Hope and Probation
The latest (25 April 2025) Academic Insight from HM Inspectorate of Probation is titled: Hope and Probation: Using the lens of hope to reimagine probation practice. Written by Adam Ali, Anita Dockley, Stephen Farrall, Sarah Lewis, Jake Phillips and Kam Stevens, it presents the findings from recent research which focused on the concept of hope within the delivery of probation services, recognising that having hope is important for people who have a desire to change.
The report explores differing types of hope and the importance of ‘transformational’ hopes, as distinct from ‘institutional’ hopes, is highlighted. A key finding from the research was how transformational hopes can be drowned out through the adoption of a tick-box culture (with a focus on technical compliance), an over-emphasis on risk management, and through practitioners’ fears of making mistakes, with hope also being outsourced to other agencies.
The research
The research on which the Academic Insight is based was undertaken was being renationalised and involved 52 interviews with a range of people who had been on probation, probation staff and other stakeholders. These interviews focused on what people on probation hoped to get from it and the research team identified three types of hope: hopelessness, institutional hopes, and transformational hopes.
Hopelessness
Hopelessness brought to the fore the marginalised nature of people who find themselves on probation as well as the painful nature of penal supervision, with some people viewing it as just another form of formal social control, illustrated by this quote:
“I had no hope at that time, I’ll be quite honest with you. It was just basically the way I seen it was like they’re just an authority figure over me. … So I just seen them as police and that was it … I didn’t want to get anything out of it.”
Many people were in a bad place in their lives and talked about lacking any hope.
Institutional hopes
Most participants’ priorities (both staff and people on probation) revolved around getting to the end of the sentence or complying with minimum requirements: institutional hopes. This type of hope rests upon the institutional logics of probation, suggesting a reliance on engagement and practice which is technical rather than substantive in nature.
Transformational hopes
The third category of hope – the one which should, perhaps, characterise the probation service – is described as deep or transformational hopes which surfaced when interviewees talked about moving away from harmful lifestyles to something more ‘normal’:
“To have a normal life, I said …I really have an addiction with opiates and … So get clean. I wanted to change my life and I wanted to … Maybe I just wanted to be a normal 16–17-year-old girl, you know.”
The research team describe how transformational hopes divided into formless and concrete hopes. The former involves hoping that ‘things will be better’ in ‘the future’, i.e. crime: “It’s about not ever going back to a situation where they’re involved in the system again”.
Participants talked about how these hopes had their roots in having become tired of previous ways of running their lives and leaving behind lives which were structured by forms of behaviour which were illegal and harmful. Over time, formless hopes developed into more concrete (and distinctly ordinary) hopes such as getting married to a specific person, having a (second) child, getting a new job, going on holiday, or moving to a bigger home.
Drowning out hope
Participants felt probation should be supporting people to achieve deep (transformational) hopes, but were concerned that it was failing to do this. Researchers identified four main reasons, the most common of which was that probation had become a tick-box culture which interviewees experienced as a dehumanising process.
“Probation is too focused on the tick-box checks. Have they been where they’re supposed to be? Yes, right. Okay, job done, next person. Not in terms of, is there any quality or is there any change been there. Have they turned up? Yes or no, right next one. So, it’s pile them high and sell them cheap at the moment, which is a bit understandable, given the high caseloads.”
The second reason was that the probation service is currently thought to be too focused on risk management at the expense of promoting desistance. This was reinforced by the third reason, practitioners’ fears of being scapegoated in a person they were supervising committed a serious further offence. Probation officers talked of how the probation service is currently characterised by punitive principles of retribution and deterrence and so has to rely heavily on enforcement because this enables it to demonstrate efficacy. Interviewees saw this emphasis on punishment manifest in reduced levels of trust between practitioners and people on probation.
Dispiritingly, the fourth reason was that probation staff and people on probation both increasingly look to other services to help people achieve their hopes of a better life – in effect, an outsourcing of hope.
A more hopeful probation service
Although the research paints a generally negative picture of probation, interviewees did discuss aspects of practice which they felt could make penal supervision a more hopeful process. There were a number of examples of what probation could do differently, summarised in the infographic above, although high workloads remained the single biggest obstacle.
The five enablers of hope will be familiar to those who have worked in or been subject to probation in better-resourced times:
- Person centred, individualised practise
- A focus on strengths rather than deficits
- Delivery at a local level
- Engaging with service users to co-produce goals and plans of achieving them
- A focus on making a real difference to people’s lives, termed “substantive compliance” rather than merely complying with the technical requirements of a period of supervision.
Thanks to Dmitry Ratushny for kind permission to use the header image in this post which was previously published on Unsplash.
