Compliance through Discussion: The Jersey Experience

Abstract

The enforcement of compliance with community sentences has been a topic of vigorous discussion in England and Wales since the early 1990s. A series of studies showed enforcement to be less consistent and less rigorous than a strict interpretation of the law would require (H. M. Inspectorate of Probation 1995; Ellis et al. 1996). Together with a high level of political interest since the 1990s in the processes and outcomes of probation supervision, this led to enforcement becoming a major target (sometimes the major target) of the National Probation Service created by amalgamation of over 50 local services in 2001. In the very clear account provided by Robinson and Ugwudike (2012) we see how successive editions of the ‘National Standards’ for the supervision of offenders from 1992 to 2000 increasingly constrained the discretion of probation officers to accept probationers’ reasons for imperfect compliance; this resulted in increases in breach proceedings and the return of probationers to court for more punitive resentencing under the 2003 Criminal Justice Act if as few as two appointments were missed without an acceptable excuse (Home Office 1992, 2000; Ministry of Justice 2011; National Offender Management Service 2007). Targets were set for the proportion of orders to be subject to enforcement action, and, although an additional target for compliance (based on the proportion of orders satisfactorily completed) was introduced in 2004, it is clear that far more thought was given to how to ensure enforcement than to how its presumably intended result, better compliance, might actually be encouraged.