A failed social experiment: damaged professional identity post 'transforming rehabilitation
| Author | Sam Cooper |
| Position | Probation Officer |
| Pages | 46-66 |
46
British Journal of Community Justice
©2021 Manchester Metropolitan University
ISSN 1475-0279
Vol. 17(2) 46–66
https://doi.org/10.48411/q52p-j685
A FAILED SOCIAL EXPERIMENT: DAMAGED
PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY POST ‘TRANSFORMING
REHABILITATION’
Sam Cooper: Probation Officer
Contact email: sam.wp@hotmail.co.uk
Abstract
Following the Government’s Transforming Rehabilitation process of privatising half of the
Probation Service, research found that profession identity and resilience had been
damaged in the aftermath. Five years later, just after the Government announcement that
Probation is to be re-unified, this paper explores the impact of the last five years on 7
members of staff working in one of the CRC companies that originally reported the lowest
resilience and the most difficult working experiences. Narrative inquiry was used to allow
staff to tell their own stories, and then followed up by semi-structured interviews to fill in
any gaps in data. Key themes which emerged were loss of professional discretion,
resistance to financial driven decision making and diminished self-efficacy as a result of
inconsistent management oversight. Recommendations are made at the end of the paper
to assist new managers to ease the transition and support staff resilience.
Keywords
Professional Identity, Self-Efficacy, Decision Making, Morals and Ethics, Professional
Discretion
A Failed Social Experiment: Damaged Professional identity post ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’
47
Introduction
The difficult working conditions of front-line probation staff has long been recognised and
resulted in a large review into the resilience of probation officers across Europe between
2012 and 2013 (Vogelvang and Clarke, 2013). The underlying ethos was to ensure staff
wellness and avoid stress, trauma and eventual burn-out during their employment. This was
considered necessary even before the added stressors of entire structural paradigm shifts
that UK probation staff have faced (Senior, 2016; Robinson et al., 2017).
This paper will examine the impact that privatisation has had on the probation staff who
were transferred to the private sector. It will examine how the fundamental shift from
socially driven to profit driven ideology has affected staff and the impact on their
professional identity. Outlining the history of probation is beyond the scope of this paper
and has been done eloquently by numerous other writers (Maruna, 2007; Phillips, 2010;
Deering and Feilzer, 2017; Robinson et al., 2017), instead I will focus on what came after as
staff prepare, once more for re-nationalisation.
This paper attempts to explore what form and to what extent professional identity and
emotional resilience has been impacted by the privatization of part of the service and make
some suggestions for managers to support staff during the re-unification process. Data was
gathered by way of narrative inquiry and semi-structured interviews with seven members
of staff who were in the privatised part of the service, and this will be discussed below.
Damage to legitimacy
One of the biggest issues for staff following privatisation has been the perception of
legitimacy and loss of trust in the professional ability of those members who were
transferred to the private sector (Robinson et al., 2017). Staff historically had a sense of
pride in their professional role and the organisation they worked for, according to Deering
and Feilzer (2017), often joining the probation service through a desire to serve the public
but following privatisation, research suggests they lost faith in their role and the
government which had brought about these changes. They found that rather than work in
the private sector, many officers chose to leave their jobs wi th 28.9% of staff in the CRCs
actively seeking new employment after the split (Kirton and Guillaume, 2015).
This loss of staff has acted as an almost self-fulfilling prophecy, because the drastically
reduced numbers of qualified and experienced staff has led to increased workloads and the
associated lowering of standards as staff struggle to keep up with higher caseloads (Senior
2016). This reduced standard of risk management has then been publicised and heavily
criticized as being a failure of the TR process (Barton, 2019; Deering and Feilzer, 2019),
leaving staff feeling unfairly judged.
Professional identity as an internal construct
Many disciplines have attempted to define professional identity, from psychology and
sociology to philosophy (Motallebzadeh and Kazemi, 2018) but have found i t intrinsically
difficult. Writers have accepted that many factors affect an individual’s sense of i dentity
from race, age, gender, nationality, and self-esteem (Motallebzadeh and Kazemi, 2018) to
personality factors and emotional state (Chamberlain et al., 2005). Because some of these
To continue reading
Request your trial