Book Review: Policing Scotland

• DOI: 10.1177/1057567707299376
• Author: Nathan W. Pino
• Published date: 01 March 2007
• Date: 01 March 2007
• Subject Matter: Articles

Book Reviews
71
are at greater risk of having their leash in the community tightened and of perhaps being yanked into
prison when they breach a condition of their liberty.
In comparing the approaches to community penalty of Conservative governments between 1970 and
1997 and the new Labor government of Tony Blair thereafter, the authors note no significant change
of direction. If anything, they argue, there has been an increasing uncoupling of the relationship
between crime and “the social,” a heightening of the discourse of punishment, and an increasing adop-
tion of the new penology in which risk assessment and risk management of actuarial categories of
offenders trumps concerns with individual rehabilitation. To the extent that rehabilitation is a concern
at all, the new mantra is the philosophy of doing “what works” to reduce offender risk of recidivism.
In 2001, the NPS was created to “modernize” probation as a criminal justice rather than a social
work function. One of the five major aims of the NPS is “the proper punishment of offenders.” This
is reflected in the renaming of community service orders as community punishment orders and the
shift from social inquiry reports to presentence reports. The authors note that a military background
is considered an advantage in new recruits, in keeping with the idea that “the only acceptable kind
of community sentence is a ‘tough’ one administered by ‘tough’ people . . . not by . . . liberal-
minded . . . university graduates who have been taught to criticize and challenge anything that
smacks of managerialism and accountability” (p. 97). More recently, in 2004, the U.K. government
created the National Offender Management System, which the authors contend works to effectively
merge prison and probation so that offenders serve increasingly “seamless sentences.”
Most readers will likely find most interesting the two chapters in which the authors examine how
the larger trends they discuss are manifested in two major areas: special measures for sex offenders and
youth justice. With regard to sex offenders, Worrall and Hoy note the dominance of an ideology of dan-
gerization in probation, the “tendency to perceive the world through categories of menace” in which
sex offenders are “constructed as morally,...