In contemporary probation, the "future" is omnipresent, approached from a defensive angle. Drawing on the recommendations and formulation tools from Good Lives Model practices and a structured review of recent literature, this article proposes a specification of the Good Lives Model Framework explicitly oriented toward the future (the principle of time, Temporalized Good Lives Model). (1) Primary goods are conceptualized as socially compatible "preferred futures"; (2) the Good Life Plan becomes an architecture of robust scenarios (milestones, alternative plans, conditions of viability); (3) dynamic risk factors are reclassified as obstacles situated on the trajectory, while protective factors and strengths become the resources making this future tenable; (4) lived temporality (presentism, prospection, continuity of the future self) and agency are treated as clinical and criminological mechanisms. For this Temporalized Good Lives Model principle, we propose a concrete five-step "future-first" procedure and a research/implementation agenda to support probation that is simultaneously rigorous, engaging, and testable.
This article presents findings of empirical research with British ex-servicewomen who were subject to military sexual trauma (MST) during their military careers. Drawing on eight in-depth qualitative interviews, we explore their experiences and perceptions of the service justice system (SJS), revealing good practice alongside persistent, ingrained barriers to justice. Ranging from lack of information and victim-survivor support through to inadequate investigations and social and professional retaliation, our findings illustrate structural, cultural and operational challenges throughout the SJS response to MST. Centring victim-survivors' voices, our findings capture a spectrum of engagement with the SJS and contribute unique insights into how the process is perceived and navigated by victim-survivors. They underscore the need for continued engagement with victim-survivors as reforms are implemented and evaluated.
Prison officers face considerable challenges in their day-to-day work, stemming both from the nature of their role and the environment in which they operate. Over the past two decades, these challenges have intensified, with the prison estate in England and Wales widely regarded as being 'in crisis'. This article uses Freedom of Information data from 2010 to 2024 to examine sickness absences attributed to psychological reasons among Prison Service employees. The findings reveal a significant increase in psychological illness-related absences, rising from 5.66% to 12.90%. More concerning is the sharp rise in the proportion of staff leaving the service who had previously taken psychological sick leave, now accounting for 39% of all leavers. These findings offer a troubling insight into the mental health and well-being of prison staff, showing that sickness rates in the Prison Service exceed those in the police and are only slightly below those in the Probation Service during comparable periods.
Prisoner deaths are significantly increasing in England and Wales. The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman investigates circumstances around self-inflicted deaths, including how a prisoner’s risks have been managed. Our empirical study demonstrates that the ombudsman’s approach inadvertently and inevitably contains blame: negative affects, emotions and judgements combined with the attribution of responsibility. Investigations usually fail as prison staff fear and withdraw, anticipating the transfer of blame between the ombudsman and other investigative mechanisms (e.g. inquests). Ombudsman and prison staff also contest analyses of a death (e.g. individual staff performance vs complex prison conditions), so frustration and tension escalate between the ombudsman and prison staff. We innovatively conceptualise the ombudsman’s approach as a blaming assemblage that combines opportunities and challenges. Consequently, we defy the standard call for discrete and ostensibly ‘blame-free’ accountability and learning mechanisms, instead suggesting how the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman could more productively name blame and engage with accountability and learning.
This article offers a workforce-led periodisation of probation reform in England and Wales under successive Conservative-led governments between 2010 and 2024. Existing analyses of probation reform are commonly organised around a policy-led model that treats Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) as a bounded rupture, followed by organisational restoration through reunification. Drawing on national-level workforce data and informed by Historical Institutionalism, this article develops an alternative four-period account that foregrounds changes in workforce composition, stability and experience as indicators of institutional capacity. The analysis shows how austerity-driven contraction, the removal of administrative and support capacity during TR’s implementation, prolonged instability in workforce retention, and post-reunification expansion without the recovery of experiential depth combined to reshape probation’s organisational ecology over time. These workforce transformations reveal processes of institutional drift and conversion that were not coterminous with formal moments of reform and were not reversed by reunification. To account for these dynamics, this article introduces the concept of experience laundering to describe how numerical growth following a period of rapid contraction masks the cumulative loss of experience and professional depth across all grades. The article demonstrates the methodological value of workforce-led periodisation for analysing incremental institutional change and contributes to wider criminological debates on how criminal justice institutions endure, adapt and weaken under prolonged reform.
