By Adam Ali, Anita Dockley, Stephen Farrall, Sarah Lewis, Jake Phillips and Kam Stevens

Hope, efficacy, optimism and positive expectations are connected to greater levels of psychological and physical wellbeing (Alarcon et al., 2013) and peoples’ ability to change (Bartholomew et al., 2021). Hope is important for people who have a desire to change following a period of punishment or criminalisation (Burnett and Maruna, 2004; Farrall et al., 2014). However, research on the concept of hope in criminology has tended to focus on prisons and – to a lesser degree – desistance from offending. Little research has focused on hope in the context of probation despite facilitating change being one of probation’s central aims. We thus undertook research to look at: • how people on probation supervision and people who have experience of working in probation conceptualise hope • how the Probation Service in England and Wales might facilitate hope • what people hope to get from probation and what ‘gets in the way’ of probation supporting them to achieve those hopes • what needs to happen to make probation a more hopeful experience for people on probation. The most widely used definition of hope is the ‘perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways’ (Snyder et al., 2002: 249). So people need goals that are, at least to some degree, achievable and that they think or believe can be achieved. It is as a ‘way of thinking’ (ibid.) and is thus relevant to probation practice because it ‘may be helpful in fostering adaptive rehabilitation processes through the use of intervention techniques aimed at creating clearer and more sustainable goals, increasing pathways thoughts, and instilling greater agency’ (Snyder et al., 2006). Moreover, to have hope one must feel like one has the agency to work towards and achieve those hopes (see Miceli and Castelfranchi, 2015:161-3). Considering the links between agency and desistance (Healy, 2013), we can further see the potential importance of hope for people on probation supervision. Hope has been variously conceptualised in imprisonment studies. Institutional hope was seen as an adaptive strategy to cope with the challenges of imprisonment, as a ‘key mechanism of psychological survival’ (Crewe et al., 2020:126). It can also be a protective factor against the adverse effects of imprisonment (Wai-Ming Mak et al., 2021), that supports higher levels of wellbeing. While deep hope is transformational and involves moving away from previous ways of living. Seeds (2022: 241) suggests hope is ‘sparked by the absence of an institutional apparatus, hope is a process of reorientation’. In turn, hope might lead to a ‘re-narration’ in which people in the criminal justice system reconstruct their own identities and commit to being better people (Seeds, 2022). There are clear links with desistance research which emphasises the role of redemption scripts enabling people to actively re-tell their lives and, crucially, their future (Maruna, 2001). Elsewhere, Farrall et al. (2014) point to the changing nature of hope that people experience as they desist from offending. Hope has been incorporated into some models of criminal justice practice such as the Good Lives Model (GLM) (Ward and Brown, 2004) which focuses on developing peoples’ ‘goods’ and creating a more hopeful outlook. The GLM asks practitioners to practice in a way which ‘adds to … personal functioning’ rather than removing or managing problems (Ward et al., 2007). For example, research with women in prison constructed hope as a belief in a better future and was ‘heavily dependent upon outside sources that would provide structure and discipline’, demonstrating the potential for probation services to provide strengths-based re-entry programmes, mentorship and goal-setting strategies (Stearns et al., 2018). Whilst these strategies can support people to be more hopeful, they tend to be specialist interventions and so are not widespread. In this Academic Insights paper, we share the ideas, perceptions and possibilities found in our research for probation practice if hope were to be incorporated into its thinking and practice. A more detailed discussion of the research and findings can be found in Phillips et al. (2025)

Manchester, UK: Inspectorate of Probation, 2025. 18p.