Building Probation Capacity: What Works? Learning from the European Experience of Probation Service Development in the 21st Century. Main report.

By Stephen Pitts and Leo Tigges  

  This report describes a project to improve understanding of good practices in building probation capacity, both of new services and those already in the process of development. We found that “success” is promoted by several factors - • A collaborative, partnership approach • Creating a shared vision or aspiration regarding probation’s potential contribution to wider justice system evolution • Recognising and working with complexity and context – international and national • Building a network – engaging, involving and harnessing the expertise of critical stakeholders and partners • Technical and soft skills – an inspiring, individualised, knowledge and tools-based approach, building on strengths to foster organisational and personnel capacity and sustainability • Achieving the vision - planning and implementing through challenging steps, piloting, and review, with flexibility • Recognising and engaging with the stimulating and sustaining role of supra-national organisations and professional bodies, including through standards, data, finance, research and knowledge sharing Together with a range of project management skills we found to be especially important in international capacity building, and risks to be aware of, we propose 10 points for consideration, or implementation “Success Factors”, when building probation capacity at the national or jurisdiction level. We also offer a model (the “Domains and Enablers Model”) to support communication between actors in this field, and 5 points for deliberation by the international community which we believe may help progress the contribution of probation work globally. Our findings and recommendations are based on a study of European probation development in the 21st Century, supplemented by a review of international literature. Whilst the origins of probation work in Europe are  traceable to the 19th Century1, early pioneers having since been joined by other Western European nations, perhaps most striking has been the acceleration over the last 25 years in establishing probation organisations in Central and Eastern Europe in former Soviet republics and other countries previously within the Soviet sphere of influence. The European picture is in this sense both remarkable and successful. However, this is not the whole picture. As this study makes clear, European probation services vary greatly in their scale and focus. The Council of Europe offers a guiding basic principle2 - “Probation agencies shall aim to reduce offending by establishing positive relationships with offenders in order to supervise, guide and assist them and to promote their successful social inclusion. Probation thus contributes to community safety and fair justice process.” Aside from the inherent difficulties in measuring some of these aims and approaches, probation “success” can be hard to define for other reasons, as we discuss later, not least variation in probation service purpose and emphasis (see for example Durnescu, 2008).3 We also note some concerning aspects of European probation development, most notably “net-widening”4. Notwithstanding difficulties in defining or measuring success, our study shows that some development initiatives appear to have been more successful than others, certainly in the sense of contributing to probation organisations that today have an established and sustainable role in their country, and significant responsibilities and workload. We ask which approaches to development or methods appear to support success and consider whether the success factors, and risks, we identify in Europe are likely to be relevant in other regions of the world. We conclude that, for the most part, they are.  

 Utrecht, 

The Netherlands: Confederation of European Probation, 2023. 367p.