ABSTRACT
This chapter then seeks to reimagine moral rehabilitation by analysing the values, skills and attributes required to support desistance journeys and rehabilitative endeavour in the context of professional, organisational and occupational considerations. We begin by considering the insights provided by Lipsky’s Street-level bureaucracy and we are concerned to understand punishment in practice in the sense of how occupation and professional cultures and organisational design influence rehabilitative work. First, we outline professionalism from above in the context of central government policies and approaches which initially attempted to control local semi-autonomous probation services through performance targets and management to the more recent marketisation of rehabilitative services. Second, we contrast that with professionalism from within which speaks to a very different set of concerns focused on the soft/relational skills which are seen to be important. Our analysis then switches to the politics of delivering rehabilitation and specifically the way in which organisational change has been experienced under the Transforming Rehabilitation government initiative. We chart the differentiated impact on staff and the means by which they adapt to the new arrangements of a national probation service and the privatised community rehabilitation companies.
