Deconstructing Probation: Risk and Developments in Practice

Riots and probation: governing the precariat

“…Previously, probation's approach was more holistic and concerned with both welfare needs and reducing the risk of criminality. With the distancing of probation from this role, empathy and a humanistic approach to offenders has been substituted for a concentration on monitoring and risk assessment (Fitzgibbon, 2008). This relates to job insecurity and the insecurity experienced by workers in terms of their skills and career structure.…”

“…The principles of risk assessment by tick box are now common and reinforced by inspection regimes that focus on compliance with national targets and procedures (Fitzgibbon, 2008). As Standing again maintains, regulation through prescribed methods of working, targets, tick box forms, leads to interchangeable staff who can be swopped around.…”

Probation

“…Th erefore, besides the terms 'reparation', 'victim' and 'community', even the notion of probation does not escape contextual contamination. Th is is obvious when we look at the variety of practices and policies that the umbrella of probation actually covers, some of them focussing on assisting vulnerable ex-off enders to maintain themselves in society, others designed to control and prevent the phenomenon of delinquency as such (Fitzgibbon 2008 ; ). Probation sometimes aims to prevent a public sanctioning, but sometimes serves, for the deserving off ender, as a conditional alternative to a more repressive sanction.…”

Police, Probation and the Bifurcation of Community

“…In this environment, both the practitioner and the client are deconstructed (Fitzgibbon 2008). The client is fragmented into a number of characteristics described in terms of formatted, technologically-storable and comparable data (Franko Aas 2005) and is handled by any number of practitioners responsible for various stages of reprogramming who may have little or no contextual knowledge of the offender's biography (Brown and Duguid 2000).…”