News

Interventions Alliance has published a new evaluation of a Hub coordinated on behalf of police forces in the south of England, focused on tackling violence against women and children through a whole family approach. The Hub supports victims and perpetrators of domestic abuse and works across policing, health and social services.

This book, Forensic Social Work – Supporting Desistance, has been released by Routledge. It is a practice-oriented resource exploring how forensic social work can support desistance and foster meaningful change in the lives of justice-involved individuals.

At a time when many parole systems are experiencing considerable strain, the aims of this collection are twofold: first, to encourage systematic and critical reflection on the rationalities, institutions and practices of parole. Second, to think big, and pose ambitious ‘what if’ questions about the possible futures of parole and prison release. Offering novel insights from Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America, this collection builds the case for, and then showcases, a ‘way of doing’ parole research that is global in outlook, interdisciplinary in approach and unapologetically normative in character.

To mark the EU Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism on 11 March, the EU Centre of Expertise for Victims of Terrorism has published a new Guidance Document on the Needs of Victims. This document is a significant step forward in reinforcing a victim-centred approach within counter-terrorism efforts across the European Union.

We’re thrilled to announce that the Confederation of European Probation (CEP), in cooperation with the University of Glasgow (led by CEP Honorary Member Professor Fergus McNeill), and with the support of the CEP Expert Group on Research, has produced the CEP Research and Development Strategy. We are happy to share the summary with you!

David Jackson and Jed Stone focus on the use of AI in probation and advocate for investigations to understand the opportunity, address issues and innovate for the good of all.

In March 2024, we paid attention to the study of Steve Pitts and Leo Tigges about Building Probation Capacity . The executive summary of their publication is now available in French and German, including the infographic on capacity building in both languages. Later this year, translations in Italian and Spanish will also be released!

>> Read the translations here

Is the day of a probation officer in Germany similar to the one of someone working in Romania? In the series ‘A day in the life of a probation officer’, we publish articles written by probation officers from different countries in Europe to see if their days look a like or are very different from each other.

The publication of EuroVista journals stopped in 2016. On this page you can find the online journals volume 1.1 – 4.2. If you would like to have your research published on the CEP website, please send an email to communication@cep-probation.org.

EuroVista was published up to three times a year by CEP, the Confederation of European Probation. The journal is dedicated to linking research with policy and practice in probation and community justice throughout Europe. EuroVista seeks to share experience of good practice and responses to challenges that may have relevance to many countries across the continent.

EuroVista aims to publish articles that are relevant and accessible to practitioners, managers and policy makers in a wide range of criminal and community justice agencies, especially probation. It is also read by students, researchers, scholars of criminal justice and others who are interested in the subject matter. Whole issues or individual contributions can be downloaded without charge.

Journal on monitoring technology and its use in enhancing public safety. More information on the website of the Civic Research Institute.

Most of the Ukrainian victims of war who take refuge in EU countries are women and children. And these children go to school in their host community, with it becoming one of the first points of contact between the local population and the refugees.

The book ‘The Girl Who Kept Her Eyes Open’ aims to raise awareness among children (7-10 years old) and adults (parents and teachers) of the problems suffered by people fleeing war and their rights.

Through the story of a Ukrainian refugee child meeting a particularly observant little girl in her new school, it shows the importance of paying attention to others in order to recognize the victims of crime – in this case, the victims of war-related crimes – and offer them support.

The Irish Probation Journal aims to provide a forum for sharing theory and practice, increasing co-operation and learning and developing debate about work with offenders. The journal is supported by the Probation Board for Northern Ireland (PBNI) and the Irish Probation Service.

JUSTICE TRENDS is a premium printed and online magazine that features exclusive content such as interviews with Ministers of Justice, Directors General of prison and probation administrations, as well as articles on pressing current criminal justice topics globally.

“I, who had it figured out!” is a memoir by Patrick O’Dea, a social worker who has worked in the Probation Service for twenty years, followed by 17 years in the Social Work School of Trinity College Dublin. Now, he works part-time at University College Dublin. The book reflects on O’Dea’s 40-year journey in social work, including his time as a teacher at Trinity College, Dublin. It explores his experiences in 1970s Ireland, his commitment to the ideals of social work, and the impact of his profession on real lives. The memoir has received endorsements for its wisdom and insight from notable figures in the field of social work.

