ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the impact that the various attempts to construct criminal justice settlements in the UK in the period since the Second World War has had on probation work. We have chosen probation as a case study because, since its inception, it has been uncomfortably situated in the ill-defined ‘social care-social control’ borderland between the social welfare and criminal justice systems, and there has been an on-going debate about whether it should be undertaken by a social work agency or a criminal justice agency.
