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Competing to Control in the Community: What Chance for a Culture of Care?

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The Private Sector and Criminal Justice

Abstract

This chapter considers the limits and scope of the privatisation of probation services in the UK. In so doing, it places the relationships between the traditional probation service and the private and voluntary sectors in their historical context before outlining some of the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors which led to the recent UK Coalition Government’s policy of splitting the probation service into two and creating Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) to supervise all low- and medium-risk offenders. It proceeds to offer some critical reflections on the broader debates about ‘probation as a public good’ and the prospects of privatisation in terms of costs, profits, market share and as a mechanism to drive up standards. The chapter concludes by suggesting that whilst probation services have no monopoly on ‘care’, there is need to think very carefully about how the philosophy of ‘care’ (which is fundamental to the concept of supervision, control and programme delivery) is embedded and sustained within the new professional culture and practice and structural arrangements.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Probation Service Officers are employees of the Probation Service who do not hold the Probation Officer qualification. They undertake similar tasks to their Probation Officer colleagues but are not responsible for the highest risk cases.

  2. 2.

    The successful bidder in the Durham Tees Valley area was a joint venture without a private sector company.

  3. 3.

    Addaction withdrew from the Purple Futures Partnership in April 2015 ‘due to a failure to agree on the detail of subcontracting arrangements’ (Addaction 2015).

  4. 4.

    SEEDS is an acronym for Skills for Effective Engagement, Development and Supervision. The model and its associated training are most commonly referred to as SEEDS (Sorsby et al. 2013).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Jane Dominey & Loraine Gelsthorpe

Authors
  1. Jane Dominey
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  2. Loraine Gelsthorpe
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Law, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

    Anthea Hucklesby

  2. School of Law, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

    Stuart Lister

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Dominey, J., Gelsthorpe, L. (2018). Competing to Control in the Community: What Chance for a Culture of Care?. In: Hucklesby, A., Lister, S. (eds) The Private Sector and Criminal Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-37064-8_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-37064-8_7

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