The Institute for Criminology of Universität Tübingen has compiled a list of interesting links in the field of criminology. Listed are, among other things, institutions, journals and research from within Europe and beyond. Also available is KrimDok, a bibliographical search engine in the field of criminology. It is managed by the Criminology institutes of the Heidelberg and Tübingen universities. Not just German-language works are included in this database.

The EM conference in Helsinki 2022 inspired researchers Beata Maria Nowak, Sławomir Grzesiak, and Maja Zawadzkaus to complete and publish their scientific work on alcohol monitoring in the penitentiary and probation service. Their publication titled “Transdermal Measurement and Monitoring of Alcohol Concentration: Possibilities of Implementation and Adaptation in the Polish Penitentiary and Post-Penitentiary System” is now available for download in English and Polish versions.
You can find the publication on the website of our Publishing House, where you’ll also discover other open-access books: https://swws.edu.pl/wydawnictwo/nowosci/

This collection of research and evaluation explores issues in mental health and probation across the globe. The volume offers insight into a wide range of interrelated topics that address the mental health and mental health needs of those under probation supervision. The chapters embrace a range of diverse mental health concerns. The underpinning assumption is that offenders should receive mental healthcare that is ‘equivalent’ to that received by the general population where this is appropriate. This overview is informed by perspectives from academics and practitioners based in England and the Republic of Ireland, and also includes the views of people with lived experience of the Criminal Justice System. Building upon and adding to the existing literature in this field, the book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers as well as those training to work in, and currently working in, the criminal justice and mental health field, and would also be of interest to those working in related healthcare settings.

This book explores the concept of punishment: its meaning and significance, not least to those subject to it; its social, political and emotional contexts; its role in the criminal justice system; and the difficulties of bringing punishment to an end. It explores how levels of criminal punishment could and should be reduced, without compromising moral standards, public safety or the rights of victims of crime.

This book addresses the relationship between restorative justice and children’s rights, an issue of increasing relevance to restorative justice theory and practice that has thus far received relatively little attention. Readers will find useful reviews of international human rights documents and of legislation, policy and practices in countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, North America, and Oceania. Each of the chapters demonstrates the compatibility between children’s rights and restorative justice. Adopting a rights-based approach is an important means for countries that are interested in further developing restorative justice practices, as it helps restorative processes that are new to the juvenile justice system to gain credibility as well as safeguard young participants’ rights in these processes. In countries where restorative justice has been developed, a rights approach can stimulate innovation and applications beyond the child justice system. The book focuses on both needs and rights of children and young people who caused harm or suffered harm. Some chapters also adopt a critical point of view to explore the tensions between rights and restorative justice in relation to colonisation, welfare models, and professional privilege.

For more information and the possibility to order click here.

This book explores probation staff understandings of professionalism in the aftermath of the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms to services in England and Wales. Drawing on the sociology of the professions, this book offers an original and timely contribution to the criminal justice literature, examining the ways in which professionalism in probation has been reshaped and renegotiated in response to the market logic that has dominated public services in recent decades.

This book is about the human factor in cybercrime: its offenders, victims, and parties involved in tackling cybercrime. It takes a diverse international perspective of the response to and prevention of cybercrime by seeking to understand not just the technological, but the human decision-making involved.

the most important competencies in offender rehabilitation: relationship skills, pro-social modelling, problem solving, motivational interviewing and cognitive restructuring. Each skill is described from both a theoretical and a practical perspective and is developed through different exercises, reflection points, practice tips, scales and questionnaires. Readers are also advised on further reading or video resources.

This book asks how we should make sense of sentencing when, despite huge efforts world-wide to analyse, critique and reform it, it remains an enigma.

Questions regarding how to improve the transitional phase from prison to life in society after release have gained major importance in the last decade in criminal policy. All over the world release preparation and resettlement practice are discussed with the aim to reduce negative effects of imprisonment and re-offending rates. Small and large reforms aiming at the improvement of release processes and reintegration strategies have taken place in many European states.

What measures can prison authorities take to detect radicalisation in prison? How should prison staff be selected? How should they be trained to evaluate and manage the risks without abandoning high ethical standards? What role can religious representatives, psychologists, friends and family play?

