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Understanding the Marketisation of the Probation Service Through an Interpretative Policy Framework

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The Management of Change in Criminal Justice

Abstract

The government’s plan for the management of offenders, Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) (Ministry of Justice, 2013a) outlines a structure where only those assessed as high risk are managed in the public sector and sets out a process for bidding to provide criminal justice services within a market environment. This agenda builds on the intentions set out in Breaking the Cycle (Ministry of Justice, 2010) to extend the principles of payment by results (PbR) to all providers of services for offenders. In the TR agenda, the government is moving from a position of relative stability in an area not recently attracting significant public concern towards a policy that has little evidence base. It is a policy decision fraught with pitfalls that could expose the government to a high-profile policy failure especially if previously effective systems are dismantled and reoffending increases.

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© 2015 Rose Broad and Jon Spencer

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Broad, R., Spencer, J. (2015). Understanding the Marketisation of the Probation Service Through an Interpretative Policy Framework. In: Wasik, M., Santatzoglou, S. (eds) The Management of Change in Criminal Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137462497_4

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