Probation practice in a velvet cage? Specialist court work after probation privatisation in England and Wales
| Published date | 01 January 2020 |
| Author | Gwen Robinson |
| Date | 01 January 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474519828695 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Punishment & Society
Probation practice in a
2020, Vol. 22(1) 70–89
! The Author(s) 2019
velvet cage? Specialist
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474519828695
court work after
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
probation privatisation
in England and Wales
Gwen Robinson
University of Sheffield, UK
Abstract
This article presents findings of a study of pre-sentence probation work in Magistrates’
courts in England and Wales in the wake of a process of partial privatisation of proba-
tion services in that jurisdiction. Specifically it addresses the subjective experiences of
probation workers in two court teams and seeks to make sense of the finding that,
despite clear evidence of a process of McDonaldization in the court setting, probation
practitioners in this study experienced their work in terms that were largely positive.
Using a Weberian analytical framework, it is argued that this finding can only be fully
understood with reference to the recent history of unprecedented rupture in the
probation arena, and to a generalised perception of the court team as a ‘place of
safety’ in an otherwise hostile and turbulent field. Thus, whilst confined in Weber’s
metaphorical cage, practitioners experienced this less as a cage of iron than of rubber
and velvet.
Keywords
courts, privatisation, probation, McDonaldization, Weber
Corresponding author:
Gwen Robinson, Reader in Criminal Justice, University of Sheffield, School of Law, Winter Street, Sheffield S3
7ND, UK.
Email: g.j.robinson@sheffield.ac.uk
Robinson
71
Introduction
The English and Welsh probation service is among the longest established in
Europe (Vanstone, 2004), but its recent history is characterised by significant
and rapid change. Not only has the probation service been exposed to the influ-
ences of the kinds of broad social and political developments which have affected
the punishment field more generally (such as a ‘punitive turn’ in penal policies; the
growth of managerialism and the rise of risk as a key concept in criminal justice
and other public services), but it has also been subject to a number of specific
strategies designed to change the way probation is organised and delivered. In the
last 20 years in particular, there have been major changes affecting the organisa-
tion and governance of the service; the profile and training of its practitioners; the
size and nature of practitioners’ caseloads; and the official purposes of probation
supervision (e.g. see Burke and Collett, 2010; Raynor and Vanstone, 2007).
Most recently, the probation service has been subject to sweeping and sudden
reforms under the Coalition Government’s Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) pro-
gramme (Ministry of Justice, 2013). This saw the implementation – at unprece-
dented speed – of a complete reconfiguration of existing probation services
according to a rationality founded on the twin logics of marketization and risk
(Robinson, 2016). On 1 June 2014, the probation service (made up at that time of
35 public sector Probation Trusts) was replaced by a new, much smaller, public
sector National Probation Service (NPS) and 21 Community Rehabilitation
Companies (CRCs) which in 2015 were contracted out to a range of providers
dominated by private sector interests. To date, only a handful of studies have
considered the views and experiences of probation workers as they have transi-
tioned to the new organisational structures (e.g. Burke et al., 2017; Deering and
Feilzer, 2016; Robinson et al., 2016). Since these studies have focused mainly on
the privatised CRCs, relatively little is yet known about the day-to-day experiences
of staff in the new NPS.
One of the areas of work which the new NPS inherited was the provision of pre-
sentence services in the criminal courts, an aspect of probation work dating back to
the late 19th century (Vanstone, 2004). This was retained in the public sector,
to ensure that the provision of advice to courts around sentencing would continue
to be ‘carried out impartially and in the interests of justice’ (Ministry of Justice,
2013: 22). Indeed, current legislation explicitly states that ‘the giving of assistance
to any court in determining the appropriate sentence to pass, or making any other
decision, in respect of a person charged with or convicted of an offence’ is reserved
to ‘a probation trust or other public body’.1 This means that only the NPS and not
CRCs can submit pre-sentence reports2 and provide advice to the courts.
