ABSTRACT
Despite governmental attempts to eradicate it from criminal justice vocabulary (Worrall 2008a), the concept of ‘probation’ has proved remarkably resilient and has, in recent years, come to signify resistance to and subversion of the dominant penal discourse of ‘offender management’. It has become an ‘imaginary penality’ (Carlen 2008) – an area of work where it is necessary for practitioners to act as if they believe in the rules about the effectiveness of ‘risk-crazed governance’ while knowingly using those rules in ways that will also achieve meaning.
