This article explores probation practice through the architecture and arrangement of a probation office led by a Community Rehabilitation Company. It presents findings from an ethnographic study of a probation office in a large city, combining observations of the research site with data derived from interviews with 20 members of staff. Drawing on Foucault’s art of distributions, the article highlights how the managerial dynamics of recent decades have filtered into the physicality of the office to influence probation practice. It argues that probation practice under Transforming Rehabilitation can be situated along a managerial continuum, as standardized, computer-based work has become further entrenched within the office.

This article reviews developments in probation in England and Wales since 2010, a decade in which services were exposed to the logic of competition and profit. In 2014, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government’s Transforming Rehabilitation ( TR) reforms promised an end to a top-down, target-centric culture of state intervention by outsourcing services for low-to-medium risk offenders to 21 privately-owned Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). And yet, just four years after the reforms were implemented, the Conservative government announced that CRCs’ contracts would be terminated, with all offender management services returned to the public sector. With a focus on the private sector, the article argues that radical change to the probation service’s structure has entrenched a focus on centrally-administered performance targets and audit. In other words, contrary to the decentralising rhetoric at the core of TR, the decade has in many ways produced more of the same managerialism that the reforms were presented as a means to displace. The result has been a general decline in the quality of probation services.

This paper utilises the concept of organizational professionalism to illustrate the importance of emotional labour for probation practice, as well as its potential consequences for practitioners. Based on an ethnographic study of a probation office led by a privately-owned Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC), the paper demonstrates that probation values are operationalised through the performance of emotional labour with offenders. However, the implementation of the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms has exacerbated long-term trends away from working with 'people' towards working with 'things'that is, the information technologies on which the CRC depends for payment. That practitioners are willing to forgo their administrative responsibilities to spend time with their clients suggests emotional labour is fundamental to practitioner understandings of professional identity. The paper thus demonstrates that the challenges of balancing a client-centred ideology of service with the increased administrative pressures that have accompanied the TR reforms have further exposed probation practitioners to emotional exhaustion, stress, and sickness.

This paper draws from Foucauldian understandings of the sociology of the professions to explore legitimacy, identity, and practice in probation after the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms to services in England and Wales. A discourse of ‘professionalism’ was crucial to the Coalition Government’s mobilization of TR; however, the contested nature of the term is rarely acknowledged in a probation context. Based on an ethnographic study of a privately-owned Community Rehabilitation Company, the paper demonstrates how professionalism in probation has been reshaped by punitive, managerial, and rehabilitative ‘adaptations’. It argues that professionalism has been detached from its ideal-typical groundings, becoming a malleable practice of (self-)government which is integral to how probation professionals demonstrate their legitimacy to multiple (and competing) actors in a network of accountability – the state, the public, offenders, adjacent organizations, and, additionally, private providers. Accordingly, appeals to a discourse of professionalism are a source of meaning for staff and a disciplinary mechanism that governs their conduct ‘at a distance’.

This article explores the changing nature of supervision in a Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC) following the Transforming Rehabilitation ( TR) reforms to probation services in England and Wales. Based on an ethnographic study of an office within a privately owned CRC, it argues that TR has entrenched long-term trends towards ‘Taylorised’ probation practice. This is to say that qualitative and quantitative changes to the complexion of practitioners’ caseloads since TR reflect a decades-long devaluation of the probation service and its staff. The decision to allocate most qualified practitioners to the National Probation Service means that Case Managers (i.e. probation service officers) now supervise offenders who would historically have been supervised by Senior Case Managers (i.e. probation officers). This loss of expertise has been exacerbated by administrative staff redundancies at the office. The result is an increasingly standardised and fragmented mode of working within the CRC in which the majority of services are now delivered by the voluntary sector.