ABSTRACT
Over recent decades, probation policy has witnessed legislative changes that has forcibly shifted practice towards one driven by a public protection discourse. This chapter briefly introduces the notion of public protection and its emergence from the dangerousness and risk narrative and sketches the legislative changes that have impacted probation policy and practice since the 1990s. Much of this legislation is inconsistent with probations’ ethos and principles and as such we highlight some of the resultant challenges. To explore the public protection work of probation, we apply four forms of rehabilitation as conceptualised by McNeill to those convicted of sexual offending and managed by probation. Finally, we argue that public protection approaches such as models of containment, control, and preventative sentencing, hinder the work of probation practitioners, fail to protect the public as intended, and increase penal excess.
