News

Call for delay to government probation plans

Our Director, Richard Garside, is one of eight signatories on a letter to the Justice Secretary, David Gauke, calling for him to 'pause and reconsider' the government's plans re-let probation contracts to private companies.

The call comes in the wake of a damning National Audit Office report last week, which concluded that the Ministry of Justice 'should pause and reflect on whether its propsed approach is both deliverable and consistent with its strategic aims for the probation system'.

The seven...

6 March 2019
News

Our submission to Transforming Rehabilitation inquiry

Our submission to the House of Commons Justice Committee inquiry into 'Transforming Rehabilitation' has now been published on the Committee's website.

Whatever the government's original intentions, we argue in the submission, the Transforming Rehabilitation programme 'is sabotaging, rather than transforming, probation work across England and Wales'.

Rather than 'attempting to make a badly-designed system work slightly less badly', we...

20 December 2017
News

Comment on bail-outs for private probation companies

Our Director, Richard Garside, has commented on the National Audit Office report, Investigation into changes to Community Rehabilitation Company Contracts, which is published today.

Richard said:

The government admitted some months ago that it had bailed out the struggling private probation companies. Thanks to the National Audit Office, we now know that the bail-out was worth a third of a billion pounds. It is unlikely to be the last bail-out the

...
19 December 2017
News

Call to end dysfunctional probation privatisation

Richard Garside, Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies today commented on a damning annual report by the Chief Inspector of Probation, Dame Glenys Stacey.

'None of government’s stated aspirations for Transforming Rehabilitation have been met in any meaningful way', Dame Glenys noted. She went on to question whether the current model for probation can deliver sufficiently well'.

Speaking today, Richard said:

This really

...
14 December 2017
Comment

Let them fail

In its structure, planning, delivery and financing, probation across England and Wales faces major problems.

27 October 2016
News

Probation reforms are sabotaging rehabilitation

The government's reforms of probation in England and Wales appear to be sabotaging, rather than transforming, the rehabilitation and resettlement of prisoners, our Director Richard Garside says today.

Richard was reacting to...

4 October 2016