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The street vibe
It might seem somewhat counter-intuitive in light of my twenty years as a probation officer to be promoting a book by Vincent Schiraldi the former Probation Commissioner of New York City.
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You remind me of Valjean
Community-based supervision is relatively invisible, in the popular imagine, compared with prison.
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The best is yet to come
Antong Lucky’s memoir charting his path from incarceration to political activism, A Redemptive Path Forward, contains a memorable phrase: “withered my last ambition”.
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Under the influence
Waiting to Inhale, chronicling the impact of the US ‘War on Drugs’ on black, brown and Indigenous American people, offers a powerful vision for redemptive policy measures that might offer new ways of securing racial and social justice redress.
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Was that because you cared for me?
Jamie Peacock’s incisive and accessible book, Working the Phones, draws on his experience of working undercover in a call centre to uncover some of the alienating features of front-line workers undertaking low-paid and high-stress work.
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What are you trying to find out?
One day, I was hastily enlisted to appear on a TV News channel on behalf of the probation union, Napo, as a practitioner to talk about potential cuts to offending behaviour programmes in London.
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Am I the person I was always meant to be?
It is always gratifying to pick up an accessible criminology book offering a fresh ethnographic approach based on hard-earned biographical insights into some of the often overlooked ambiguities of desistance.
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Good in installments
A piquant phrase caught my attention in Hugh Ryan’s remarkably engrossing book, The Women’s House of Detention, a forgotten prison that once stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
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You're prison bound
Sometimes books leave you with uncomfortable after-effects of outrage and disgust.
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Probation in Ukraine, nothing like this
One of the pleasures of reviewing books for the Probation Journal is the discovery of literary gems that not only enliven the reader but evoke memories of former probation practice.
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Out on the patch
I recently read a book that covers, with an impressive historical sweep, some of the tumultuous changes imposed on the Probation (and Prison) Services by, often poorly evidenced, politically driven reorganisations.
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Dodging passing traffic
"I often wondered if, stumbling upon a service user in cardiac arrest, my immediate reaction would be to administer CPR or to update their risk assessment".