ABSTRACT

The opening up of the provision of community-based supervision and rehabilitative services to diverse providers within private and voluntary sectors and the development of "payment by results" in reducing reoffending re-casts the role and values of probation and community supervision. Penal practices, values and sensibilities have undergone enormous transformation since the early 1990s and it follows that the authors should ask some searching questions about the moral dimensions of what probation officers now do in their everyday practice with offenders and victims, and more particularly what they are guided to do by national directives. But if the history of probation is more complicated than has been presupposed, it is fair to say that the value base for probation is arguably even less clear now than it was then, over a hundred years ago.