ABSTRACT
In 2007 the probation service in England and Wales was 100 years old. Its birthday was celebrated by several major conferences as well as booklets providing an overview of the history of the service (National Probation Service 2007 ; Napo 2007 ). Understandably, there was a great deal of satisfaction in what the service had achieved in its 100 years and how far it had come, but it was notable that in the respective booklets both the Director of Probation in the Home Offi ce and the National Association of Probation Offi cers (Napo) representing probation staff spoke of uncertainty about the future of the service, thereby tempering the celebratory mood. And there was a lot to be anxious about. Probation had been under persistent attack by Conservative and Labour governments since the early 1990s. It had been subject to fundamental structural change as it was reorganised into a National Probation Service under direct government control in 2001, and then had become a part of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) in 2004 alongside the prison service (although in 2007 it was still unclear exactly what form NOMS would take). The Offender Management Bill, which had been presented to Parliament in November 2006, contained provisions to end the monopoly of Probation Boards on providing probation services and to replace Boards with Trusts. The promise of the Effective Practice Initiative had remained unfulfi lled. New sentences – the community order and the suspended sentence order – had recently replaced the probation order, the community service order and the various other community sentences run by the service. And the pressure to meet externally imposed targets was unrelenting. For probation service staff, then, celebration might not have been the most appropriate response to the centenary; a more considered response would have been to ask how it had come to this.
