This paper is based on the author's chapter in the recent edited book 'Not Your Usual Suspect' published by Emerald Publishing.
"The landscape of the Probation Service in England and Wales continues to be challenged by matters of priorities, workload, and meaningful relationships between offenders and practitioners. In a climate of uncertainty and renationalisation of the Service, vulnerable offenders on probation become the ones mostly affected due to management plans and license conditions that may not respond to the variability of their needs. This research explores the older individuals on probation and uses the framework of Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) to examine the extent to which it accommodates the needs of this group of offenders in an otherwise risk-based context. This study draws ideas from previous research of the author and aims to develop the existing limited academic attention that older offenders supervised under specialised probation contexts have received. The purpose of the relevant chapter remains doctrinal in nature as a response to the need for a more comprehensive and inclusive perception of the risk of reoffending later in life and its implications for bespoke community reintegration strategies. This approach also allows for theorisation of MAPPA’s multi-agency structure and its prospects for the rehabilitation of older offenders. The study finds that as MAPPA only manages violent and sexual offenders, the ‘older MAPPA offender’ becomes a special category for probation that may exhibit a variety of needs and life circumstances. It thereby becomes even more important for these offenders that a constructive working relationship between them and the probation officer is in place. This supports the latter in appreciating what factors lead the individual to offending later in life and what interventions may be most effective to address their risk of re-offending as well as their needs in the community."

In this paper, we present findings from an ongoing 'Research and Development' project, commissioned by the Confederation of European Probation. The project aims to explore the uses and role of research in the development of effective and ethical probation work, and to identify future research needs. We will present findings from a survey completed by almost 1,000 European probation professionals, and from focus groups with a wide range of stakeholders.

Hope can be a powerful driver for positive change in peoples’ lives. As such, fostering hope could – and some argue should – be a key feature of effective probation practice and probation services. However, very little research has sought to understand what people on probation hope for, nor whether probation supports people to achieve their hopes. In this talk we will present findings from a study which explored the concept of hope in probation in England. Through a combination of walking groups and interviews with people on probation, staff working in probation, policymakers and other interested parties we sought to understand ways in which probation does and does not create the conditions for more hopeful lives for people on probation. Our findings shed light on what people – both staff and supervisees – hope to get from probation and what forms of practice and policy can help and hinder the fulfilment of those hopes.

Hope is ‘an active state grounded in reality’ and can either be ‘invested in an existing system’ or ‘born from a lack of identifiable bearings’ (Seeds, 2022). Using this framework, we identify ways in which probationers’ and practitioners’ hopes span relatively short-term goals such as finishing a sentence or avoiding breach to longer-term, more aspirational hopes for a better life. We consider how these different types of hopes can be understood as the foundations for successful desistance down the line and identify the challenges for probation when it comes to focusing on hope as a tenet of good practice. Our talk therefore concludes by looking to the future with a discussion of what participants believe is needed to change – on a practice and systemic level – to enable people on probation, probation services and probation practitioners to achieve their hopes more readily.

This paper draws on the literature on security to explore how changes to the governance of the probation service in England and Wales have filtered into identities and practices. It utilises a framework of ‘nodal governance’ to show how efforts towards rehabilitation and the management of risk are not organised from the top-down; rather, they are dispersed among a network of actors. Based on data derived from 38 semi-structured interviews with probation staff, the paper considers the importance of, and challenges inherent to, engaging providers beyond (private) and below (voluntary) the state. The relationships between these ‘nodes’ are explored in the context of recent organisational reforms – specifically, the part-privatisation of probation through Transforming Rehabilitation, in 2014, and the subsequent ‘unification’ of the service in June 2021. The paper theorises probation’s role in a contemporary programme of security. It argues that a nodal emphasis on the relational aspect of security is a practical and necessary means to address the often multiple and overlapping needs of the individuals under probation supervision. In this sense, the service can, and ought to, perform a civilizing function as a central, organising node which connects correctional, social, and treatment spheres. However, its ability to realise such an axial role is being undermined by institutional crisis and a lack of capacity within the wider programme of security in which probation operates.