ABSTRACT
The claim that forms the title of this chapter was made in the context of an overview of general trends in crime in the fi rst half of the twentieth century, where one of the arguments advanced was that from the beginning of the century there had been ‘a change in penal philosophy from one which was predominantly punitive to one which is primarily reformative’ (McClintock and Avison 1968 : 20). Probation was seen to be a key indicator of this change and throughout the 1930s its signifi cance was acknowledged repeatedly in offi cial reports. In this chapter we will examine how probation developed from 1930 up to the 1948 Criminal Justice Act, a period dominated fi rst by mass unemployment as a result of the depression following the Wall Street crash of 1929, and then by a second world war only 30 years after the so-called Great War had ended. It is not our intention to try to tease out just how far these two issues may have impacted upon probation’s development, but it is necessary to bear them in mind as the backcloth against which this development took place. And, although we certainly do not wish to claim any simplistic causal relationships between unemployment or war and recorded crime, there is no doubt that crime increased considerably during this period; for example, between 1931 and 1951 indictable crimes recorded by the police rose from 159,278 to 524,506, an increase of 230 per cent, while during the preceding 20 years the increase had been only 64 per cent (McClintock and Avison 1968 : 23).