Transfer of Judgments of Conviction in the European Union and the Respect for Individual’s Fundamental Rights

‘Reimagining Rehabilitation: Beyond the Individual’ is published in June 2018 and written by Lol Burke, Steve Collett and Fergus McNeill. This book aims to make the case for and provide some of the resources necessary to reimagine rehabilitation for twenty-first-century criminal justice. Outlining an approach to rehabilitation which takes into account wider democratic processes, political structures and mechanisms of resource allocation, the authors develop a new model of rehabilitation comprising four forms – personal, legal, social and moral.

On the 16th of November 2018, Fergus McNeill, Professor in Criminology and Social Work at the University  of Glasgow and CEP Boardmember, published his new book ‘Pervasive Punishment: Making Sense of Mass Supervision’.

The book ‘Enforcement of Offender Supervision’  by Niamh MaGuire and Miranda Boone provides a comparative analysis of the process of breach across ten different European jurisdictions. The book focused on the breach processes that follow non-compliance with a community sanction or measure and non-compliance with conditional early release from prison. It is informed by the research activities of the COST Action IS1106 on Offender Supervision in Europe, particularly the Action’s work on developing new comparative methodologies to examine the process of decision-making involved in the breaching of offenders for non-compliance. CEP spoke to the authors about their research and findings.

The Oxford Handbook of Offender Decision Making is a book written by researchers Wim Bernasco, Jean-Louis van Gelder and Henk Elffers. It provides reviews of the main paradigms in offender decision-making, such as rational choice theory and dual-process theory.

Why punish? is an attempt to show the value of combining the insights of social sciences with those of philosophy in trying to understand punishment. Subtitled An Introduction to the Philosophy of Punishment, the book takes no particular philosophical position but is guided by a definition from the Harvard philosopher, Michael Sandel:

‘Philosophy is reflecting critically on the way things are. That includes reflecting critically on social and political and economic arrangements. It always intimates the possibility that things could be other than they are. And better.’

How can evidence-based skills and practices reduce re-offending, support desistance, and encourage service user engagement during supervision in criminal justice settings? How can those who work with service users in these settings apply these skills and practices?

This book, written by Ioan Durnescu and Ruth Armstrong, provides an assessment of contemporary international knowledge about the experiences of life after release from prison. For over 100 years people leaving prison have been supervised by probation services, but little has been written about how those who are supervised experience this process, or how this process influences experiences post-release.

European Journal of Probation is a peer review academic journal aiming to promote comparative research on probation and community justice across Europe. European Journal of Probation was launched 1 April 2009 and was until 2011 a biannual e-journal. From 2011 onward the journal has three issues per year. The Editorial Board includes well known academics and criminal justice professionals from twelve different countries. The journal is now published in partnership with SAGE Publishing.

Women are a minority in prison. Currently 6.8% of the world prison population is female, but this number is rapidly growing. Due to the relatively low number of female inmates, prison policies have traditionally developed in response to the behavior of men. However, women in prison have different needs. For example, needs related to: pregnancy, breastfeeding, raising children, hygiene, health and prison security. In order to respond to these specific needs, the UN General Assembly adopted the Bangkok Rules (2010). The Bangkok Rules have three focal points. Apart from responding to the specific needs of women in prison, the rules also focus on the protection of children and the prevention of (sexual) abuse. In addition, the Bangkok Rules promote non-custodial sentences for convicted females.

This book is a collection of essays by a unique group of authors about the political destruction of the probation service in England and Wales. All of them are probation officers turned academics, with a collective scholarly output that is both prodigious and distinguished. They address the history of probation, its underlying values and working methods, and the way it has been systematically dismantled by successive political administrations. The book offers essential reading for those interested in broadening their understanding of the probation service and its vital role in rehabilitation. In addition it makes a compelling case for the reinstatement of an evidence-based probation service as the primary criminal justice agency concerned with helping people who come before the courts to become contributing citizens. A lively and engrossing read, it is destined to be invaluable to policy makers, social science theorists and commentators, as well as scholars of criminology and the justice system, and all those who work in it.

For more information or ordering, you can visit the website of Palgrave McMillan.

Conversations about rehabilitation and how to address the drugs-crime nexus have been dominated by academics and policymakers, without due recognition of the experience and knowledge of practitioners. Not enough is known about the cultures and conditions in which rehabilitation occurs. Why is it that significant numbers of practitioners are leaving the alcohol and other drugs field, while disproportionate numbers of criminal justice practitioners are on leave?

