Introduction

The advent of Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) was proclaimed a ‘revolution’ in the Coalition government's 2013 consultation paper, which announced:

The operationalisation of TR in 2014–15 impacted on policy and practice aspects of the criminal justice system as a whole and on the staff and service users of probation in particular. While TR brought about new structural and governance changes – most specifically the rupture between the National Probation Service (NPS) and the mainly privatised Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) – it is suggested in this chapter that this should have been viewed not as a new development, but rather as an enforced adaptation that was in alignment with neo-liberal penal reforms which had taken place over a longer period (Garland, 2001; Deering and Feilzer, 2019).

Of relevance in this respect were the strategies associated with the new penology which had been incorporated into probation and prison practice in England and Wales since the early 2000s. Actuarial assessment of offenders undertaken at sentencing, or at the pre-release stage from prison, informs the allocation of offenders according to risk levels, thereby sorting ‘individuals into groups according to the degree of control warranted by their risk profiles’ (Feeley and Simon, 1992: 459). The use of actuarial tools such as OASys (Offender Assessment System) provides assessments of risk in relation to individual offenders and thereby enables the overall management of levels of supervision, with the intention that the level of intervention should match the level of risk (Bonta and Andrews, 2017).

The rise of neo-liberal principles with which risk is associated (Hardy, 2014) became of increasing importance for probation over this period when resources were diminishing (Kemshall, 2012), with concerns being expressed by the then Chief Inspector of Probation about ‘the “silting up” of probation caseloads with low risk offenders [which] is a major problem for an already over-stretched workforce’ (Morgan, 2003: 7).

Introduction

This chapter explores issues relating to rehabilitation and desistance with regard to women offenders, drawing on empirical data from a two-year research project that investigated the operation of different elements of a Community Justice Court in a city in the south-west of England. In particular, analysis is applied here in respect of the interactions with, and the situations of, some of the women offenders who appeared in the court during the period of the study (2012–24). This Community Justice Court, sitting once a week within a local Magistrates’ Court complex, was created in 2007 to deal with low-level offences and included the option of pre-sentence referrals to problem-solving meetings (see MoJ, 2014a). Within these sessions, defendants could be further assessed and could discuss their personal problems, so they could be offered support and signposted to relevant agencies and services in the community; this contact was intended especially for those defendants who did not reach the threshold of intervention from statutory agencies (see Auburn et al, 2016).

This review focuses specifically on the application of therapeutic jurisprudence within the community court proceedings in relation to women offenders. This approach could be seen to align with the view espoused by Birgden (2004, p 285) that this ‘is a legal theory that can usefully address the responsivity principle in offender rehabilitation’, seeing ‘the law itself – legal rules, procedures, and the roles of legal actors – as potential therapeutic agents’. Such a focus on responsivity emphasises the importance of ensuring that interventions are tailored to the specific circumstances of each individual, endeavouring to be more effective than a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. In terms of criminal justice policy and practice in England and Wales, this innovative development thus appeared to fit well with the entreaty from the renowned Corston Report (Corsten, 2007, p 79) for a ‘distinct, radically different, visiblyled, strategic, proportionate, holistic, women-centred, integrated approach’ for women offenders.

The model applied in this setting envisioned that the offences that came before the court would be situated within the context of local social problems. In addition to the problem-solving meetings (Wolf, 2007), it was planned that the court would adopt a community justice approach, a term that ‘denotes a vision of justice practices with particular concern for the way crime and justice affect community life’ (Karp and Clear, 2000, p 324).