1. Professor in criminal and social justice
The History of Probation in the UK Social Work History Network London 25th May 2017
Dr Philip Whitehead
Professor in criminal and social justice
Teesside University

2. What to explore in the time we’ve got
Explore the origins of the probation system in 19th century
Conditions of existence and surface of emergence (Garland)
Always an interest in origins and wanted to write about it (Whitehead and Statham 2006; 30 years after Bochel in 1976) – do the job and understand its history, tradition, culture, and role in CJS
Tried to bring this long history up to date in Transforming Probation (2016)
Welcome relief to talk about history than the last 20 to 30 years of political impositions; intellectual detachment/emotion and rage

3. Before 1876 and the first PCM of CETS
The era of Victorian liberalism and ideology of laissez-faire individualism
19th c. conception of the offender – freedom and equality under the law, individual responsibility, imbued with Enlightenment reason, rational choice (the ontology of the human subject)
This conception was reflected in the politico-economic and ideological conditions of existence: laissez-faire capitalism, minimalist state, freedom of the individual in a market-driven society, individual choice and responsibility (ring any bells?), which justified and legitimated a penality of retribution, deterrent penal and social policies, the prison system
In other words, mid-Victorian criminal justice and penal policy meshed with a particular state formation, view of the world, ideology, belief system, understanding of human behaviour
We cannot understand criminal justice or penal and social policy unless we take account of the politico-economic conditions of existence and concepts of state, ideology, class, power. For Garland (1985) Punishment and Welfare to a large extent penality is structured by its political and social context; it rests on a particular platform that we can excavate and explain (reference to Marxist theory)

4. From 1880s disruption of Victorian penality (History of CJS and timescales)
CHANGES – a changing political and economic context; recession, poverty, deprivation, inequality, social deprivation (Booth and Rowntree surveys); arguments and need for social reform? Working class agitation, trade unions, beginnings of the labour movement. The legitimacy of the Victorian prison was also being questioned
CRISES – changes elicited 2 related crises: a) role of the state in socio-economic issues; b) regulation, management, containment, and control of troublesome populations – the problem of order
RESPONSES – a) social work and probation; b) social security, beginnings of welfare state and reforming liberal government ; c) positivist criminology and questioning of classicism; d) eugenics movement

5. Consequences
After the 1880s, through to the reforming liberal government of , we see the reordering of the political, social, economic, and criminal justice realm
This is the context within which, the conditions of existence and surface of emergence, for the emergence of the probation system between 1876 and the Probation of Offenders Act 1907

6. Victorian penal complex and sanctions
Death
Penal servitude
Imprisonment
Detention in a reformatory school (industrial)
Corporal punishment - whipping adults and birch juveniles
Release on a recognizance (PCM after 1876, 1879, 1887)
Fine
Criminals differed from non-criminals only by the fact of lawbreaking. Voluntary action, utilitarian deeds, individual choice so that 19th c. penality is a mix of classical justice, deterrence, retribution and reform.

7. Modern penal complex 1895-1914 Extended grid of disposals: Probation
Borstal
Preventive detention
Detention in inebriate reformatory
Detention in institution for the mentally defective
Licensed supervision
Supervised fines
Notions of law, justice, deterrence, and retribution remain. But “criminals are presented as individuals to be pitied, cared for, and if possible reclaimed” (Garland, 1985, p. 27)

8. 20th century and recent history – full circle?
The disruption to the Victorian penal complex after 1880s ushered in what Garland describes as the penal-welfare complex. This era of criminal justice reached into the late-1970s and was dominated by probation and rehabilitation
But this penal-welfare complex was, in turn, disrupted from the 1980s: from the post-war settlement, Keynes, Attlee, Beveridge, Temple; to the new dispensation of Hayek, Friedman, Reagan, Thatcher and political ideology of neoliberal capitalism
The new conditions of existence for the erosion of probation – competition, privatisation, markets working their way into people-based organisations. To some extent a return to the 19th century liberal era – the accountant’s logic
Transformations which have damaged the quality of criminal and social justice, contingent on the erosion of probation/CJS dialectic has stalled