Investing in ‘Toughness’: Probation, Enforcement and Legitimacy

Abstract

This article examines the rise in prominence of ‘enforcement’ as a key aspect of the work of the probation service in England and Wales, and assesses the extent to which probation's ‘enforcement turn’ can be said to have enhanced the legitimacy of the Service. With reference to research on the effects of the toughening up of enforcement policies on both offenders and staff, this article argues that the equation of ‘toughness’ and ‘legitimacy’ in the probation context is deeply problematic. The article concludes that we may have reached a ‘tipping point’ with regard to enforcement and its reputational significance for the probation service, and that a more responsive and flexible approach towards the enforcement of community sanctions may be emerging.

Understanding Compliance Dynamics in Community Justice Settings

“…That said, practitioners operate within a performancefocused policy climate that places demands on them to pursue target-driven outcomes. Key examples of these outcomes are measurable proxies for compliance (for example, attendance and completion) which do not require service user participation and engagement (Phillips, 2015;McCulloch, 2013;Robinson, 2013;Robinson et al, 2014;Robinson and Ugwudike, 2012). Some have argued that in the current penal policy climate, compliance issues are now embedded in the managerialist imperatives of efficient and cost-effective offender management.…”

Legitimacy on Licence: Why and How it Matters

“…They argue that in the sphere of criminal justice, front‐line professionals must pay most attention to their perceived legitimacy since these people have the most frequent and direct encounters with those who might contest their legitimacy on a day‐to‐day basis. In recent years, further studies in the field of community sanctions have drawn on, and developed, the concept of legitimacy (Digard ; Hucklesby ; Nellis ; Robinson and Ugwudike ). Most pertinent in the context of the current article, McNeill and Robinson () indicate that supervisory relationships are likely to constitute the key site or resource for enhancing offenders’ perceptions of the legitimacy of community sanctions.…”

Myopia and misrecognition: The impact of managerialism on the management of compliance

“…Firstly, Crawford and Hucklesby make the case that because states accept they no longer have a monopoly on crime control, along with evidence that criminal justice institutions are not effective in terms of rehabilitation, reform and prevention means that legitimacy and compliance are both deeply implicated in and interconnected with each other in ways that require close conceptual scrutiny and empirical analysis and demand our attention in thinking about ways of better regulating people's behaviour and fostering conformity with prevailing social norms. (Crawford and Hucklesby, 2013: 3-4) This article contributes to this particular line of thought by focusing on one way in which compliance has been used, ostensibly at least, to enhance the legitimacy of probation (Robinson and Ugwudike, 2012) by presenting analysis of the ways in which probation workers go about encouraging compliance in a particular field.…”

“…One answer lies in the way in which the change in the objective field 'incorporated cognitive structures [which were] attuned to the objective structures' of the new policy (Bourdieu, 2000: 178). In some respects we can see this as the swing of a pendulum that had swung towards enforcement, which practitioners found difficult to reconcile with their habitus (Robinson and Ugwudike, 2012), and had now swung back towards a more amenable form of practice. In relative terms, the new policy could be seen as a less bad option than its predecessor.…”