 I learnt a lot from the talk and my head's full of ideas about how to go further with some of those issues highlighted by ANCIA. But for the purpose of this brief commentary, I just want to begin to kind of develop, I suppose, three themes. So, I'm a criminologist, and I'm a criminologist who focuses on probation policy and practice. So I thought that I would try and shed some probation-shaped light on what I felt were three really important points from the paper. So firstly, I want to think about the importance of that almost total disregard for why people do not comply that comes out in the analysis of the guidelines. The effect of policies which serve to widen the net of criminal justice, or the cumulative effect of policies which serve to widen the net of criminal justice that we've seen in recent years. And then some thoughts on what I think this might mean for kind of probation policy and practice and culture, I suppose. So my first theme really is that seeming unwillingness by the Sentencing Council to include any consideration of why people were not compliant. And in particular, the fact that the Justice Select Committee report led the Sentencing Council to begrudgingly add the following to the guidelines to make sentences take into account evidence of circumstances of offender characteristics such as disability, mental health issues, learning difficulties, which have impeded the offender's compliance with the order. Now, this is good. Well, it's better than the original proposal, but it seems to me to be far from adequate in encouraging sentences to take account of why people do not comply. Now, this is an under-researched area, so I'm going to draw fairly heavily on a recent paper published in the British Journal of Criminology by Beth Weaver and colleagues at the University of Strathclyde, which I think can help us a little bit. So they argue that, for their participants, their intentions to comply with a community sentence were overwhelmed by situational dynamics, social circumstances, a lack of resources, and the influence and impact of socio-structural conditions, which bound agency. They argue that these wide socio-structural and systemic conditions that enable and constrain the exercise of responsibility, choice and agency, and that socio-structural disadvantage and deprivation and systemic constraints can impose significant challenges and competing obligations, which may manifest in non-compliance and be interpreted as postures of defiance, especially, they say, where those challenges are not understood or recognised. And I think that's absolutely key because these guidelines don't really seem to make any attempt to understand or recognise some of those structural constraints to people complying. The participants in Weaver et al study felt that the order was not difficult to comply with, but the interaction between addiction, mental ill health and inadequate of precarious housing, poverty, chaotic lifestyles rendered compliance unachievable. And so, in short, I think complying with community sanctions is difficult and Weaver et al's analysis kind of complicates the idea that people truly do willfully breach an order, although I'm sure there are people who do willfully breach orders, and I can think of people I've worked with in the past who would fall into that category, but I think it's more complicated than the guidelines take into account. And I think the kicker to this is that whilst non-compliance may well have its roots in those individual factors, such as disability, mental health, learning difficulties and so on, those factors also affect people's sense of social connectedness and human dignity. And so, the guidelines, as they're currently written, do nothing but have a deleterious impact on people's wives, their social connectedness, their dignity, their identity, their position in society. I suppose we may be able to justify that on the basis of retribution and the idea that, as Angie says, breaching an order can be understood as being paramount to undermining the authority of the court. But in relation to the other purposes of sentencing, it seems to me at least to be nothing but counterproductive. Beth Weaver's paper also shed some really important light on how people who do not comply experience the justice system and argue that that is critical then to future compliance. So they argue that perceptions of procedural injustice were compounded where supervision was experienced as ineffective, superficial and meaningless, with insufficient recognition of and support to address their myriad socio-structural and systemic problems, particularly if, and this is the important bit, when people fail to comply, this was disregarded in professional decision making. And so it seems to me that having a law and associated set of guidelines, which are, in Angie's words, discretion fettering, leaves sentences with little choice, but to impose more onerous sentences and especially custodial sanctions sentences for offences which would not have received a custodial sentence in the first place, is going to do very little to improve people's chances of seeing the criminal justice system and their punishment as legitimate in the long term. My second point is that I think that this new guideline is clearly problematic on its own and Angie's point that this seems to be a deliberate act of legislative netwining is one that is very well made. But things