This book discusses the role of the prison in Europe across a divide of over 200 years. Inspired by the travels of the prison reformer John Howard (1726-1790), who visited prisons across Europe in the eighteenth century, it fundamentally reflects on centuries of the practice of locking people up as punishment. Howard travelled across Europe to visit prisons, with a simple method: he travelled and knocked on prison doors on his journey and entered the premises. He then observed the situation in the prison, took notes and left to visit other locations. Howard’s influential book The State of the Prisons resulted from his experiences, provoking debate among prison reformers and academics worldwide.

This volume poses a series of key questions about the practice of probation as an integral part of the European criminal justice system. The contributors are established experts in their respective fields of study and together their questions address the legitimacy, and perhaps continued existence, of probation.

Correctional policies for Islamist violent extremist offenders are often based on the premise that prisons can be hotbeds of radicalization. The perception that inmates are susceptible to violent extremist belief systems has given rise to a fervent international public, political, and scholarly debate and has led to the introduction of drastic, often expensive policies to counter the threat of prison radicalization. But is the introduction of these policies justified?

In 2010, the Dutch Probation Service introduced a digital decision support system for case management plans, a so called fourth generation risk/needs assessment instrument. Does this system help probation officers in determining the appropriate interventions that should prevent recidivism for each individual client? And to what extent are the case management plans based on existing theories on desistance from crime? These are the central questions in the thesis of Jacqueline Bosker of the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht: ‘Linking Theory and Practice in Probation – Structured decision support for case management plans’. “Further development is still needed, but we can conclude that the use of digital decision support helps improve the quality of case management plans.”

In recent decades prison populations have become less homogeneous. Statistic reveal that foreign national prisoners (FNPs) are detained practically everywhere in the world and very often in relatively
large numbers This is particularly true for countries in the European Union (EU), where on average nearly one in every five prisoners is a foreigner.

In Community Punishment: European perspectives, the authors place punishment in the community under the spotlight by exploring the origins, evolution and adaptations of supervision in 11 European jurisdictions. For most people, punishment in the criminal justice system is synonymous with imprisonment. Yet, both in Europe and in the USA, the numbers of people under some form of penal supervision in the community far exceeds the numbers in prison, and many prisoners are released under supervision. Written and edited by leading scholars in the field, this collection advances the sociology of punishment by illuminating the neglected but crucial phenomenon of ‘mass supervision’.

In Offending and Desistance, Beth Weaver examines the role of a co-offending peer group in shaping and influencing offending and desistance, focusing on three phases of their criminal careers: onset, persistence and desistance. While there is consensus across the body of desistance research that social relations have a role to play in variously constraining, enabling and sustaining desistance, no desistance studies have adequately analysed the dynamics or properties of social relations, or their relationship to individuals and social structures. This book aims to reset this balance.

In some jurisdictions, early release is automatic at a certain point in time; in others, it is discretionarily decided by a court or an executive authority; others still have a mixed system and, increasingly, others opt for mandatory post-release supervision with the hope of better controlling dangerous offenders. In some cases, due process applies and the independence of decision-makers is viewed as being paramount; in others such principles are deemed inapplicable. Some legal systems consider that release – , and breach issues – are part of a penal continuum that starts with arrest; in others, they are perceived as
belonging to the executive and as being strictly distinct from penal issues.

Today, I pinch myself as I look over at the table, listening to Alan tell his story of overcoming the worst time of his life. His hopelessness for anything to ever change slowly turned to hope, relief, empowerment, and ultimately – Joy! He is now at Glasgow University, pursuing a degree in Community Development, and has the determination of a man with a ‘gifted mission’ to keep going no matter what life may throw his way. I couldn’t be any happier if I were handed the keys to the world. A little sad as I looked at Alan and saw everything my father deserved as he voiced his desperation for change. Nothing was offered to my father, and he continued suffering and abusing until he did the ultimate inevitable for some – killed my mother when she wanted to leave, make it stop, save her children from further harm.

Women in the Criminal Justice System: Supporting Pathways Away from Offending. An interview with Probation Officer, Caitriona Dennan,  by the Probation Service