Co-creating parties and target group

Target groups are users of probation services have committed crimes and are subject to community sentences (such as performing unpaid work) or been released from prison under license.

Co-creating parties are interserve managers; interserve front-line staff (case managers); service users; volunteers peer-mentors (former service users) and potetntial community partners.

Contextual impact on the UK pilot

One huge problem in this pilot were the unanticipated volte face in criminal justice policy that undermined My Direction, as a by-product of government action not an intention.

Under the “Transforming Rehabilitation” policy, probation for low and medium risk offenders was split off from the national service and allocated to so called ‘Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs), which were transferred to eight mainly private sector suppliers in 2015 . The rationale was that independent providers would be better placed to innovate outside the confines of the public sector. The CoSIE pilot partner Interserve won contracts for five of the 21 CRCs including the CoSIE pilot site. At the outset of the CoSIE project the pilot partner, academic partner and stakeholders all assumed that the service would continue in its privatised form. During the lifetime of the CoSIE project, a succession of reports by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Probation highlighted mixed performance by CRCs and documented need for improvement. In 2018 the Chief Inspector of Probation, declared Transforming Rehabilitation “irredeemably flawed”. The Ministry of Justice announced early termination of all the CRC contracts and in 2019 confirmed the return of probation to the public sector. The national Transforming Rehabilitation experiment within which the pilot was situated had officially failed. Interserve faced severe financial issues (more due to problems with its contracts outside criminal justice), went into administration and was sold to a newly incorporated company the Interserve Group. The Interserve Group made a decision to close the Justice division.