Give Them Money: An Illustrative History of Forms of Reimagined Rehabilitation in Probation Practice in England and Wales
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Author | MAURICE VANSTONE |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12405 |
The Howard Journal Vol60 No 2. June 2021 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12405
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 167–184
Give Them Money: An Illustrative
History of Forms of Reimagined
Rehabilitation in Probation Practice
in England and Wales
MAURICE VANSTONE
Emeritus Professor of Criminology, School of Law, Swansea University
Abstract: Traditionally, in its efforts to help people lead offence-free lives, the probation
service has focused on work aimed at changing the individual and there has been much
less focus on the context of offending. Recent commentators have called for a reimagined
definition of rehabilitative work that includes paying attention to the social context of
offending. This article argues that this aspect of probation practice has been neglected
and attempts to trace its history in order to draw out lessons that might inform the policies
of the newly nationalised Service.
Keywords: desistance; probation history; rehabilitation; social capital
Sitting in his Soledad State Prison cell in the 1960s George Jackson1wrote:
‘[b]lack men born in the U.S. and fortunate to live past the age of eighteen
are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison’ (Jackson 1971, p.27).
Alongside this unadorned statement of fact, he set out, on the one hand the
duty that the wealthy have towards the less privileged, and on the other,
the inalienable birthright of all Americans to those assets necessary for sur-
vival, that is to say ‘meaningful social roles, education, medical care, food,
shelter and understanding’ (p.215). No apologist for his early criminal
behaviour,2he reiterated the idea of a social contract in which individuals
cede control to politicians in exchange for the resources necessary for
them to support themselves and contribute to the community. Although
he did not mention rehabilitation specifically he mirrors both its moral jus-
tification, based as it is on the recognition that the choice to offend or not is
‘bound – often tightly – by the circumstances into which offenders are born’
(Cullen 2007, p.722), and the rights-based rationale in which rehabilitation
is accepted as an integral ‘part of government planning and social policy’
(Rotman 1986, p.1036). Six centuries earlier, the French philosopher,
Nicolas Oresme (1956), in his treatise on money, pinpointed the direct
connection between the exploitation and monopolisation of wealth by the
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2020 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
The Howard Journal Vol60 No 2. June 2021
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 167–184
powerful and the impoverishment and social exclusion of others. In more
recent times, and in harmony with both Jackson and Oresme, proponents
of theories of desistance have exposed how mainstream criminology paid
scant attention to the effect of political decisions about the economy and
welfare on people’s life trajectories and the commencement of criminal
careers: as Sampson (2015) puts it, societal change and social context ‘have
yet to be systematically linked to individuals’ pathways of crime’ (p.280).
It follows that the achievement of crime-free lives depends not only on
individuals having concrete ways of achieving their basic needs, such as
employment, sound relationships and money,but also on political decision
making that creates a social and economic environment that makes such
achievement possible (Farrall 2002; Farrall, Gray and Jones 2020; Maruna
2001; Sampson 2015; Ward and Brown 2004). These observations, by dis-
parate people across time, serve to remind us that the association of social
and economic privation with the aetiologies of crime and social exclusion
has a long history, and that manifestly, it is pertinent to questions about
the rehabilitation of people who have personal histories of offending.
This is not to deny the relevance of work that endeavours to improve
the individual’s capacity to change. Farrall (2002) in arguing against the
exclusivity of cognitive-behavioural work calls for research that combines a
focus on social context and individual change; Maruna (2001) points to the
part played by the construction of new identities in pathways to crime-free
lives; and others, in a critical review of such work, acknowledge robust
international evidence of effectiveness and put forward ‘a multi-modal
approach addressing multiple criminogenic needs’ as likely to be most
effective in reducing offending (Harper and Chitty 2005, p.29).
In an important, recent treatise about the future of rehabilitative work,
Burke and his co-authors (Burke, Collett and McNeill, p.2019) flesh out the
four forms of rehabilitation originally expounded by McNeill (2012) in his
argument for an interdisciplinary understanding of the concept. Alongside
the personal, concerned with change, improvement and resolution of in-
dividual problems, they place: judicial or legal, concerned with restoration
of full citizenship; moral, that encompasses victims and the community;
and social, predicated on a civil society defined by social equality, propor-
tionate punishment, active citizenship and the genuine empowerment of
the communities in which people subject to probation live. In the latter,
emphasis is placed on collaborative relationships between supervisors and
supervised, humanistic values, and a focus on the social and economic fac-
tors, or in desistance terminology, limited social capital that hinder efforts
to lead offence-free lives. Given the current political climate in which pop-
ulist policies and the commercialisation of public service mitigate against
such achievements, this is a timely clarion call for what they call reimag-
ined rehabilitation that is, as Raynor (1997, p.259) puts it, compatible ‘with
social justice and communal solidarity’. Both managers and practitioners
involved in the renationalised probation service should heed that call, but
they might also benefit from some reflection on earlier reimaginings of
numerous people both within, and close to, the probation service. The
purpose of this article, therefore, is to explore some aspects of what is a
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2020 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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