He made a flamboyant entrance to his first appointment at the probation office.
“Mr Guilfoyle, you should know that I have spent many years at the bar, and will most surely be appealing my conviction”.
Comment
Comment
7 April 2022
Well I was, and I wasn’t – and like him I’d seen the latest Prisons Strategy White Paper and thought I could see the future. And it wasn’t bright.
Feeling alone with only a dark future for company is not a nice place to be so I sent Richard a note. “Would you mind expanding on that for the website?” he asked. Er…
Comment
5 April 2022
Such was the case with retired probation officer Wally Morgan’s independently published autobiographical offering, Probation: Butter Side Up.
Comment
25 March 2022
There is always a problem in finding a balance between the different types of activity or approaches which voluntary groups take when they want to bring about change.
Comment
21 March 2022
I would like to reassure Richard that there is a way to do this, provided we are prepared to move away from 19th and 20th century solutions to what is a 21st century problem.
Comment
18 March 2022
I made tiny mistakes but I tried to correct them and I co-operated from the beginning. I feel like I wasn’t treated with respect, either because I was a woman or because I didn’t speak good enough English.
Comment
11 March 2022
Consider the Prisons Strategy White Paper, published in December 2021, in what already feels like a different time.
It promises more prisons, on top of existing plans to expand current capacity to around 100,000 places. “We need a pipeline of accommodation beyond our current build programme”, the White Paper states, “and we will begin preparatory work... to set ourselves up for future expansion”.
Comment
10 March 2022
The Honest Politicians Guide to Prisons and Probation is an absorbing read, larded with many surprisingly candid interviews from most of the government ministers and senior civil servants responsible for implementing these systemic changes.
Comment
, 
, 
16 February 2022
Institutional violence is the systemic reproduction of oppressive policy and practice (for example, housing children in unregulated accommodation; releasing people from prison with no fixed abode; assessing universal credit and Personal Independence Payment) in ways that harm large groups of vulnerable people.
Comment
10 February 2022
An observation from David Emery's scabrously funny and poignant personal account of his experiences as a front line social worker.
When working as a probation officer, I had been invited to attend an initial child protection case conference, which had been convened in response to expressed concerns from Social Services at 'unspecified' allegations of child neglect.
Speech
8 February 2022
I'm going to talk this morning about sentencing and criminalised women. There are two main things that I would like to do.
Comment
7 February 2022
Helen talked about our soon-to-be-published research on joint enterprise prosecutions. It was a sobering talk. Whatever the intentions of police officers and prosecutors, it is clear, for instance, that the effect of joint enterprise prosecutions is highly discriminatory, particularly against young black men.