Police, Probation and the Bifurcation of Community

Abstract

The police and probation services are agencies that have traditionally had close relations with the communities in which they work. Both agencies exhibit tensions in their relations with the community: in policing, in the relation between centralised targets and community needs, and in probation in the role of the community in the process of rehabilitation and desistance. We argue that these tensions mirror deeper contradictions within current urban and social policy concerning the role envisaged for community in the process of urban renewal.

Exceptionalism for most, excess for others: The legal foundation of a bifurcated criminal justice system in Denmark

“…This raises the question of whether the policies have been intended to address gang crime through innovative control mechanisms or if their main purpose has been to serve as reassuring tokenism. Bifurcation carries connotations of discriminatory practices of marginalized population groups (Fitzgibbon and Lea, 2010;Ruggiero, 2013), threatens the rights of offenders through curtailments of prisoner rights and unproportioned sentence lengths (Snacken, 2006), and has been found to put pressure on the prison system in the form of both overcrowding (Snacken and Beyens, 1994) and a concentration of dangerous and difficult offenders which in its own right threatens the ability of prisons to deliver rehabilitative services, since resources have to be allocated to control practices (Hudson, 1993). Further studies could follow Storgaard in an endeavour to unfold issues of access to justice in regard to bifurcated penal practices (Storgaard, 2020).…”

Supervising Rioters: The Role of Probation

“…While, from Cocker's account, there is no evidence that probation officers actually saw the rioters as political offenders, this was, nevertheless, traditional, old‐style probation, heavily rooted in social and community work. It clashed with the cognitive therapy approaches increasingly dominant in probation and, by contrast, supported the conclusions of research on routes to successful desistance from further offending (Maruna and Immarigeon ; Farrall ; Fitzgibbon and Lea ) which suggested ‘that probation work should be less focused on “offending related” issues and more on areas that have been found to correlate with desistance, such as employment or family relationship experiences’ (Cocker , p.273). West Yorkshire Probation, at that time, appears to have been still sufficiently independent of both official government theorising about community cohesion and from the punitive sentencing regime (which, paradoxically, enhanced the involvement of probation), to pursue, as Cocker noted, those desistance strategies that traditionally have worked best.…”

Improving Criminal Justice Workplaces

“…Finally we look at the concept of professionalisation in Chapter 6. This has featured significantly in discussions about reforming aspects of the Criminal Justice System particularly in relation to policing (Neyroud, 2013) and probation (Fitzgibbon and Lea, 2010).…”