get even worse when we think about the way this legislation intersects with other developments in the fields of community sanctions and sentencing more broadly. So, one such example is the introduction of post-sentence supervision introduced by the Offender Rehabilitation Act 2014, which means, as you will no doubt know, people sentenced to less than 12 months in prison now have to spend 12 months in the community under supervision. A development described by Cracknell is an attempt to reaffirm and legitimise prison as a dominant form of punishment in society or what Carlin refers to as carceral clawback. Cracknell argues that this post-release supervision widens the net, extends the period of punishment and oversight and will undermine efforts made to resettle short sentence prisoners. I think added to this, we've seen increased rates of recall for various reasons which have led to increases in the prison population in recent years. And it seems to me that if there is one trend occurring across criminal justice at the moment, it's one of netwining through what Angie describes as the ratchet effect. There are others as well, I suppose. And I think Angie's paper provides you another example of how this occurs, but I think for me the really important point is that it illustrates how this appears to be occurring really quite insidiously and out of sight of any or very much anyway scrutiny and with little accountability. And this kind of brings me to my final point. I'll admit to being surprised that so-called breach offences are not criminal offences, but I'm not a lawyer. But then again, neither are probation officers and they're responsible for deciding firstly when someone is in breach and subsequently whether something should be done about it. And for me, I think this has some really quite serious implications. So Angie argues that the breach rules and guidelines lead to excessive punishment in two ways in the sense of disproportionately severe as a response to the crime committed and then excessive in the sense of unnecessary in view of specific sentencing goals. And I think from a probation perspective, it's the latter which is most likely to concern your average probation officer. It's no surprise to say that probation these days is all about risk. Practitioners decisions are directed by concerns of risk and full of protection rather than necessarily proportionality and fairness, although they would not discount them altogether. I imagine that probation officers would not want people to get more onerous orders for the sake of onerousness. I think their primary objection to that though is not because it seemed to be disproportionate, but because it risks setting people up to fail. They don't necessarily want people to avoid prison because it's disproportionate. Most probation officers I've spoken to see well for custody, although many would argue it's overused. But because they seek custodial sanctions as counterproductive to what they see as the broader range of the criminal justice system, rehabilitation, reform and ultimately public protection. And so it's for this reason that in my experience when someone is breached probation officers will endeavor, not in all cases obviously, to try and mitigate this ratchet effect of the direction to impose a more onerous order on someone who is in breach. So I've seen people recommend residency requirements be added to a community order because by virtue of that person being in stable accommodation it would actually make no material difference to their life. And I wonder how this intersects with the discretion-fettering guideline analysed in Andrea's talk. But I've also had probation officers say to me that sometimes a breach is needed to, in the words of one probation officer, give him a kick up the bum. That such an action could then result in a custodial sentence would seem like a most unfortunate outcome for probation officers who, like I said before, tend to be fairly anti-custody. This is an area of probation practice and policy which has barely been researched and Andrea's paper raises real questions for me in terms of how probation officers deal with a policy which removes some discretion from the system and widens the net of criminal justice. Finally, something that's kind of troubled me over the years is that probation officers are not trained in the law yet they are responsible for delivering the punishment handed down by the court and breaching people if they don't comply. Some people may argue that probation officers are there to assess and manage risk and so do not need to know the law in any great depth. But Andrea's paper tells us that this is a naive view, especially when the sentence in council is so sloppy in the way it aligns guidelines with the legislation. A probation officer's decision, especially in the case of a breach, intersects with the law and surrounding guidelines in myriad ways. And I can't help but think that we're probation officers to have a better knowledge of the law than some of these negative effects might be mitigated earlier in the process. So for me then, Andrea's paper becomes one about the need for good critique of legislation and associated guidelines and the implications this has on probation practice, those who find themselves engaged in the criminal justice system. And I'd like to express my thanks to her for illuminating this with such clarity. Thank you very much.