ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the role of probation in public protection, especially through the assessment and management of risk. Discussions of risk used to be concerned mainly with the identification of a small number of ‘dangerous offenders’, but risk has now become central to all aspects of probation work. The risk posed by all offenders is now routinely assessed and the outcome of that assessment determines the type and intensity of intervention that will follow. After some discussion about the contemporary significance of risk and approaches to its assessment, we look at probation’s work, in partnership with other agencies, with ‘high risk offenders’, going on to consider how some of the principles established here have been extended to work with other groups of offenders. The chapter will conclude with some reflections on risk in probation, in the wider criminal justice system and the extent to which society has been made safer by these developments.
The priority that the public must be protected has been a dominant theme in penal policy in recent years (Garland 2001; Loader and Sparks 2002; see also Chapter 1). This has led to a revived interest in the concepts of risk and dangerousness.1
