Editorial: A Decade of Reflection
| Author | Paul Senior |
| Pages | 1-4 |
1
EDITORIAL: A DECADE OF REFLECTION
Paul Senior, Hallam Centre for Community Justice, Sheffield Hallam University
I have had the privilege of being th e joint editor of thi s journal, first with the late Brian
Williams and then Jean Hine since its inception in 2002. I feel proud therefore to be writing
this editorial on the completion of the tenth volume of this journal. We were never quite
sure that we would get this far and, at the same time, achieve and maintain the quality
and diversity of contributions which we have managed. We have done this without a
commercial publisher but with the goodwill and support of academic colleagues from De
Montfort and Sheffield Hallam, administrative excellence in getting the journal from
conception to published form from successive Hallam Centre for Community Justice
Administrators, and the good advice and counsel of our Advisory Board.
It is though somewhat unnerving to be promoting a journal committed to exploring the
positive contribution of community justice for over a decade when one of its key
constituents, the probation service, has suffered unprecedented levels o f attack, and now
stands on the verge of extinction or at least severe constriction in the face of the current,
seemingly ideological, assault by the current government.
Any review of the last 10 years would have to note that probation itself was not entirely
lacking in responsibility for what happened to it when the National Probation Service was
created in 2001. The loss of the voice of probation in the demise of ACOP, the
simultaneous retirement of 50% of its leadership, the increasing difficulty the trade union
at NAPO faced in remaining at the decision -making table, and the willingness of the new
probation leadership to passively accept a series of managerialist and target-driven
outputs left it vulnerable to attack. Practitioners became more office-bound and struggled
to maintain their historic connections with local communities. The c entre usurped the
bottom-up developments of 'what works' to impose a programme of CBT delivery which
was ill-conceived in its scope and execution, and threw the champagne out with the cork
in allowing some of the traditional essence of probation - case management, relationships,
continuity of care, pro-social modelling - to be lo st in the pursuit of bureaucratic targets
such as breach statistics, risk assessment completions and programme completions. This
distorted organisational priorities, a s all target-driven reforms have a tendency to do (and
Payment by Results is no less a target-based mechanism with all the likelihood of 'gaming
the system') and most disturbingly threatened the very essence of what probation is
about. It is therefore somewhat surprising, though gratifying, that the resilience of
probation practitioners has remained and its voice has been re-kindled to articu late a
British Journal of Community Justice
©2013 Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield
ISSN 1475-0279
Vol. 10(3):1-4
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