Risk and Privatisation
| Author | Wendy Fitzgibbon |
| Pages | 87-90 |
87
THOUGHT PIECE
'Thought Pieces' are papers which draw on the author's personal knowledge and
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normal way.
RISK AND PRIVATISATION
Wendy Fitzgibbon, Reader in Criminology, London Metropolitan University
A privatised probation service will involve a plurality of providers with different histor ies,
working practices, priorities and skills. This has implications for the management of risk.
The most obvious aspect is the risk of leakage of sensitive data about offend ers and their
victims. Probation always handled data from other agencies - from prisons and police,
shared data via Multi-Agency Public Protection Arran gements (MAPPA). Usually the
problem was risk assessment data on individuals not being efficiently passed between
agencies (e.g. from prison to probation) leading to wro ng risk assessments. Th is will now
be joined by the problem of data leakage to the media and the 'lost laptop' problem will
increase as members of consortia share sen sitive data on offenders. Low cost , low skill
private providers will increase the probability and frequen cy of the 'lost laptop' problem in
turn raising issues of human rights and privacy.
The most effective solution for collab orating agencies is data centralisation in a separate,
secure location accessible only to specified personnel. The logical solution would be that
National Probation Service (NPS) holds all data. This would minimise problems of disposal
of sensitive data when contracts termin ate. But it would also increase the direct control of
NPS over private Community Rehabilitation Compani es (CRCs) thus undermining the
whole privatisation project. NPS will in any case be much too small to handle such a
central monitoring task.
Leakage is one problem, data falsification is another. Individual and system failure was the
general explanation for failures to pass information (notably estimates of risk of further
offending) from one public sector agency to another - in the Sonnex case from prison to
probation (Fitzgibbon, 2011). Privatisation brings the additional problem that private
providers with an eye to contract renewal have a disincentive to share data which migh t
render them likely to blame. Thus in a 'Sonnex' scenario th e private CRC might be
British Journal of Community Justice
©2013 Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield
ISSN 1475-0279
Vol. 11(2-3): 87-90
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