Private sector involvement in probation services

Savas Hadjipavlou, business director of the Probation Chiefs Association, looks at the current challenges and future prospects of community justice: “The probation service itself should be tasked to increase, through competition, the involvement of private and voluntary sector providers”

In 2011, there were 1.3 million offenders sentenced in the courts of England and Wales. Just over 100,000 were sent into custody immediately. The rest received suspended sentences, community sentences and fines. While the focus is often on prisons, it is plain that community justice is, and will remain, a core component of the system.

The public probation service has a responsibility to advise courts and ensure compliance with the sentence of those under its supervision, bringing together a range of interventions needed to manage risk of harm, rehabilitate and, where appropriate, liaise with victims. Probation works in partnership with a range of local service providers which make an essential contribution to tackling the deficits that are common to many offenders – drug addiction, alcohol abuse, mental-health problems, poor educational attainment and so on. Combined efforts have yielded incremental improvements to ‘proven reoffending’ rates, from 37.9 per cent in 2000 to 34.2 per cent in 2011.

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Ethosis aimed at public sector leaders, politicians, academics and policy specialists debating the future of public services today.