Despite its importance as an aspect of probation practice, court work has
received very little research attention in England and Wales: the only empirical
study to provide a direct insight into probation’s role in the Magistrates’ courts is
now over 40 years old (Carlen, 1976). Although there have been several studies of
the main artefacts of court work (i.e. pre-sentence reports), these have tended to
72
Punishment & Society 22(1)
focus on issues of quality (e.g. Gelsthorpe and Raynor, 1995) rather than the
experiences of staff producing them, whether deployed in specialist court teams
or in field teams responsible for a variety of probation tasks. This article presents
findings from an ethnographic study of two teams of probation staff based in local
Magistrates’ courts,3 which set out to explore the contemporary nature of this type
of work after TR. A key finding of the study was that this type of work was
evolving rapidly under the influence of both TR and a parallel central policy
programme (known as Transforming Summary Justice) aimed at increasing the
efficiency and speed of criminal proceedings (Robinson, 2018). For example, by
early 2017 when the research commenced, the proportion of ‘traditional’, written
pre-sentence reports (produced in the space of an adjournment between conviction
and sentence of typically three weeks) prepared for the Magistrates’ courts had
dropped to just 1%, while the proportion of reports prepared on the day of request
and delivered orally in court had risen to 68%4 (Ministry of Justice, 2017; see also
Robinson, 2017). Another key development was that the NPS had taken a decision
to implement a national model of fully specialist court teams, such that members
of field probation teams would no longer have the opportunity to provide pre-
sentence reports or conduct ‘court duty’ as part of their wider role (NPS, 2016).
Instead, each court would have a dedicated court probation team, including both
fully qualified Probation Officers and Probation Service Officers without a profes-
sional qualification.
On the basis of my research findings, I have argued elsewhere that the coinci-
dence of Transforming Rehabilitation and Transforming Summary Justice – on top
of longer-term trends associated with managerialisation – have jointly pressed
probation work in the Magistrates’ courts into a shape consistent with George
Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis (Ritzer 2015a/2015b, 1998; Robinson, 2018). The
offices of contemporary court teams, I have argued, today resemble factory-like
environments, in which the work is increasingly being shaped by efficiency con-
siderations; being evaluated with reference to quantitative outputs; subject to pre-
dictable processes and routines; and controlled by structures and systems requiring
pre-emptive compliance and largely negating the need for managerial oversight.
In the current article I turn my attention to the subjective experiences of the
probation workers in the teams who participated in the research. To that end,
I draw principally on interview data collected in the course of the study, and I
utilise an analytical framework suggested by Ritzer but derived from Weber’s
metaphor of the ‘iron cage of rationality’. Although much sociological scholarship
(and Ritzer’s original thesis) has suggested themes of deprofessionalisation and
dehumanization in McDonaldized occupations, the analysis presented here takes
as its starting point Ritzer’s argument that such themes should not be regarded as
inevitable and their salience (or otherwise) must be established empirically in par-
ticular contexts. In this article I seek to make sense of the finding that, despite clear
evidence of a process of McDonaldization in their place of work (Robinson, 2018),
discontent among the teams was minimal. Not only did team members talk about
their work in terms that were overwhelmingly positive, but as a researcher
Robinson
73
spending time with the teams my sense was of a happy workplace and a workforce
that was largely contented. I argue that, whilst several aspects of court work help
to explain this finding, it can only be fully understood with reference to the recent
history of unprecedented rupture in the probation field, and to a generalised but
largely unspoken perception among team members of the court team as a ‘place of
safety’ in an otherwise hostile and turbulent field.
Analytical framework
In the last 25 years, George Ritzer’s (1993) McDonaldization thesis has proven a
popular framework for making sense of broadly similar developments across a
range of industries and occupations engaged in the production of goods and
services. Presented as an explicit development of Weber’s (1921/1968) theory of
rationalization, and echoing Weber’s characterisation of the ‘bureaucracy’ as the
ideal-typical model of a rationalization process in the Western world of the early
20th century, Ritzer’s original thesis suggested that the fast-food restaurant had
come to represent a dominant form of economic organisation that was creeping
into a range of both low-level and...
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