ABSTRACT

Drawing on probation service social enquiry and pre-sentence reports from different periods of history in England and Wales (from the 1960s up to 2009), this chapter refers to conceptions of offenders’ needs and their portrayal in pre-sentence reports as a reflection of the changing contexts of probation practice. We report on pilot work concerning comparative discourse analysis of pre-sentence reports that seeks to make sense of changing representations of offenders against a backdrop of late modern moves towards risk thinking, managerialism and ‘populist punitiveness’. Although the contexts for and practices of pre-sentence report writing vary across jurisdictions, since these broader penal trends have influenced policy and practice in many jurisdictions, the evidence from this case study from England and Wales may have resonances in other places. We leave it to those with a greater appreciation of their own jurisdictions to assess how far our findings are pertinent.