Innovation and Privatisation in the Probation Service in England and Wales
| Author | Wendy Fitzgibbon |
Is it possible that innovation can arise out of the privatisation of the probation service in England and Wales? A frequent justification for the creation of the Community Rehabilitation Companies to supervise the majority of probation clients is that it can.
However, there is a paradox here that must be addressed. It is almost a truism that the long term development of probation in England and Wales since the 1990s has involved a shift away from rehabilitation and desistance through community re-integration towards risk management through surveillance and discipline administered by an increasingly deskilled workforce (Fitzgibbon, 2007; 2011).
This shift has taken place irrespective of privatisation (Fitzgibbon, 2013; Fitzgibbon & Lea, 2014). A graphic illustration of this is the fact that the recent introduction of biometric reporting now being deployed by Sodexo this year to effect a 30 per cent cut in probation staff in the CRCs under its control, (Travis, 2015) was in fact piloted by London Probation back in 2012. The pilot project was justified at the time as a bureaucracy reduction exercise which would liberate practitioners from excessive time spent on administration (Doward, 2012). Many feared it would be used to justify staffing cuts and redundancies and this appears to have now been true.
Nevertheless probation practitioners have opposed privatisation precisely on the grounds that it accentuates such tendencies, of deskilling, insecurity and an erosion of working conditions and continues the increasing precariatisation of the practitioner labour force (Standing, 2011). Practitioners now talk about the 'end of the probation ideal' and are demoralised and concerned about their futures (Deering & Feilzer, 2015).
What this ideal refers to is obviously not the recent history of national standards and the role of the Ministry of Justice in deskilling but rather the semi-autonomous social work tradition which still survives in the probation service but which will, practitioners fear, be effectively killed off by privatisation and the new CRCs.
Thus the issue is not in fact privatisation per se as a form of organisational change but the final destruction of the autonomous probation culture. As Whitehead and Crawshaw noted (2013) Probation:
'…has a textured and semi-autonomous cultural history ... [with] ... its own internal dynamics, professional routines, primary tasks and ethical-cultural configurations ... [which exhibited the ability] ... to challenge, resist and modify the prevailing hegemonic order.' (Whitehead & Crawshaw, 2013:10)
That culture has been crucial in sustaining the importance of traditional rehabilitation methods and it is this culture that has been placed under threat as much from the state as from the private sector (Fitzgibbon & Lea, 2014).
In this context the role of academic...
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