ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the investigation started in Chapter 6 a step further and explores the role played by social and personal contexts in mediating the outcome of the attempts to tackle obstacles successfully. Instead of concentrating on the type of intervention, the extent to which officers and probationers worked together or the extent to which these were associated with the probationers’ motivation, the focus is on the social and personal contexts in which the efforts to tackle obstacles were embedded. In so doing, more light is thrown upon the content of probation work. This process of illumination offers an explanation for one of the clearest findings to emerge from the study: that probation interventions appear in many cases to have had little impact on either the obstacles faced by probationers or their lives more generally. The explanations for this would appear to be that much probation work is negated by aspects of the probationers’ lives, is aimed at tackling obstacles which are enduring and therefore very difficult to address or that the proposed solutions and the manner of their delivery appeared to be irrelevant to the needs of the probationers.
