Rehabilitating
Probation

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Project Article - Indifference, resistance, possibility: Probation staff perspectives on the introduction of professional registration

The Rehabilitating Probation Project team have written an article exploring staff perspectives on the introduction of Professional Registration

Project Article - Anchors Through Change: Exploring Identity Work in the Unified Probation Service for England & Wales

Our paper explores the impact(s) of organizational change on probation workers and the identity work that they engage in as they move through iterations of change.

Project Article - A fork in the road: Probation unification in England and Wales two years on

In this paper, published in the Probation Journal, we report on frontline probation practitioners’ reflections, two years after unification, of living through a period of profound organisational change.

Can probation be rehabilitated?

An article based on Professor Gwen Robinson's Bill McWilliams memorial lecture that considered the recent past, present and potential future of the service through the lens of a central concept in probation work: namely, rehabilitation.

10 January 2024

Project Article - Whose confidence? Regional leaders’ perspectives on building confidence in a reconfigured probation service.

Our paper draws on interviews conducted with Regional Probation Directors (RPDs) in England and Wales to focus on the question of whose confidence matters and what are the challenges when building confidence from the perspective of those leaders.

1 November 2023

Project Article - Making Good?: A Study of How Senior Penal Policy Makers Narrate Policy Reversal

Our paper draws on interviews with senior national policy participants to provide a narrative reconstruction of the unification of the probation service in England and Wales

Project Article - A necessary but painful journey: Experiences of unification in a probation service region

In this first paper, published in the Probation Journal, we report on frontline probation practitioners’ reflections, one year after unification, of living through a period of profound organisational change.

Researching Probation Unification

This brief article published in the most recent issue of Probation Quarterly presents an overview of some of the themes emerging from interviews with probation practitioners in the first year following unification of probation services.

A street sign reading Petty France SW1

The role of stories in penal policy change

Bringing policy reform to fruition is an enterprise fraught with difficulty; penal policy is no different.

8 February 2023

Implementing, managing, and delivering Through the Gate Services for short-term prisoners

10 January 2023

A legitimate business? Representations of privatised probation

13 December 2022

Capturing Probation Leaders' experiences of delivering public sector reform

Drawing on tracked, longitudinal style interviews we explore the personal and professional challenges for probation leaders in having to make sense of and then implement a reform programme during a period of profound uncertainty.