ABSTRACT
The very creation of probation was an innovation, and its early practitioners were pioneers assisted not by manuals and good practice guides but by a rough template bequeathed by evangelical, soul-saving police court missionaries. It was inevitable, then, that practice should be shaped more by individual creativity than by organisational norms and expectations: how to save a soul might have had a spiritual and biblical context, but its process was very much left in the hands of the particular practitioner when face to face with the particular, wayward citizen. It should not surprise us, therefore, that people working in the probation service have never lacked imagination or the enthusiasm for innovatory ways of endeavouring to achieve their goals. Indeed, in some ways the history of probation practice can be seen as a continual quest for effective ways of resolving people's problems and helping them to lead crime-free lives; however, that quest has invariably been idiosyncratic, uncharted, often unsustainable and impermanent — albeit simple at its core. With echoes of McWilliams (1987), Statham and Whitehead (1992) have argued that successive layers of complexity have been superimposed on this simplicity — first, religious fervour, second, scientific treatment, and third, management with its accompanying manipulation — and although theirs is a broadly accurate analysis it perhaps oversimplifies the final layer. As this chapter attempts to demonstrate, there was a phase in the early stages of development of what McWilliams terms the ‘rise of policy’, when some managers took advantage of what was by then an admittedly fragile tradition of autonomy in the probation service to further their vision of management and leadership, before it was eclipsed by the spreading shadow of the managerialist school. It is relatively late in the history of the service that the quest for effectiveness has been organised and managed in ways that have become increasingly conservative and myopic and lacking in the innovation and vision of individuals and teams of practitioners. It will be a central argument of this chapter that those developments, which might be generalised under the epithet What Works, have constituted a great missed opportunity — the opportunity to foster an evidence-based approach that accommodates leaps of often eccentric imaginations as opposed to rigidly formulaic prescriptions, to encourage the social scientist-practitioner and not the dutiful plodder, and to foster and encourage leaders instead of policy apparatchiks.
