Abstract
This book provides a timely account of the history and development of the probation service in England and Wales. The service ‘celebrated’ its official centenary in 2007. This work acknowledges and engages with many of the formative waves of policy, practice and individual endeavour which converged at the turn of the 19th century to result in the 1907 Act of Parliament and the formal development of a probation service. The reader is provided with a rich array of signposts and references to the early works, movements and individuals that shaped the ‘pre-history’ of the service. These provide valuable pathways into a deeper academic engagement with the origins and developments of probation for the serious criminal justice historian and social policy maker. They also provide a clear hinterland from which to understand the development of a movement which the authors suggest may be in decline. Chapter 1 engages with this pre history and sets the backdrop to chapters that follow and Chapter 10 rounds the history off with some concluding remarks and prognosis for the future.
The reader is led through a series of coherent chapters that track many of the significant developments, shifts and challenges that have taken the service from a relatively small local service to part of a wider social work and social policy approach linked to the local magistrates court to one that now defines its practice and worth in relation to its centrality in public policy in relation to key themes of public protection and punishing offenders. It is a story of successes and missed opportunities, changes in political and economic landscape and at times one of the ascendancy of one set of theoretical and value perspectives over another. This includes coverage of major legislative developments as well as exploration of some of the many bills and ideas that never came to fruition.
Chapter 2 follows the decade after the 1907 Act including early indications of tensions as to whom probation should be for and concerns that it might be perceived as a soft option. Chapter 3 tracks the growth of a service in the 1920s and with that growth attendant interest and growing control of government. Chapter 4 takes the reader up to the end of World War II and outlines some of the ideas and influences that were lost between the pre-war years and a changed state and set of priorities post-1948. Amidst the broad signposts, details of caseloads and size of service are provided and readers will be interested to see that sexual offences counted towards the profile of a small but significant number of early case loads that probation officers held in this period. Chapter 5 covers the period from 1950–1962 which have been referred to by some as a ‘golden age’ of probation, albeit this may say more of the age and profile of those opining and the location of their practice/research careers than any justifiable assertion. The chapter pulls out important debates in relation to the training and profile of probation officers, a theme which appears to run throughout probation’s history. It is of note that 1955 marks the start of a period of growing links between researchers, policy makers and probation with regard to its efficacy and impact. Chapter 6 covers the period in which ‘after care’, community service, day centres and parole emerged as parts of the probation landscape changing the focus of attention to a potentially much wider and larger caseload with a focus on different sets of care/control priorities. Chapter 7 takes the reader through the 1970s to the end of the Thatcher era and the birth of New Labour including the work of Martinson (‘nothing works’) through to a 1991 Criminal Justice Act which saw probation become a sentence in its own right as opposed to an alternative to a sentence, the growth of formalized risk assessment and the growing impact of managerialism and marketization of services. Chapter 8 takes the story up to the present day and engages with the creation of NPS and then NOMS, the infamous ‘prison works’ mantra, the ‘what works’ and effective practice movement and some signposting towards the importance of relational focused practice for both past and present practices.
Mair and Burke present a worthy academic analysis that links social policy with probation history and while they avoid any rose tinted spectacles looking backwards, they perhaps look forward through a glass darkly. While they are quick to see only bleak prospects ahead, critical histories of state and social movements have the potential to serve the purpose of spurring a new generation into action. Warranted pessimism about future prospects may be more indicative of comment on the current (political) institutions and trusts within which the probation ideal finds itself embodied, rather than any lack of evidence of commitment to a rehabilitative ideal. There are a range of voluntary and third sector organizations, individual academics and politicians who seem as committed as ever to the social worth of offenders as individuals and the value of rehabilitative and re-integrative practices. It may be that as the probation service of the 1970s would be a foreign land to those involved in probation’s early inception, what is of more importance to society and offenders is whether the notion of rehabilitative practices remain relevant in the 21st century, whether that commitment is located in the formal body of the probation service or the myriad body of voluntary and third sector organizations and local initiatives that continue to engage with ‘offenders’ and allow some to be ‘ex-offenders’.
This history does come at the end of a decade in which Wallis (2001: 5) the then Director General of the ‘new’ National Probation Service, explicitly stated that she wanted to take ‘lead the service against the grain of its past history and traditions’. It would therefore appear that probation’s history may be as much a threat to some as something to be celebrated or learnt from. It may also have the potential to reawaken interest in something other than ‘offender management’. Those interested in the continuation of the rehabilitative ideal may now need signposting towards those domains where a more proactive and positive approach exists. For such an ideal to flourish in the current era, policy and practice may need contemporary reference points that signpost potential futures where the rehabilitative enterprise is understood as meaning more than the business unit of a new probation trust.