Patrolling the Borders of Risk: The New Bifurcation of Probation Services in England & Wales

• In Event: Outsourcing Probation Services in England and Wales: Theorizing and Documenting Change

Abstract

In the last 50 years, the institution of ‘probation’ in England & Wales has evolved considerably in the context of an increasingly volatile penal field. Arguably the most significant development during this period has been the rise of risk-based reasoning, which has increasingly affected the discourses, practices and organization of probation work since the 1990s in particular. During 2014, in the context of a wide-ranging programme of reforms known as Transforming Rehabilitation (TR), probation services in England & Wales have been reconfigured according to a logic of risk, such that old structures have been dissolved and replaced with two separate organizational structures: a National Probation Service responsible for the supervision of high risk offenders, and 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) responsible for the supervision of medium- and low-risk offenders (Ministry of Justice 2013). This paper takes a critical look at this institutionalization of risk in the probation context which, it is argued, belies the probation service’s knowledge and understanding of risk in relation to offending, and presents new threats to the legitimacy of community punishment in England & Wales.

Author

• Gwen Robinson, University of Sheffield