conviction and sentence,2 the probation ser-
vice is hardly mentioned in the raft of documents associated with TJ. Nonetheless, in the
last few years TJ has been a significant driver of a move towards faster delivery pre-
sentence reports (PSRs) and a concomitant drop in the proportion of ‘traditional’ written
reports prepared during a typical adjournment of three weeks (known as Standard
Delivery Reports). In the year that the TR reforms were implemented (2014), just 21 per
cent of pre-sentence reports prepared by probation workers were Standard Delivery
Reports; the remaining 79 per cent were either delivered orally on the day of request, or
were ‘Fast Delivery Reports’ prepared in writing within five days of request (Ministry of
Justice, 2015). By early 2017 the proportion of Standard Delivery Reports had dropped
further to just 4 per cent (Ministry of Justice, 2017a; see also Robinson, 2017).
This article seeks to shed much needed light on the hitherto neglected arena of pre-
sentence probation work in the Magistrates’ courts. It presents findings from an explora-
tory ethnographic study of probation work in two such courts which was conducted in
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