ABSTRACT
At first sight, a radical social work practice in the probation service looks distinctly unpromising. Probation officers are tied to the courts. They are deeply implicated in issues of law and order, so any overly critical questioning of the state and its attitudes towards criminals seems professionally precarious. Most probation officers practise in ways that reflect the state’s assumptions that the service exists to correct the behaviour of criminals. They do this as individual, autonomous operators practising on individual, involuntary clients. This is not the stuff of radical practice. Nevertheless, in spite of this unpropitious background, there are a number of writers and practi tioners who have begun to work out what a radical practice might look like. We shall briefly acknowledge a couple of them before moving on to consider the achievements of McLeod. She offers a practical example of working with prostitutes in the probation setting and her stance is that of the radical.
