Practitioner perspectives on risk: Using governmentality to understand contemporary probation practice

Abstract

This article reports findings from a study investigating if, how and why concerns regarding risk are impacting on probation work in England and Wales from the practitioner perspective. It begins with a review of key debates regarding how 'the rise of risk' has come about and with what effects. I then briefly explain what the study entailed-its aims and objectives, methods and theoretical framework (governmentality). Findings from the study are then presented. These are at odds with the 'critical consensus' that risk has dramatically altered the nature of practice. The article concludes with discussion of the implications of these findings for ongoing debates regarding the significance of risk in probation practice.

Officers and Drug Counsellors: New Occupational Identities in Nordic Prisons

“…According to such arguments, present risk thinking, influenced by neoliberal principles of efficient management of welfare services, has eroded the humanistic and reha-bilitative component in prison contexts. The morally-based, closer relationship between officers and inmates -based partly on officers' discretionary acts -has been replaced by an impersonal focus on managerial regulation (Hardy 2013). However, as Hardy suggests, and as our data confirm, it may be more correct to see the prison as being in a state of flux, characterized not by a wholesale rejection of the rehabilitative ideal of former times, but by a mixture of welfare and risk.…”

“…Second, seen from a prison perspective, our data may be seen as representing examples of what has been termed late modern hybrids in criminal practice (Hardy 2013). Recent arguments about penal practices have focused on the abandonment of welfare thinking in favour of risk thinking (Bullock 2011;Seddon, Williams and Ralphs 2012).…”

“…There are reasons to believe that instead of wholesale rejections of discretionary power and previous welfare models -characterized by more sincere intentions of rehabilitation and seeing the inmate not as a risk factor but a whole moral person -we are seeing the emergence of 'late modern hybrids'. In these hybrids practitioners integrate and accommodate new penal ideas and initiatives into their existing occupational identity (Hardy 2013). In this article, we will describe one such hybrid.…”

Probation practice in the information age

“…More recently, Hardy (2014) has analysed practitioner perspectives on risk using governmentality as an analytical framework. He argues that whilst risk was prevalent in much of his participants' work, its presence has not resulted in the 'wholesale jettisoning of rehabilitation as intent or practice' (Hardy, 2014: 315).…”

Drugs in prisons: Exploring use, control, treatment and policy

“…Increasingly, drug problems, as well as social problems more generally, are understood, tackled as well as produced within this framework of risk and risk management (see also : Bullock, 2011) and a criminalisation of drug problems and policy (Duke, 2006). However, as suggested by Hardy (2013) and by the various articles in this Special Issue it may be more correct to see the prison as being in a state of flux, characterised not by a wholesale rejection of the penal-welfare ideal, but by a mixture of welfare, risk and security. Rarely, however, is the mass incarceration of people who use drugs in itself questioned in official policy; neither ethically nor as being an effective strategy to reduce drugrelated harms in prisons and society.…”