Asbjørn Storgaard: A potential for democratic emancipation? - Policy and discretionary practices in probation service

This book is an in-depth study of practice within the Danish Probation Service and as such provides a unique and valuable insight into an aspect of the criminal justice system that is too often overlooked in penological scholarship (Robinson, 2016).Located within the broader Scandinavian context, it explores changes to penal practices and policies over time, as well as their enactment in practice.This careful empirical work challenges overly simplified analyses of Scandinavian 'penal exceptionalism' (Pratt, 2008).The book is based on a mixed-methods study, which involved two elements.Firstly, a documentary analysis of key publicly available policies and strategies relevant to the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Prison and Probation Services and an ethnographic study involving field work in two local probation offices in Denmark.This included observations of meetings between probation officers and clients; observations of probation team meetings; participation in probation officer team exercises, and semi-structured interviews with probation staff and probation clients in the two sites given the pseudonyms of East Ville and West Bridge.The careful analysis of the policy documents demonstrates some of the iterative shifts that provide substance to the idea of the move towards a managerial turn.Some examples include analysis of Danish Prison and Probation Services' strategy briefs between the years 2017-2021, which identifies changes in emphases from the execution of sanctions -in language which foregrounds close cooperation with the outside world, security, safety, and decency for the individual citizen (explicitly including the clients) towards a focus on punitive sanctions being executed in a way in which the physical and mental well-being of staff is not endangered.Further examples are provided to show that this 'managerial turn' has been accompanied by a 'punitive turn'.Focussing specifically on Denmark this is evidenced by the changed emphasis encapsulated by Code of Principles (1998) which provides a description of how the Danish Prison and Probation Service aims to fulfil its tasks based on principles of normalization, to later strategy documents published from 2018 onwards, in which this Code of Principles is no longer explicitly referenced and 'harsher and more rapid consequences