ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 Mike Nellis chronicles the growth of the Probation Service to 1972, the year in which a major Criminal Justice Act brought to fruition a period which he characterises as one of probation ‘modernisation and diversification’. Nellis emphasises that much of the history of early probation practice remains to be written, local sources and offender perspectives having been little drawn on. Further, he points out that the Probation of Offenders Act 1907, generally taken as the major administrative starting point, nevertheless drew on a common law tradition of ‘preventive justice’. Moreover, although the reformist movement of the early twentieth century promoted welfare measures as a means of ensuring greater public safety, the Probation Service’s role to ‘advise, assist and befriend’ also represented a toughening up of traditional court recognisances. By the 1930s probation had emerged as a branch of a broader social work profession, secularised (separated from its police court mission origins), with psychology and casework methods at its core. However, it was in the 1960s that the Service emerged from an organisational struggle between welfarism and criminal justice with a cultural tradition of what Nellis characterises as ‘humanised justice’.
