Probation Practice in the Early 21st Century?

This chapter pulls together all the data gathered from respondents and considers changes to probation practice, as described by practitioners, to relate these to the aims and purposes for the service put in place by governments in recent decades and to further consider these issues in the light of theories of the new penality. The coming of National Offender Management Service (NOMS) and its establishment as a legal entity in July 2007 has seen the move towards 'offender managers' providing the assessment and management of interventions with offenders, with interventions being delivered by supervisors, group work tutors and others. Thus there is little sense of the new penality or actuarial justice and its associated theories about the management of aggregate groups or the change of criminal justice workers from helpers to controllers and managers of offenders.