ABSTRACT
An Act of Parliament represents not only a beginning, but also a culmination. On the one hand, an Act sets out new legislation that will take effect from a specifi ed date – it may be new forms of practice, new modes of allocation of services, new forms of control, new agencies – but the implication is that the Act is a starting point. But an Act is also the summation of activity that may have taken considerable time and energy to pull together and formulate. In this chapter, we will discuss the various ideas, individuals, initiatives and organisations that lie behind the 1907 Probation of Offenders Act. It is diffi cult enough today to try to elucidate the origins of recent Acts of Parliament; these tend to be complex, convoluted and all too often bathed in degrees of political spin. Looking back more than 100 years there is probably rather less spin to worry about (although it would be naive to claim that spin did not exist), but also less information in general. We do, of course, have the benefi t of hindsight, which permits a more objective assessment of the factors that infl uenced the Act, but we do not have any real feel for what was considered at the time to be important.
